sali

i read these stories every day.  sometimes just a paragraph, sometimes post after post.  i like thinking about her, and all her strong friends who i have and havent met, rather than fixating on how i felt when i found out what had been done to her, or the images that have been running through my head when i start thinking about all the wounding that friends and i have been forced to deal with.

most times when i read these posts, i think about a characteristic of sally that i hadnt turned over in my mind a million times over the past month.

who loved her thumb tattoo? that little tree was the best.

and im so happy that she got to ride trains with a group of ladies.  that was definitely a recurring theme in our conversations: how awesome it would be to be in a big crew of ladies riding trains across the country together.

practicing how to say 'no' and sharing our strategies to deal with men's entitlement issues was  another ongoing conversation.

being mostly sober and making sculpey jewelery at a party while other folx got wasted... she made HUGE slugs that i worried wouldnt cook through to the center, but looked rad anyway.

we affirmed each others suspicions that joan jett singing 'crimson and clover' was, well, pretty much one of the hottest things ever.

i loved talking with her about being really weird kids growing up.

talking about wearing makeup, then not wearing makeup so much.

talking about families, how to come to some understanding of and mutual respect within our own, when it is worth it, butterflies over taking that step.

i also remember her passing by a punk show where some friends and i were, and her trying to get me to give it up that evening and go square dancing instead...

i loved running into her unexpectedly, sneaking up on me at food not bombs, walking around town, busking.

getting a letter on the shittiest day of the shittiest month of the year in pdx that came in a golden wrapper and was decorated over every square centimeter with her drawings and words.

getting an email "ill be there TOMORROW! in 4 hours!" etc.



on and on.

I knew Sali only briefly...... both traveling with our best friends, we crossed paths in the winter of 06. A crew of us drove south to PueblaMexico, three of us rode trains back to the states. 

We were tres mujeres, we were young and fierce and stupid and free and luckier than hell. I always say I don't know how we made it out alive... And now we have lost her.... My mind has been dumbstruck since I heard the news. Unable to truly believe that this dancing, singing, firecracker has been taken. 

 I have this epic picture of Sali lodged in my brain from that trip. It came at a moment when we had been pulled off a hotshot  in the middle of a desert in mexico, by what seemed like an entire army of train cops. They didn't know what to make of us. Three crusty white girls who hardly spoke spanish.... they wanted our passports they told us we couldn't ride that train. We had to watch our ride pull away as we crowded into a pick-up truck with a dozen men we didn’t know. Sali sat in back with our packs and the army. As we pulled into the station I turned around to see her. She sat in the center of that truck bed, surrounded by men in black uniforms, with her banjo slung across her lap. I can’t describe to you how beautiful and epic a vision it was. This beautiful dirt encrusted gypsy woman casting a spell over these curiously confused and ever so official men. Hitting those strings and humming those notes, as the dust rose and we held our spines straight and ready incase they tried anything…. 

 She was a fierce and beautiful piece of this world. And she will continue to be so as we carry her in our hearts, ours songs, our stories…..

 Love and salty crusty tears… Dinah B

 

I met Sally in 2002 in Eugene at "My House."  She would come to every show with her best bud Sarah.  I was 19, and I swear I thought she was 30, and it wasn't just the make-up.  Her presence was unique.  She was confident, wise, open, creative, passionate, and so very free.  She held her gifts radiantly.  When I found out how young she really was, I understood that she was just an "old soul." It's apparent that she knew why she was here.  Her bright blue eyes and ear to ear smile could warm anybody's heart.  And she shared her many passions across the country and into Mexico.  I am thankful that she left us such an inspiring legacy. 

When I first heard of her passing (10/23), I got the intuitive hit that she was happy and well.  I felt peace.  I had no idea of the circumstances of her death until today (10/24), and although I still know that she is well on the other side, I am outraged at the injustice.   It's frustrating to live in the post-WTO era.  Her murder an obvious cover up.  I feel rage but, I remember that the tides are changing.  Sally fought for this and she's left us inspiration keep the resistance.  Our actions, our perperverance will create the change we are all entitled to.  As the fascist war continues, I know we can expand our hearts to meet the oppression.

Sally taught us a new definition of Radical! We can overcome with open hearts! Love! Embrace! Dance! Live! Believe... We will always be Free!

And Sally, will always be with us.

Thank you Sally Ratty Tatty!
<3 <3 <3 Carly B.
(luckimutiny@yahoo.com)

Ok, its me dendron again. God i took me so long to get over my fear of writing on this thing and now i am all over it. So i have been doing alot of ritual kind of stuff for sali, lighting candles in front of pictures on my alter every night, breaking bottles on the railroad tracks with words in them like sexual violence, misogyny, imperalism, etc. The thing that has been really powerful for me is that is my newly formed band called The Homo Stamens, (their are two out of the three that were really close with sali: me and leah),  wrote one of our songs about sali and performed it at a community performance night a couple weeks ago. We had some pictures of her all around, i lit some candles and talked a little about her. even though their were only a handful of us that new her, it felt really good to process some grief and anger through song. i wanted to share the lyrics on this website and hopefully we can share it with some of you either at the memorial in Santa Cruz or Tucson coming up. I really hope to see some of you there. Thank you everyone who has shared, it is hard to start writing but feels like such an important connection with all the rest who loved and missed sali. love to all of you, here is the song lyrics:

SHE BROKE THE BOX


Fight like dancing
Sing like mourning

I can see your eyes
I can see your eyes 
Feasting on life
Bright, magnetic presence 

Fight like dancing 
Sing like mourning


I can see your eyes
I can see your eyes 
Blazing too hot
To be caged
Like you took too much in
I can see your eyes

You broke their hold on your body
Don't want your ashes to cool
Let it spark into fire
To hold us right here/in this fight

Fight like dancing
Sing like mourning

My little sister and quite often my big sister, you guided me through some of my hardest moments..Like that time when our craigs list ride fell through and it was getting dark. We were walking down the tracks in Santa Cruz and i was crying because i was scared. i hadn't traveled in a while  and felt unstable and small. You held my hand and said, "we are so fuckin strong, we can do this on our own, we dont need them. We have each other and are so capable, we will get where we want to go. this became our belief, together we could do anything, you and me sali. you and me... you were a rock, and solid place to go for home, for confidence...you held me up and sometimes i saw you so broken and vulnerable and scared and sad. i feel so blessed that you trusted me in those times. that you were safe with me. You helped me realize the giant strength in vulnerability, in crying it out. Remember how good you felt after and long cry? your blue piercing eyes swollen and cleansed, like thats all you needed and now were ready to move on. Oh, so sensitive you were sali, especially to those you loved. Wheni first met you, i couldnt figure it out, i thought you were impermeable, so hard and tough, and you were but you were also so soft, you felt so hard, took it all in and sometimes felt you would explode with the beauty and difficulty of it all. How your body would melt when you would look at your lover,  or how you would shake out of control when listening to music you loved, or how you smile so fucking big when in the dumpster, or how you would fix those gorgeous eyes on mine when we talked about family, bodies, resistance. When you were focused, in your body i could tell it, you would change. You were one of my first chosen family, sali, a catalyst in this continuous journey of finding home, creating roots and loving like that is all we have. It happened that day on the land in oregon, where the pavement ends(one of your many homes), again your hand in mine, the fog all around us, talking about yarrow, we decided that we were sisters, that our relationship was so strong but really hard sometimes. We made a pack that no matter how far apart we lived or grew that we would always be family, open arms for return, comfort, relief, support and protection. I regret so much not keeping in tough with you these past two years, its own of the deepest regrets of my short lifetime. I have to trust that before you died you new that this pact was still true, that i would have done anything for you sali, anything. I have been making up stories in my head that make this not so hard, but the facts begin to hit and i am so angry, that they took this thing that you worked so hard every day to re-inhabit, your precious body that you took such good care of, your mind rattled with questions and self-education, and so many good ideas, your heart and soul that loved like i dont see many people loving, pure and raw, and thats right, real, as real as we each came into this world. They took it from you, but they will never take your legacy, the ways you have affected each of us, the fire you have ignited, the honesty you have planted, the "be your fuckin self "liberation. I think of you with everything i do now, when i dance real hard, when i run, when i sing loud as fuck on my bike, when i swim, when i am silly, when i am down by the train tracks, when i protect myself, when i decorate my body, when i use my hands, when i cry, when i trust my intuition, when i yell, when i love my body, when i think about relationship to food, when i massage, when i listen to adventure metal, when i speak honestly, when i put intention into relationships, when i hold those i love so tight. i would never be who i am without you sali, i would have never learned to love my self like i do now, i would never be this inhabited. So i will use this body, that is mine to honor your life, i will take care of it, and use to to fight against all that is hurtful in the world, to love with everything, to create alternatives, to reconcile, to hope, and to remember all those that have passed that have made a crater in our hearts and in movements for social justice. I love you more than i can even imagine. My sister, my comrade, my friend, my love.
 in remembering, grieving, and holding onto to life,
dizzy d double-decker (aka dendron)

 I remember vividly the first time I met Sally. It was in Portland, Oregon, at a house show. There was this radiantly beautiful girl sitting on the porch, laughing a bunch about something, drinking nasty looking homemade cider from a plastic jug, her hair all crazy puffed out and a million different colors. I’m pretty sure she had her rats there, too, crawling all over her, somewhat of a defining characteristic of Sally’s.

                I only talked with her briefly there, but afterwards I always remembered her voice. Its something that’s hard to describe, maybe without inventing new adjectives; it was her sally voice, coupled by her sally laugh, soft and unimposing, yet distinct. It was great. It would be a few months before I saw her again, this time in Berkeley. I don’t remember exactly where I ran into her, but I know she recognized me from seeing my shitty stick and poke bicycle tattoo. I thought that was pretty cool.

                A small group of us were there, and we all ended up staying at the same place for a bit. I guess it was then that Sally and I started to become really close. I’m at a loss for words when trying to think of what it was that really impressed me about Sally; her glowing personality, her intelligence, that near perfect blend of strangeness and self-assured confidence, that quirky exuberance and outward show of strength and sure-footedness. I could go on and on and still fall short of describing her at all. I was shocked to learn she was only sixteen. She looked and sounded ten years beyond her age, at least. I always thought that of her, so much more mature than most of the people I was surrounding myself with. In short, she was a total badass.

                So four of us, me and my friend Kyle, and Sally and her new traveling partner Tyler, decided to catch a train out of town together. I think Sally had ridden one train before. I could sense that her motives were a bit different than most 16 year old would-be train hoppers. It seemed less like she was trying to escape something, to run away from something, than that she was just thirsty for adventure and for seeing the world. She had a heart and mind far too big to stick around her hometown. I think we both shared the sentiments that traveling was about more than just getting drunk under a different bridge in a different place every day, that it was more about connecting with new people and new places, contributing to their communities and discovering any beauty this world might have to offer anyone willing to search for it. At least that’s how it seemed to me.

                We all caught a train out of Oakland together. We crossed the Sierra Nevadas in the middle of the night, to the deafening sounds of the wheels screeching, steel on steel, and surrounded by the stark beauty of the towering mountains looming in the night sky. We woke up in Salt Lake City, our string of cars set out, and if that wasn’t shitty enough, had to run from the bull, first through a swamp, waist deep, then through a maze of port-o-potties outside of the yard! I don’t remember what we did in SLC, nothing all that pleasant I’m sure, but we eventually caught a train out of there.

                We crossed the prairies for awhile and ended up in Laramie, Wyoming. The town was pretty good to us as far as hospitality and free food go. Later the same day we hitched down to Denver, where an old friend picked us up and brought us to her house. Rita and Sally ended up becoming pretty good friends in the few weeks that they were together. We all drove out to the Silk factory and checked the dumpster. That I think was my first experience with Sally’s all out obsessive love for dumpstering. Man, she would just dive in head first and dig with this maniacal grin across her face. She wasn’t shy about what she ate out of there either. She once told me a story about dumpstering in the dark, eating some meat or fish or something, just straight from the bottom of the dumpster, only to realize that there were maggots crawling all over the place. Luckily this time we just ended up with a lifetime supply of vacuum packed marinated tofu, as well as tons of broccoli and other produce from a nearby dumpster.

                We all ended up splitting up to hitch hike to Minneapolis. I think it was me, Sally, and Tyler that went together. I remember a trucker screeching to a halt on the side of I-80 and taking us pretty far, but barraging us with a Jesus lecture the entire way. It was a long ride. I think Sally’s rats had more interesting shit to say than that guy.

                We were sticking our thumbs out somewhere in Minnesota when a minivan pulled over, and not only was the other half of our group, Rita and Kyle, inside the car, but it turns out the driver was a girl we had all just met in Oakland. So we got a ride to MPLS; the beginnings of a pretty epic month there for all of us.

                That night it was freezing cold, but luckily we ran into some folks that said we could crash at their place. It was the House of Thrash, a three story punk house on Cedar Ave. By the end of our stay there it had turned into one hell of a party, with more random travellers lurking around than actual house residents.

                I think Sally fell in love with MPLS the same way that I had. We’d go to the bread dumpster, with its giant oozing doughball. We’d go for leftovers at the Seward. We’d sit around and laugh at Tyler when he got obliterated on whiskey. We would give Sally and Rita lots of shit, because they would go fly a sign together all day, then spend all the money on mushrooms, and walk around the house giggling and staring at shit. It was pretty funny.

                Then Julien and Christine, two French Canadians I had also met in Portland when I met Sally, arrived in town. Soon enough we all started jamming on the music equipment in Brady’s room, and somehow it coalesced into a band (though I use that term loosely) that we called Diswar, on Julien’s insistence. We practiced once a day in that room. We wrote nine songs I think, all pretty rudimentary, especially since Julien refused to play anything except a D-beat. To this day I can still hear in my head Sally’s voice screaming such memorable lyrics as “fuck your car, stop paving this world, the Earth does not belong to you!” I was excited, because she was a great singer, and this was my first “real” band.

                It was good for us, too, that she was singing. No matter how much your band sucks, as long as you had Sally out front screaming into the mic you were fine, I mean, all eyes were on her. She was captivating, both on and off stage. We could barely tune our instruments, but whatever, we could just turn up Sally’s mic, and encourage the audience to disrobe, which seemed to be a regular occurrence at a Diswar show.

                We played like four of them I think, all within a week, in Minneapolis. We played an after party during Thrash Fest, with a keg and a million smelly crusties running around naked. We played at one in the afternoon on MayDay. We sounded like such shit at Mala’s one night I think we cleared the room.

                The entire month we were there at the house Sally had to be on 24-hour guard of her two beloved rats. Kyle had a pitbull named Sandy, possibly the dumbest dog I’ve ever met, who was obsessed with trying to kill Sally’s rats. Sally would be standing there scraping the last bits out of an avocado shell and feeding it to the rats, or letting them drink spit straight from her mouth, when Sandy would sneak up and jump on her and try to bite the rats. She would leave them on the top shelf of a tall dresser and Sandy would sit there all day and stare at them and whine. One time she almost knocked the whole thing over trying to jump up on it.

                Unfortunately, at one point Sandy did manage to kill one of them. Sally was pretty bummed about that. I think the other rat was a little bit lonely after that as well.

                Of course we all had to have a debaucherous ending to a month full of debauchery. It had been a wild month, and we all decided to take the wildness on the road. Somewhere along the way our group had grown from 4 to 14, and we were all sitting in the bushes in St. Paul waiting for a train, with more than enough whiskey in tow. It was a haggard operation. The 14 of us would stumble out of the bushes and bumrush a train, then it would pull forward 50 feet and break air. We would groan and sulk our way back to our bush.

                Eventually by some miracle we did all end up getting out of there. It was the wrong train, of course, and instead of taking us towards Madison as we had hoped, we woke up in Portage La Prairie. To this day I don’t even know where that is. And it just so happened that of all the places in the universe for George Bush himself to be visiting that day, he decided on Portage La Prairie. So we needed to get to the highway quickly, before the Secret Service closed it off for Bush’s entourage to pass through. So the 14 of us split into groups and stuck our thumbs out. By random chance the two Canadians ended up being the last to get to the highway, and were subsequently picked up by the Secret Service, interrogated, and very nearly deported. But they talked their way out of it, and we were all pretty happy to see them walking down the street in Madison.

                We had gone there for the Anarchist Bookfair, which turned out to be really rad. Diswar even got to play an after party in a bike shop. We all even played naked.

                It was splitting up time again soon afterwards. We decided to meet up again in Pittsburgh. I took off on my own, and they all beat me there. Sally had already run into some folks she knew from there, Katy and Christina, and we all went back to their place. We ended up playing what would be the final Diswar show in their living room, much to their surprise, after dragging all the punks and crusties out of the woods to come and watch. 

                I guess that was the last time I ever played music with Sally. Besides maybe tapping my feet to her playing banjo occasionally.

                We decided on Philly next, but me and Kyle took a detour to NJ to visit home for a bit. By the time I talked to the others again it turned out that Sally was homesick for the West Coast and had gone back to Oregon. I missed her, and wished that I could have said goodbye at least, but as always she had more important plans on her mind, and ended up doing a bunch of forest defence work back in her own bioregion. Her passion was for making the world a better place, or least for saving the few pristine remnants that hadn’t been destroyed yet. That was where her heart had always been. It took precedent over running around with a bunch of drunk fools playing bad music. I had to admire her for that.

                We kept in really good contact over the following months, emailing on a weekly basis when she wasn’t out in the forest. I felt such a strong connection with her, rare in its genuineness, and was always excited to read those emails.

                Then that fall she wrote and said she wanted to play music together again and was coming east to meet up with me. She would have to cross the whole country, a favour I would repay a year later when, on my way to Mexico from Philly, I took a detour to visit her in Portland, riding the highline with Roach in November.

                Another thing that always struck me about Sally was her fearlessness. She seemed to have no apprehensions, ever. She was 17 years and rode alone from Oregon across the country. The only ride she could find leaving there was a suicide, so she hopped on and got no sleep for 48 hours, clinging to the edge the entire time. Then somewhere, like Wyoming I think, she got caught and was detained by child services as an underage runaway. They held her at some weird place, I forget, almost like a foster family’s house or something. It seemed weird, and shitty. They tried to send her back to her mom’s house on a bus, but she convinced them to send her to her dad’s house in St. Louis instead, which was on her way east.

                So we met up in Philadelphia. It was great to see her again. Her hair was even poofier. She still had her rats. And she had a banjo now. Our band never materialized, but Philly was pretty cool. We both moved into a giant 8-story squat, her room down the hall from mine. We would bike around a lot, go to Whole Foods and graze the bulk bins until they yelled at us (we did that like every single day), go to Food Not Bombs, dumpster dive, then bike back to the squat and get into arguments with some of the idiots who lived there. One day we went to the juice dumpster out in the suburbs and filled an entire van with juice, like hundreds of gallons. We nearly turned orange from so much carrot juice.

                Eventually we both got tired of Philly and decided to leave for Asheville. It was already getting cold, but we walked to the hop out spot at 2am and waited. We almost burned the place down, too, when our candle fell over on a mattress.

                Finally a train pulled up. It was the juice train. We scrambled onto the semi-porch of one of its cars and pretended we were hidden. We pretended as the Philly skyline disappeared, then we pretended as we passed the stadium in Baltimore with a million people around and as we barrelled through downtown DC in broad daylight, five blocks from the capitol building. We probably stopped pretending by the time we rolled into Richmond and got off.

                I don’t remember what we did in Richmond for the day or two that we stayed. But we caught another train south, and got off in Rocky Mount, NC. We walked into town and went to the store. The dumpstering was plentiful that day; it was a random supermarket in North Carolina, but the dumpster was full of tofu and soy products, avocados, bread; basically a vegan’s paradise. We looked ridiculous carrying giant boxes full of soymilk, broccoli poking out of our bags and fruit falling out of our pockets.

                That was another great thing about hanging out with Sally. We were always on the same page about things. We were a bunch of health nerds who got excited about silly shit like dumpsters full of tofu. People would always make fun of us, quite often the only two sober folks at a party, sitting in the corner chewing on broccoli, secretly making fun of all of them for being drunk retards. I miss that aspect of her companionship quite a bit.

                We had a hell of a time hitching across North Carolina. Especially getting out of Rocky Mount. We eventually gave up there, and went to find a sleeping spot. She thought I was crazy for making a fire, because we were right next to the off ramp, highway on all sides. In hindsight I guess I was, but it was nice, sitting around the fire stuffing our faces, Sally playing banjo while I drifted off to sleep.

                After what seemed like forever we finally made it to Asheville. Things worked out great, and right away we were hooked up with our own tent and little campsite in the woods next to the tracks, surrounded on all sides by a forest of nettles. I would come home to our tent at night and see that the pile of rotting produce out front had grown yet again. Sally had gotten a puppy, too, and named her Belly. So I had three little creatures crawling all over me in the middle of the night while I tried to sleep. It was an interesting, hectic yet cozy little setup we had there down by the tracks.

                We mostly fell back into our routine again, biking around, stealing shit, dumpstering, going to bluegrass nights at the bar. Sally ran around doing a million things as always, getting belly classes for work trade and a ton of other stuff I can’t seem to remember. She had already set some roots down in Asheville pretty thoroughly, it was impressive to see.

                We got a ride to Chattanooga one day and met up with a group of folks there heading to New Orleans for Halloween. We all took a pretty haphazard train trip down there, catching more than one wrong train and trudging through more cotton fields than I’d ever care to again. Through Alabama, Memphis, Jackson. It was a fun trip, but I was pretty glad when we got to where we were going.

                We hung out for a bit in New Orleans, then we both caught a ride back to Asheville. I stuck around for a few days, had a few more fires back at our tent, and then decided it was time to leave again. Sally really liked Asheville and was going to stick around for awhile. So we parted ways again, knowing we’d see each other soon enough.

                It would be almost exactly a year before I would get to see her again. I would get the usual periodic Sally e-mails. She was living in Portland, practicing banjo and belly dancing, listening to lots of Black Sabbath. A million other things too I’m sure.

                When I showed up on her front porch with Roach, she looked a lot different. She had on one of her bellydancing outfits, looking quite gypsy like, and was practicing in front of a little stereo blasting Turkish music. Her house was overflowing with insane amounts of every type of healthy food you could imagine. She was brewing her own kombucha; it looked like she had a little jellyfish farm sitting in her kitchen.

                We went to the supermarket and robbed them blind. Her thieving skills had been perfected it seemed, especially when it came to health food. She busted a chunk of raw salmon out of her bag and started munching down on it. I always figured she’d live to be 150 years old the way she took care of herself.

                It was great to catch up with her again. We all planned on going down to the Bay Area, but Roach and I left a week earlier. We hung out a bunch there. Played anarchist soccer in the park with a bunch of folks. I kept sneaking up behind her and stealing the ball; for some reason I vividly remember her frustrated smile from that. The only picture I have of Sally with me here in Montreal is from that time in Berkeley. She’s standing on the sidewalk, posing with a downtown Oakland roadkill raccoon. I simultaneously cry and laugh my ass off when I look at that picture now. I remember her sitting in the park and skinning that raccoon, stiff as a board from rigamortis and probably rabid as hell. But she tanned it with some eggs and probably made something pretty rad from it.

                 A bus load of us left Oakland on Christmas day, headed for a New Years gathering in Bisbee Arizona. A ton of kids invaded the tiny desert town, playing music and partying. It was a great time. I remember getting drunk as hell on vodka and Sally laughing hysterically at all the stupid shit I was saying.

                She contemplated coming with Roach, Andy, Waffle, and me on our bike tour of northern Mexico, but at the last minute decided not to. But then she ended up traveling around Mexico with two other badass ladies. On our way back north, Waffle and I kept meeting yard workers and random folks who would say “hey, do you guys know the three crazy gringas who just came through here? They were riding in the unit and asked us for directions.” We just smiled and nodded. Yeah, I think I might know them I’d say.

                I ended up settling down here in Montreal shortly after that. The last time I ever heard Sally’s voice was on the phone, calling from here. She had just arrived in Montreal, and we were supposed to meet up but I was out of town and was late getting back. I wish like hell now, in hindsight, that I wasn’t late. By the time I got back she had left. She hadn’t met the right people I guess, and was getting restless to leave. She ended up hopping all the way across Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver, by herself. I did half that distance once and was going crazy. I wonder how she fared.

                I guess she ended up with a real soft spot in her heart for both Arizona and Mexico, especially Oaxaca. She would send me e-mails about how much she loved it there and how active she was. I hear stories from other people who saw her down there, too. It seems like her enthusiasm and her passion, and her persistent drive to accomplish as many things as possible, as quickly as possible, were things that increased on a daily basis. I always knew her as an extremely productive person, but from what I was hearing from her and folks who were with her, she had reached new extremes. I wished I could say the same. I wished that I was around her, so her productivity could rub off on me. Or at the very least, her ever-contagious smile.

                The last time I heard anything from Sally was when she responded to an email I sent her. We had slowly been falling out of touch. I still thought about her all the time, but I guess we were both just really busy with things going on in our lives. But her e-mail was sweet. In it she said: “I hope your really happy or at least keepin it real. Well I know your keepin it real. I’m happy sometimes sad but keepin it reals whats important.” I wasn’t doing so great at the time, but her words cheered me up a bit. Because its true. And if ever there was someone who was always keeping it real, no matter what, well that was Sally.

                The news of her death hit me like a ton of bricks. They say the first step in grieving is denial, and in this case, how could it not be? Sally, dead. No fucking way. The last person on Earth it should have been. Just completely impossible to believe.

                I cried until I had no more tears. That point you get to when you’re just choking and your head hurts so bad from just sobbing uncontrollably. There happened to be a house wrecking party that same night. I got drunk and smashed everything I could get my hands on. I came back home and threw all my stuff all over my room. Some things are just impossible to deal with.

                A few days later I was looking on the internet at pictures she had taken down in Mexico. One picture stood out to me. It was one she had taken of a wall spray painted with this message: “No se le puede llamar muerto a akel ke lucha por la vida.” ("You can not call somebody dead who fought for life."). Maybe no truer words can be said about her. Its sadly ironic that she took that photo, buts its perfectly fitting, too. If ever there was someone who fought day in and day out to improve the lives of others around her, it was Sally. She might be gone now, but you can’t ever kill a spirit like that. In a world where people like Sally are all too rare, the rareness of her incredibly strong spirit is what will keep it around forever, especially to all the people who knew her. She was just that amazing.

               

                Well, that was my attempt at a happy ending to all of this. I think that’s the way Sally would have wanted it. But as I sit here and read it, I feel like I’m not being honest with myself. I mean, there’s no happy ending here. I don’t want to live in a world without Sally around. I don’t want to live in a world where someone with so much compassion and such a big heart can be brutally murdered. Fuck that. I’m so tired of this game we’re all being forced to play. A game where the best people I know are dealt the shittiest hand. A game that cheats you by taking away the most amazing people in your life, the people that inspire you to get up in the morning and to smile through the day, and then expects you to keep on playing, to keep on going even though the odds are not in your favour. I’m so sick of this shitty game.

                But really, what else am I supposed to do? I think you can be as inspiring in death as you were in life, as who you were lives on beyond your death, and the good thing is that no one who knew Sally will ever forget her. How could they? She touched so many lives, and I think that warmth will only continue to spread. So maybe the game isn’t just about winning or losing, it’s about playing by your own rules, which of course Sally always did. By remembering to also live that way we can all say a collective “fuck you” to this game. We can all keep it real.

                So in the end I guess my Sally story is one of inspiration. And really, what’s more valuable and hard to achieve than that; being a lasting inspiration to those around you? We all lost a beautiful, incredible human being, but at least we were able to connect with her while she was still with us. If memories, and some photos and letters and bad quality demo tapes with her voice screeching out from them is all we have, at least we have that much. She touched my life immensely, and I’ll never forget her.

 

Goodbye Sally.




-mike

Ratty blew me away with how much she knew about living at such a young age. She was 15 when I met her out in the forest. I was 30. She had already figured so much out. She knew she wanted to live her life. She knew she wanted to have real connections with people and not just superficial friendships. Talking to her you knew she was really listening. She wanted to know who you were.

Her ability to just step away from societies norms and be herself was amazing. She didn't put herself in a box. She allowed herself to grow and change.

I always assumed I would know Sali for many years and keep learnig from her. She had such power and energy to her her she seemed immortal. I hadn't seen her in several years but I can't believe how much I miss her. I guess I just consider myself lucky to have been able to spend the time with her that  I did.   Sing

My friend Sali, just Sally, without the Marcela, or the Grace, and initially going by Sally Rattypants and then Rattytat. I did know her birth name before she died, but only after knowing her for almost two years. She was quite a character, for every 3 'productive' things that you did everyday Sali did 8. While in Tucson, where I knew her, the only place I knew her, when she wasn't in Nogales or in Mariposa or at Arivaca helping out, she was drawing flyers, biking around photocopying them, putting them up, then going for a Dance class, often followed by a dance practice session at any place she could find space, setting up her music, and if she was lucky, a mirror. Then she would dumpster dive food to take to the immigrant camps and bike back with all of it and attempt to bake cookies or other 'treats' to take to Nogales the following morning.

Sali was truly the Prince of Thieves, you know, a Robin Hood, and instead of a capped-feather and green garb ( if that's what Robin Hood wore) she had her customary black skirt and waist pouches, her black string/twine necklace with all her treasures (squirrel paws, keys etc.) attached to it. The night before she left Tucson to go on tour with her band to Mexico, also the last night that I saw her, Sali asked me, “Do you ever have the problem of having too many treasures?” That was asked partly to explain/justify the amount of luggage I was helping her move as well as the disheveled state in which it was packed. It made sense that Sali carried her treasures so close to her, around her neck. I hope Sali's mother, or someone who loved Sali very much has that necklace of treasures. I just read a passage in 'The Enchantress of Florence' by Salman Rushdie that reminded me of Sali,

“In a small wooden box concealed behind a sliding panel in his sleeping quarters Lord Hauksbank of that Ilk kept a collection of beloved 'objects of virtue', beautiful little pieces without which a man who travelled constantly might lose his bearings, for too much travel, as Lord Hauksbank well knew, too much strangeness and novelty, could loosen the moorings of the soul. 'These things are not mine,' he said to his new Florentine friend, 'yet they remind me of who I am. I act as their custodian for a time, and when that time is ended I let them go.'

When anyone thinks of Sali, while remembering the various wonderful things about her, the fact that she was so very beautiful is something that instantly comes to mind. It's hard to come to terms with the fact that someone that I remember so clearly and that seemed just so very tangibly alive is no more. It's painful to think that next week Sali will have been dead for a month, although I now feel as though she has been dead for a very long time. These past weeks have felt long.

The thought of dancing is saddening for me because it's tinged with so many Sali Memories, but I've now realized that it I should dance whenever I can, and more importantly whenever I want to. We once discussed how painfully restricting it feels not to dance when you really want to, especially if the music is just so great, as you don't want to be the only person dancing. I remember doing this impression of her and telling her how ridiculous she looked this one time when she wanted to be dancing but wasn't 'dancing'- she was backed up in a corner with her hands across her chest and the rest of her body was vigorously moving as though she was experiencing some awful seizure or was trying to dance while in a straight jacket. Now when I dance I want it to be as much for Sali as for myself. I like to think that every one has their special selfish Sali loss- that is, the one thing they will miss most about not having her around in their life, and I miss not being able to dance with her, or having her to talk to about dance and how ridiculous the world and people can be for not wanting to dance whenever they can.

I miss my friend, and I am so very sad that I could have spoken to her as much as I wanted, danced with her as much as we could, been really annoyed with her as much as I wanted (on occasion),and looked at her as much as I could have but now all that I have are waves of extreme grief and frustration. It feels wrong that every one in the world doesn't know how wonderful she was and how awful and unforgivable her death is. Maybe if everyone who loved her can take up any of her causes in some tiny fraction, maybe, the loss might in some small capacity lessen.

I first met sally years ago, maby 2004 when I was living at hellarity house in oakland she would allways come and visit the bay area and pass throughoften.  She dated a friend of mine, Banjo Dylan for a while and started riding trains.  I saw her off on a train to Chicago from oakland , when she was probly 16, by her self.  Looking back, I can't believe it, she was very brave abd self determined, self empowered!  She always had a passion for the earth, and a wild desire to travel and learn as she went.  I was devestated, when I first read about her death and just how this happened... It struckold greif into my heart as My friend Brad Will also lost his life in the Streets of Oaca, Mexico on October 27, 2006 when he was assasinated by the Military, he was also a revolutionary who will be deeply missed.  To Sally and brad two Revolutionaries who will be deeply missed and rememmbered in our love and deep rage!  Let's keep sally alive in our heart and our actions. Ow and her old band's page in Tucson is:

http://www.myspace.com/cizanatucson
--Swash

I also first met Sali as Ratty. Straw Devil was one of my first experiences within the anarchist community and sali was one of the first people that I met out there. It is absolutely true that Sali always seemed to have a smile on her face and always had a positive outlook regardless of the situation. Sali was one of the dirtiest kids I know and she wore her dirt with such a humble pride. I remember coming back from the woods with her one year. We were hitching down to feral visions together and I just remember that silly look on her face as she tried to figure out why everyone was staring at her as if she had not realized that as she walked clumps of dirt were falling from every crack and fold in her clothes and body.

I remember how much I loved the way she would hold her 'thumbing' hand waaay up in the air as she was trying to get rides. More than that though I remember how tireless she was about EVERYTHING be it holding her hand way above her head for hours without flinching or how she was often the first awake and the last asleep, busy with the million things she would dedicate herself to. When I first came to straw devil I had escaped imprisonment from my tiny midwest town that I was from and I showed up to straw devil in blue jeans and a tee shirt; far from what everyone else there looked like. I experienced a bit of alienation my first time out there. Everyone seemed cautious of me because of my appearence (understandably so) but Sali was always extremely nice and did not treat me any different than she did any of her other friends out there. I instantly had a great appreciation for her.

Over the years as we would find ourselves in the same places at the same time we got to know each other better and better. My first impressions of her still remained true everytime I ran in to her. Sali was one of the friendliest kids you could ever meet. Sali never got caught up in the clique mentality that plagues so many anarchists and punks. Sali was always amazing to be around and always approached everyone with open arms and an open heart which sadly can tend to be a rarity in our community. My memories of Sali tend to always go back to that part of her personality.....

We have lost a great friend but here is to the countless number of kids that are now an integral part of our community because of the open heart that Sali specifically, approached them with. And here is to the empowerment that she so naturally filled our hearts with. Here is to the next rock thrown, the next banner painted, the next tree saved, and the next song that is sung with Sali, our dear friend in our hearts.





 Heres a los que vienen con el polvo y se han ido con el viento!!!!!!

-Fitch