4 - Sunday, December 29, 1991 ~ North Shore News

In pursuit of the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria

MY WIFE was weaving and butting the station wagon
through traffic on the way to the airport, racing to catch
my American Airlines flight to Miami, me sitting beside
her clutching my knapsack, video case and sleeping bag,
chewing fretfully on my plastic cigarette, wondering what
the first major problem would turn out to be (because if
you go near an airport nowadays problemis are absolutely
inevitable), when the news came over the radio that Pan

Am had gone belly up.

Pan Am? For God's sake, not
Pan Am! I was booked out of
Miami to the Turks and Caicos on
a Pan Am flight the next morn-
ing. Pan Am had been around for
64 years.

It was one of the world’s major
airlines. It was the ONLY airline
into the Turks and Caicos. Not
today!

My cameraperson, Dina
Elisat-Winlaw, was already on
board the Sea Shepherd IH, which
had departed Nassau three days
earlier, and which was supposed
to be dropping anchor offshore
from the Turks and Caicos within
hours of my arrival (on that
now-extinct Pan Am flight) so we
could rendezvous and roar off to
sea, along with a dozen Indians
from British Columbia, in pursuit
of the Nina, Pinta and Santa
Maria.

Ina nutshell, that was the plot.

it was a plot that was unrav-
elling right from the start. My
worst nightmare up until now had
been that after a long search we
wouldn't find the Nina, Pinta or
Santa Maria, which would mean
that my television station back in
Canada would have paid for the
cameraperson and me to be hang-
ing out, tying up all that expensive
equipment, in the Caribbean for a
couple of weeks, and us coming
home with nothing to show for it
except fantastic tans.

A worse scenario had now de-
veloped — everything happening,
or nothing — whatever the case —
and me not being there. Excuses,
even the collapse of a major
airline, just being excuses.

My plastic cigarette was taking
a serious grinding. (Two months,
three weeks, four days, three and
ahalf hours off nicotine, you un-
derstand.)

So I was stressed-out on nico-
tine withdrawal, although trying
hard to appear to be laid-back
and mature and cool.

Cameraperson Elisat-Winlaw, |

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expected, would be rather
ticked-off if her reporter failed to
join the boat at Turks and Caicos,
and on her first internationa)
assignment, she found herself
abandoned to her fate.

If anything had happened to
her, incidently, § would have been
stomped to death by the 17 re-
maining male camerapersons from
the station.

We were maybe going into a
war zone, after all. There would
actually be ships with weapons.

Dina normally wears a black
leather jacket. She is a wiry
road-smart biker-type married
lady who pilots a four-wheel drive
Nissan pathfinder through city
streets in pursuit of Stories On
Tape (‘‘S.O.Ts.**) every day,
while chauffeuring along one
petulant or world-weary reporter
after another.

She routinely hoists a hard-
wired $80,000 Sony Betacam onto
her shoulder that weighs so much
1 personally refuse Co lift it except
in emergencies, what with my
back problem, and besides, the
union would go bananas.

By the way, if Dina ever heard
me calling her a ‘‘cameraperson,”’

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she'd knee me.

“i'm a cameraman,”” she'd
snap. “*Ok? Let's get that outa the
way. What're we shooting?””

She wears runners and smokes
cigarettes. Oh yes. Secondary car-
cinogens. Plastic versus the real
thing.

Of course, it was not just that if
I missed the boat in the Turks and
Caicos, Dina the Cameraman was
going to be ticked considerably
off with little old me — so was
the Sea Shepherd's skipper, the
formidable Paul Watson himself,
who would by now have already
gone (0 considerable trouble and
expense, (9 say nothing of having
wasted a full day of humping
along in search of Spaniards, 600
gallons of fuel per day down the
tubes, in order to drop anchor
long enough to pick me up from
the beach.

Special treatment or what?

Well, not just me. | was sup-
posed to be meeting up in Miami
with a guy named Ron George,

president of the Native Council of
Canada.

We were supposed to be on the
same Pan Am flight to Turks and
Caicos. (Rememeber Pan Am?)

All i knew about him was that
he was a Wet'suwet’en hereditary
chief, as well as the elected leader
of 660,000 presumably militant
non-status, mixed-blood and
‘turban’? Indians spread across
Canada.

The Wet’suwet’en hereditary
chiefs — just so you know —
claim to be the true spokesmen
for a lineage going back longer
than any other direct channel of
political command on Earth.

That’s right. They consider
themselves to be the legitimate
heirs to the oldest surviving royal
families (and governments) in the
world.

The lineage — just so you also
know — is matriarchial. This is
because, as the Wing-Chief of the
Eagle Clan will tell me in a few
days, ‘‘the spirit lives on the

Mother’s side."

Ron George and I, as you can
figure from that last sentence,
were destined to find another
airline taking over from Pan Am
on the Miami-to-Turks-and-
Caicos route the following day, an
outfit called Caribana Airlines,
whose staff still hadn't figured out
where the customs forms might be
stashed, so there was an
astonishing amount of utterly un-
necessary confusion when we did
finally trundle down the tarmac
on the low wind-swept island of
Provinciales.

The last uniformed airport off-
ficial dinged me five bucks Amer:
ican on my duty-free from
Miami. } snaried at him, but it
didn't do any good.

“It may have been duty-free in
Miami,’’ he snarled back, *‘but
you're here now.”’

Oh oh, [ thought. How true.

The Major Out-of-Town News
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