In the Great St. Paul Lock-'em-up Spree, 10 feet made the difference

Mark Tracy was indisposed. He was supposed to be climbing the 151 steps of the Highland Park Water Tower with his family to experience the most beautiful view you can get of St. Paul. Instead, he was looking at the county jail.

From the inside.

Tracy, 27, is a soft-spoken follower of Gandhi and Martin Luther King who is employed as a community faculty member at Metro State University, where he teaches an online course in "Anthropology in the Global Age." From a longtime St. Paul family, and a 1999 alum of Cretin-Derham Hall High School, Tracy is as solid a citizen as they come. Only Bob Fletcher would be alarmed by him.

Fletcher is the excitable sheriff who claims St. Paul would be nothing more than a smoking heap of overturned urine buckets if 800 people hadn't been arrested during the Republican National Convention. Some of the arrested deserved to be locked up for bad behavior. The problem is that the undeclared state of martial law imposed by the city during the convention resulted in many citizens who were exercising their free speech rights to be arrested for nothing more than breathing in St. Paul.

It happened to Tracy on the first day. He and his wife, Sarah, and some friends had produced 10,000 copies of a free pamphlet called "My Peace City" that they planned to distribute during the convention.

On Sept. 1, he and his friend, Michael Birchard, distributed pamphlets until late afternoon, when they decided to knock off and head home for dinner. They were riding their bicycles past a line of cops, who didn't seem to notice or care, until they got to the very last one. That officer watched as Birchard pedaled by, then stepped up and stopped Tracy, who was trailing his friend by about 10 feet.

"Get off your bike and sit down," the cop told Tracy.

Tracy says the officer was friendly, and seemed as if he would agree to let him go.

"Sit down and we'll figure it out," the officer said.

But police began arresting protesters nearby and a melee ensued. Tracy was still sitting on the street, waiting, but the cop's tone suddenly changed.

"Remember," Tracy said. "I wasn't part of that. Can I go?"

"Yes, you were a part of those [blankety-blanks]," the cop barked. "Shut up and sit."

Instead, he was taken to the jail.

"It looked like Guantanamo in St. Paul," says Tracy's father, Mark E. Tracy, a longtime St. Paul attorney who came to the jail to try to find out what happened. "I had assumed he'd be given a ticket and released. There was no cause to arrest him, other than the fact he was caught up in the rush to arrest these other folks. They overdid it."

Prisoner No. 0502 -- the pacifist pamphlet-passing professor -- was patted down, given his rights and put in a cell with 10 other men.

Tracy lived on soda crackers and water for two days. Being in jail ruined his appetite.

Tracy was later placed in a cell with another inmate who had been drenched in pepper spray. The lingering fumes were so acrid that Tracy, in the upper bunk, covered his head with a sheet. He fell asleep but was awakened at 4 a.m. to be strip-searched.

But he wouldn't. He would spend another night in jail.

"It's not my nature to be taken over by anger," he says. "I meditated about how to fit my philosophy of nonviolence into what happened. I don't blame police. We all have the same desires, so I tried to think about why people do things to other people. People are the same, but they can be conditioned to oppress and treat people wrongly, especially people they fear. How should I deal with that? I'm still trying to answer that question."

The Highland Water Tower was open the Tuesday and Wednesday of the convention so visitors could see the city without tear gas. I am the one who got the Tracys interested in the tower; I had the pleasure of making their acquaintance at the Highland Pool in August, while our kids were taking swimming lessons. I told the Tracys that you haven't seen St. Paul until you see it from the tower.

Sarah took the kids. From the tower, they could see the cathedral and the airport and the High Bridge and the fairgrounds and the churches and the colleges, and they could almost see Daddy.

Mark got out of jail at 3 p.m Wednesday, 46 hours after being arrested. The charge of felony riot against him had been dropped. He was a free man, exactly as if he had done nothing wrong. He hadn't.

The Highland tower is open again this Saturday and Sunday, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

St. Paul is still here, undestroyed, spread below the highest spot in the city, lovely, fragile and still clinging to the curve of the Mississippi.

I hope Mark Tracy can see it.