Lebanon, Man

It always starts off commonplace. A one-hour bus ride from Tyre to Sidon, great chance to nab a nap without feeling guilty. Watch the banana plantations pass by out the window, eyelids getting droopier, head lolling forward before snapping violently back. Halfway through there is some kind of commotion, which brings us to a standstill. We're at a many-directioned intersection, with ramps and roundabouts and a Hezbollah statue rising Phoenix-like at the centre of it all. And smoke. There is smoke billowing up in raw, expanding puffs just ahead of us, pitch-black. A further look and there's fire, something ablaze on the road, with people gathered around.

You know what they say: 'You should avoid any large gatherings or demonstrations as they could turn violent.' Well, this is that. I'm not typically disposed to hysteria, but this isn't my typical world. Look real close and that unknown, burning object morphs into two hysterical possibilities: car bomb, or martyr. The bus tries navigating its way around the mess, but it's a total, constipated logjam. No one's going anywhere, fast.

So but now everyone else on the bus seems only coolly pissed off. It's strange -- they're gotten-to, but differently to me. I don't think it's the event they're seeing, but the connotations: she's going to be late for an appointment, he's going to miss out on dinner tonight. These people actually live here, so they're numbed to this unruly shit. We manoeuvre around some more, backwards and sidewards and aboard another ramp, pointlessly. Someone broken-Englishes me what's up: They're protesting. Against the government. No electricity.

Ok, I can handle that. Outside, massive black clouds are pluming up high (from a distance: bomb-like). The protesters are burning tyres, branches, any old refuse they can dredge up. Except none of this is slapdash -- it's finely co-ordinated. They have managed to simultaneously lay blockades of this refuse, now ablast with roaring flames, across all the roads in every direction of this elaborate intersection.

We manouevre around some more, deboard one bus for another. Honk, turn, try and outflank the by now terminal vehicular hemorraghing. But we only hit another impasse. Over the far side, cars are driving the wrong direction down the road, writing their own rules. Some of them creep up to blockades with ideas of running the gauntlet, or maybe sweet-talking their way through -- but they are quickly and imposingly deterred by the protesters, who are now shirtless, soot-faced, and waving sticks. Their countenance is militia-like. Mobs of them, angrily alive. Some of the younger ones start hurling rocks at the many engulfing billboards, bringing panels thudding down to the ground. All this time I've been debating what to do -- I don't care for photos, or experience, or expressing solidarity with the disaffected. About now I just want to get the fuck out of here, to preserve my own personal arse.

Me and an Egyptian guy, middle-aged and been-through-it-all, summarily jump the bus and beat our own path forward. We walk towards a blockade -- me with false calm, his for real -- hoping they'll let two meagre, foot-bound pilgrims through. But they just look at us fiercely, raise a stick. We defer, divert, walk through a litter-strewn ditch, scale an embankment and skirt quietly around the edge -- this marginal area somehow remaining unchecked. It feels good, self-reliant. It feels plain, real.

Suddenly the terrain opens up into the highway to Beirut, flowing freely. Our escape hatch, found that easy. I look back to be met by this: a morass of cars and buses and trucks facing every which way, with protesters scrambling madly from one vehicle to next, ordering them to stay at bay, to not do anything rash, threatening and terrorising them with wielded sticks, as four or five demonically black smokestacks rise up and dissipate into the sky above, polluting everything.

We hitch a lift back to Sidon on a bus. It happens to be the very same driver who drove the me in the opposite direction to an unrelated place the day before. No small coincidence, so we smile and nod and genially shake hands. The Egyptian guy is rolling his eyes, more jaded than relieved. 'Lebanon, man. This country is fucking crazy.' Without a hint of irony, without a shred of colloquialism. The day after, I check the internet: no mention of any incident along the Tyre-Sidon highway. No escalations, no news. A total non-event. More or less it didn't even happen.