No foiling this medal-winning fencer

MacKay writes about adventures Trip to Venezuela was an eye-opener

With Sherraine MacKay, it turns out the pen is as mighty as the sword. MacKay, who recently became the first Canadian fencer to win a medal ( bronze) at the world championships, entertained Star readers last year with excerpts from her diary leading up to the Athens Olympics. That effort caught the attention of a publisher and now she adds author to her list of accomplishments. The following is excerpted from Running With Swords, published by Fitzhenry and Whiteside.

International travel was by far fencing’s biggest perk. I didn’t have to travel with the entire high school band, local travel club or my parents, but I did get to see the world with all my sports buddies. Go to Mexico, fight a few bouts, visit the pyramids with my friends, eat a fajita and come home. Go to Japan, fight a few bouts, sing some karaoke, have a tea ceremony with my friends, come home. There were worse things I could have done in my adolescence.

Travelling to compete as a 17year- old in a developed country like Germany was a safe, if unrealistic, introduction to international travel. I had already been to Italy, but not to compete. The easiest place in the world to travel is Germany: it’s not too expensive, it’s safe, the trains run on time, bathrooms are clean and men don’t pinch your bum. We travelled as a big group of athletes always under the coaches’ watchful eye. In countries like Germany, if anything happened to go wrong, we knew that there was a responsible legal and policing system in place that would take care of innocent, harmless tourists such as ourselves.

This was not quite the case a year later when we travelled to Venezuela for the Pan American

Junior Championships. The Canadian contingent was smaller than usual and because of Canada’s huge size and certainly not because of the heat of separatist tendencies, we travelled as two groups, the Westerners and the Easterners. We agreed to meet up in Merida, the host city located high in the Andes. Our flight plan had few stops: Calgary- MiamiMerida. As I have learned over time, travel is seldom without surprises.

It was a choppy flight over the ocean en route from Miami to Merida. After a few landing attempts in Caracas, the pilot decided that we would be safer landing in neighbouring Colombia. My eyes went wide. Safer? The only thing I knew about this country was a local legend that a high school teacher’s sister had travelled there a few years ago and she was never seen again. My mind was all muddled with fear. Wasn’t Colombia a country full of drug barons and mountain thugs who regularly kidnapped foreigners for impossible ransoms?

There was no connecting flight to Merida: because of the terrible weather, no flights were landing anywhere in Venezuela. We explained our urgency: one of our travelling companions had his competition the next day. So, the airline offered to hire a taxi to drive us to Merida. Moments after leaving the airport the five of us were squished into a taxicab. The close quarters actually helped keep our spinal columns intact because our driver handled corners like one of the Duke brothers. Had Gandalf conjured up a car for Frodo to help him along his way, his trip through Middle Earth might have felt something like our drive from Colombia to Merida, Venezuela: lonely, desolate mountain stretches through guerrilla-ridden terrain. We had Gollum to lead us, too. Our taxi driver alternated between hating us because of our noisy Game Boy and sing- alongs and being sickeningly sweet (“ You are very nice people from Canada, no? You have the ‘ dinero’ the airlines give you, no?”). He was excited to get rid of us but desperately wanting the bolivars we had been given to pay him when we reached our destination. The trip was broken up about every hour or so when the cab would scrape around a corner where the bamboo edged out onto the rutted dirt roads and we would meet a real life equivalent of the Black Riders. These men were either the mountain thugs I had dreaded or actual Colombian military police in charge of the roadblocks, but either way, they were no English Bobbies. They dressed in camouflage uniforms and lovingly stroked their machine guns as they glared at us. When we drove up to our first roadblock, my heart beat faster as I imagined arrest and detainment scenarios, hostage taking, or at least robbery. This is it, I thought. Now people in Brooks are going to tell campfire stories about when Sherraine the Fencer went down to Colombia, got in a taxi and was never seen again! When the military police made us all get out of the car and stand with our backs against the doors, I thought, this is it. They are going to shoot us. This may sound like a panicky thought, but believe me, when you’re in a foreign country and you experience a mosaic of safe, developed regions and less developed areas full of armed men, you can feel like you’ve stepped into a Hobbesian world where even the sight of police is frightening. When they made us pull out our passports and hold them open beside our faces I thought, now this is it. They are going to sell our passports, say that we have all gone missing, and we will never be seen again! Finally, they told us we could get back in the car. The stress of each roadblock shortened my lifespan by a few days as I imagined every bad thing that had ever happened in any scary movie I had ever seen. So my overactive teenage mind continued to panic for most of the eight- hour trip, calmed only when my friend Cameron would hand over his Game Boy. When we finally made it to Merida, it was not a minute too soon, and we were equally surprised and annoyed to see the other group of Canadians who made it sans problèmes. They probably arrived earlier than we did because they were more mature and much better travellers. They were also much cooler. They were bilingual, listened to techno music and understood fashion. I, on the other hand, was a social disaster. I only spoke English. I knew all the words to Roger Whittaker’s greatest hits, including the duet he sang with Nana Mouskouri. And no one ever told me that safety pins at the bottom of my pants didn’t look good. My late teens were, like most people’s, all about struggling to fit in, or at least find a comfortable niche. This was still the case for me outside of school and in the fencing world. So, I put all my eggs in one basket and asked a guy named Cameron to hang out with me. Instead of getting to know my teammates and going through the cycle of initial politeness followed by impatience and finishing up with either mockery or the silent treatment, I spent my time with Cameron, who was definitely as weird as I was.

This is the guy who didn’t flinch when I accepted his dare and licked the park ranger’s leg at a fencing camp in Jasper. And likewise, I didn’t flinch when he started measuring distances with how many times he could sing Barry Manilow’s “ Copacabana.” On one of the first days in Merida, Cameron and I ventured out into the downtown market area and came back with bags full of ceramics, bracelets and thick wool sweaters. We were feeling pretty accomplished now that we had seen the city on our own. No one could call us backwoods fools, even if we were from Alberta! One of the very sophisticated French Canadian girls who had never noticed us before now came rushing over excitedly, “Oh, were you already in de market?”

“ Yes,” we said, hesitating. I saw Cameron resist the urge to share with her that it was only six Copacabanas away. Was my social circle actually going to grow? “ Did you see any pot?” she asked inquisitively. We nodded energetically, anxious to impress her. “ Sure! We saw lots of different kinds of pots: ceramic, glazed, painted. Practically everyone was selling them! They’re pretty hard to take across customs, but if they confiscate it at least you’ve only lost a few bolivars!”

“ No, I mean pot, like de kind you smoke, not for cooking tings,” she condescended.

“ Oh, of course,” we said, recovering. “ We knew that, you know. Anyway, gotta go, these sacks are getting heavy, so many pots in them — ha ha! See ya at supper!” We scurried off around the corner before breaking out into laughter, partly at ourselves and partly at her. As with most international travel, by the time the trip came to an end we were ready to get home where we could understand the locals and drink the tap water. Thankfully, on the return trip there was no eighthour taxi ride. We exchanged that little inconvenience for three days shut up in our Miami hotel room watching reruns of The Golden Girls. The hurricane that had met us on the way down to South America had followed us back north and we were trapped in Miami. We amused ourselves by cracking open and eating the coconuts that had been blown off the palm trees and left by the hotel’s pool . . . which, by the way, was not even one Copacabana away from our room.

During the Closing Ceremonies in Athens, Nicolas Gill and I had decided to continue our tradition where I sit my 135 pounds on his shoulders and we march into the stadium like an Olympic totem pole. As we walked in, we saw Yao Ming, China’s sevenand- a- half foot tall basketball superstar and I begged Nick to go over so I could see how I measured up with him. When we came close enough, I took the branch of wheat that we had been handed on our way into the stadium and waved it as I stood beside Yao Ming. When he realized there was someone taller than him, he took his wheat stalk and threatened to poke me in the face. Obviously he underestimated his opponent, and we soon had a fullscale fencing match in progress. The Chinese media was snapping photos left and right and eventually Yao submitted to my skill and technique. With the speeches in the background talking about the high hopes for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, I saw Yao Ming’s submission in our impromptu sparring match as a foreshadowing to what lay ahead in my life, complete with fiery possibilities and no guarantees. Running with Swords