by Ann Eriksson
Jen stood. “I’ll go too,” she said. “We need a strategy. If we spread the tree-sit out they can’t cut within a tree height radius of each tree without hurting us.”
“We’ll need equipment,” Terry said. “And know-how.”
All attention shifted to Paul and me.
“Will you help us?” Mary walked over and took Paul’s hand. I nearly gagged, waiting for the woman to flutter her eyelids and pout.
He hesitated. “Faye?”
I forced my gaze from the saccharine scene between Paul and Mary to the ragtag gathering, the weight of their hope directed at me. They didn’t know what they asked of me. To jeopardize my reputation, to step over the line of objectivity. I shook my head. “No, I can’t.”
Paul took my arm and steered me to the other side of the clearing. “They need us. It’ll be safer if we help,” he said, then added. “Do you want to see our trees coming down?”
“Of course not,” I said, shaking his hand off, the rain pelting onto our heads. I pulled up my hood. “But I’m working through proper channels.”
He gave a short laugh. “Your proper channels don’t seem interested in talking.”
“They have to,” I argued. “We have the murrelets now.”
He glanced back over at the shelter where the protesters had resumed talking among themselves. Mary watched us from the edge of the group. “A tree-sit might delay logging long enough for you to get answers.”
I wavered, the suggestion compelling.
“Who will know?” he said. “They won’t tell the company we helped.”
Cougar? Mary? Could I trust any of them? I crossed my arms. “No, Paul, I can’t.”
“Well, I’ll do it without you then,” he said and stalked away.
I watched him return to the circle. The group cheered. Terry slapped him on the back. Mary threw her arms around him and kissed him on the mouth. My chest tightened. I was losing him. To Mary. To my principles. I checked my watch. Enough time for a call in to PCF’s office. No signal and I’d drive to their yard, to Vancouver if I had to. I grabbed keys, wallet, and cell phone and headed up the soggy trail for the car.
I collided with two hikers around the first bend. They were shrouded in rain gear, appearing like bulging packs with legs. One of the hikers stepped back and called out a muffled greeting. Sodden wisps of white hair had escaped from the edge of her rain hat and were plastered on her cheek. She let her hood fall back from her face. Her glasses were fogged up.
“Hello, Faye,” the woman said.
“Mother?” I gasped. “What on earth are you doing here?”
• • •
Terry and Paul left in Terry’s four-by-four to drive to town to buy ropes, gear, tarps, and plywood. The rest of the group, buoyed by the new plan, maintained a presence on the rain-shrouded road. They dodged two loaded logging trucks hauling out of the upper valley and endured the posturing, taunts, and curses of homebound loggers at the end of the day. I spent the afternoon trying to convince Grace and her best friend Esther to go home.
I sat on a stump under the kitchen shelter and watched the two women set up their camp in the rain. In spite of the bulk of her bright yellow slicker and pants, Grace carried herself with an elegance I had always viewed with awe and envy, the fluidity of her movements suggesting her limbs were made of air or water instead of bone and tendon. She never dropped things, or stumbled, each step, each hand gesture a flawless choreography. I knew she’d danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet until she quit, at twenty-two, to marry Mel and have children. No regrets, she always said. I found the trade hard to believe. A life of dance, music, and fame for Mel, Qualicum, and three rowdy children? My birth a certain shock. Grace must have hoped for a girl. Ballet lessons and pink tutus, satin toe shoes. Instead, after two galumphing boys who preferred hockey and soccer, she got me. A tiny mutation on a single chromosome.
I was my mother’s fall from grace. When I asked her about my birth, she merely described my emergence “more difficult than the boys”; that relatives and friends had exclaimed on sight of my week-old face, “but she’s so pretty.” My interpretation: the birth was hell, the relatives shocked. As a romantic teenager, I’d conjured the momentous occasion up with pen and paper. I remembered the embarrassing gist of it.
Unlike my elder brothers, who slid from Grace’s womb with the ease of soft fruit dropping from a tree, I nearly killed my mother the night I was born. Twice.
In the hours between midnight and dawn, the time when all things mysterious and life-wrenching happen, after thirty-six hours of labour—and a crescendo of drug-induced contractions—I burst into the world with an audible pop that turned the heads of the nurses, Mel hovering in the hallway, the doctor waiting with gloved hands.
Pop. The sound of rectal muscle parting against the force of the baby’s too-large head. The first sign of my lack of elegance.
I dropped, newborn, into startled silence.
Chaos erupted against the absence of a cry. While the room filled with monitors, machines, and an emergency medical team, Grace, confused, lifted her empty arms from the pillow. “Where’s my baby?” The doctor, a kind woman with liberal leanings, focused like everyone else in the room on the scene in the corner—the oxygen tank, the wheeled incubator, the mutterings of the neonatal specialists—turned back to the bed, eyes tired above the white paper mask over her mouth.
“A girl . . .”
Of course I didn’t know any of this. I didn’t know if the doctor was kind, a woman or liberal. The precise instant of birth. Whether my father gaped at my stunted and bowed legs, willing me to die, or Grace’s tears of regret mingled with the first watery stream of breast milk on my tongue. I had torn up the story into bite-sized pieces one day years later and fed them to my gerbil.
“I draw the line at sleeping on the ground.” Grace manoeuvred a light folding camp cot through the door of their full-height tent. “We are over sixty.” Grace appeared a decade younger, few wrinkles and slim, her hair—the white still streaked with coppery brown—swept up in a coil at the back of her elegant neck.
“Why don’t you draw the line at camping altogether,” I argued. “Go home and write letters, make phone calls. I can give you a list,” I said. “I’m sure Terry would have lots of suggestions.”
“After all the work it took to get here? Besides, didn’t you get my email. I explained it all to you. Affirmative action. Peaceful resistance.”
I mumbled about a lack of a connection. Rainbow, on sick leave from the blockade because of a runny nose, called out from Grace’s tent where she was testing out Esther’s cot, “Let them stay, Dr. Faye.”
“You keep out of this,” I shot back.
“I’m afraid you have no say in the matter, dear. Esther and I are here to do what we can to help.” Grace shook her sleeping bag from its sack and tossed it through the door to Rainbow.
Esther, Grace’s loyal friend for thirty-five years, looked her age and was quite capable of dropping things and stumbling. She hammered in a stake at the corner of the tent. “Your mother and I never back down from a fight for justice.”
I knew Esther spoke the truth, she and Grace a formidable team at the endless marches I endured along with my brothers, Esther’s four children, and a dog or two, the dogs tolerating banners with slogans like Paws for Peace or I Bark for Human Rights. Save the Trees was no different.
“What about Dad?” I whined, childishly.
“Your father can take care of himself for a few days. I told him he could bail us out if necessary.”
“You’re not going to get arrested, are you?”
“If need be,” she repeated.
“It’s not going to help,” I insisted.
Grace fixed me with the gaze that never failed to stop me in my tracks, my mother’s sharp opal eyes pinning me to the wall or in this case a tree. “‘It is any day better to stand erect with a broken and bandaged head than to crawl on one’s belly.’”
How could one argu
e with Mahatma Gandhi?
“Come on, Rainbow,” I said. “Let’s go make lunch.”
• • •
As soon as the loggers abandoned the upper valley for the night, locking the gate behind them, the defenders packed the supplies needed to establish the tree-sit. Mary, Grace, and Esther remained at camp to watch the children and the belongings. I avoided the preparations, intending to hole up in my tent, get an early night, resume my aborted mission in the morning, find some answers. I made a quick visit to the latrine and was cinching up my belt, pondering the logistics of hauling half sheets of plywood up into a tree in the dark, when the sound of voices approached from the direction of camp. I peered around the crude privacy curtain erected by Esther an hour earlier and witnessed Mary, childfree and leading a feckless Cougar, run into view. The woman leaned back against a tree and pulled him to her, her hands tangled in his matted hair. He curved into her, grinding his pelvis against hers, and the two of them moaned and grunted like rutting bears, tongues flicking. Cougar lifted her skirt with one hand and tugged at his belt with the other. Horrified, I searched around for an avenue of escape.
“Maaaary.” A voice called and Cedar’s cry drifted from the camp.
The pair pulled apart, kissed again, and Mary ran off in one direction, adjusting her clothing, Cougar in another. My stomach turned as I thought of Paul and his tender heart, though I couldn’t help but feel a sense of justice. Cougar and Mary. The two belonged together, joined forever by their nose rings.
When I crossed camp heading for my tent, I found Mary kissing Paul goodbye, jostling Cedar on her hip. Cougar watched from the trail, loaded down with a heavy backpack, his face twisted with contempt. “Let’s go,” he snarled.
While I read scientific journals in my tent, the group hiked along the haul road loaded with gear, hoping to find the new clear-cut, choose the trees, and set the ropes before dark, rigging them by headlamp to ensure the sitters climbed into the platforms before morning. Paul related the scene to me at breakfast the next morning. He described how the rain had abated, persisting in a fine mist that settled on clothing and hair in tiny glistening droplets. A rough track that ripped through the wall of trees along the road heralded the site of the afternoon’s logging, a large opening full of equipment, logs, and stumps. They stopped at the edge of the clearing and surveyed the scene in silence. The view resembled a bomb blast: shattered trunks, broken branches, crushed shrubs and ferns, ravaged earth. Piles of delimbed trees rested by the yarder, waiting for the trucks.
Terry waded through the carnage to an enormous stump and climbed up between two jagged vertical slivers of wood that rose like daggers above his head. One by one they followed until all eight of them stood side by side across the span of fresh-cut wood. The sharp fragrance of cedar permeated the air.
“Jesus,” Squirrel muttered, one of the few words he’d uttered out loud since he arrived.
“I feel ill,” Sue said. “How can people do this?”
“Come on.” Cougar stepped forward. “Dirt in their gas tanks’ll put a stop to this.”
“No.” Terry grabbed him by the arm. “Vandalism works against us.”
Cougar shook off Terry’s hold. “Wimp,” he growled and took another step toward the edge of the stump.
Terry moved in front of him. “Peaceful protest. No violence. Or you are out of here.”
Cougar stiffened and clenched both hands into fists.
“Terry’s right,” Paul interrupted. “Your tree-sit’s a great plan, Cougar. It’s worked in California and Oregon. They can’t cut with people in the trees and it doesn’t hurt anyone.”
Cougar turned to Paul, his face deformed by a malicious grimace. The rest of the group braced for an explosion and was surprised when he answered, “Sure. What are we waiting for?” He lifted his arm and pointed. “Hey, where’s he going?”
Mr. Kimori had climbed off the slab and was picking his way through the slash to the yarder. He clambered up into the cab, his cap of silvery hair visible through the dusty window.
“What on earth is he doing?” Terry mumbled.
“The Buddhist has a mean streak,” Cougar sneered.
“Shut up, Cougar,” Jen snapped.
Mr. Kimori climbed from the cab and pushed the door closed. He brushed the dust from his black nylon pants, then made his way back to the stump, the expression on his face one of detached satisfaction. When he reached the group he said. “Shall we work?”
“Do you mind telling us what you did in the yarder, Mr. Kimori,” Terry said. “We don’t condone damage to equipment.”
Mr. Kimori reached into the pocket of his vest and drew out his hand. He opened his fingers to reveal a cluster of tiny red and black ladybugs scattered across his palm.
“What the hell?” Cougar jumped from the stump onto the ground beside Mr. Kimori.
Mr. Kimori closed his fingers around the ladybugs, reached over and grasped the handle of the hunting knife that always hung in a sheath from Cougar’s belt, pulling it free before Cougar could protest.
“Give me that back,” Cougar growled, but Mr. Kimori held out his hand toward the man. He opened his fingers and inverted the knife point into the middle of his palm. The observers drew a collective breath. Mr. Kimori rotated the knife tip up; a single ladybug clung to the glinting metal.
“Fridge magnet,” he said. “I left one on the dash. A peace offering.”
Paul and Terry chose three trees, far enough apart to deter cutting in most of the area, but close enough so the tree-sitters could still communicate. Over the course of the night, the crew constructed rudimentary platforms high up in each of the trees, hauling plywood and tarps up with ropes and pulleys until they had three solid shelters. An hour before dawn, Paul talked Cougar, Squirrel, and Jen up to their makeshift nests. Squirrel balked halfway and Paul coaxed him the final distance. Sleeping gear and warm clothes were hauled to the platforms along with light backpacking stoves and fuel, a few days worth of food and water, and a bucket latrine each. One radiophone with spare battery was shared between the three of them. Supplies would be replenished nightly.
Cougar hauled his rope up for the final time. Paul called to him. “Would you keep track of any birds you see? Watch for marbled murrelets. Brown and white, big as a robin. Sounds like this . . .” He cupped his hand around his mouth. “Keer, keer.”
Cougar grunted and withdrew to his sleeping bag. The team packed up and headed back to camp, the lights on their headlamps bobbing through the trees like fireflies.
8
Roger’s truck was parked outside the trailer when I arrived. He opened the door at my knock, dark circles under his eyes. “Faye, come on in,” he said, appearing unsurprised at my arrival. He returned to his desk, the surface a jumble of papers and empty coffee cups. “Sorry for the mess, I’m getting behind with the new baby.”
“Of course,” I said, embarrassed I’d forgotten. He was preoccupied, that’s all the problem was. “Well, congratulations,” I said lamely.
“Thanks,” he answered. “Mixed blessing,” he added quickly, nodding. “I know why you’re here”—he shuffled through his papers—“I’ve asked the ecologist to check in with you, but he’s busy for another week. I promise, he’ll come out.” He held up a scrap of paper. “Here’s our correspondence.”
His conciliatory manner disarmed me. “That’s . . . great,” I said. “Did you find out about the timber markings?”
“Haven’t had time,” he said, shaking his head. “Cal can do that when he comes out.” He tapped his pen on the desk.
“Well”—I slid off the chair, relieved—“I guess that’s all I need to know. I better let you get back to work.”
He stood. “You’ve got quite a crew out there at the campsite.”
I stopped, startled by the unexpected comment. “We do, yes.”
“What are they up to?”
“Protesting,” I replied warily. Wasn’t it obvious?
“These guys can damage eq
uipment, blow things up. Anyone we should watch out for?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, heading for the door. “I do my thing, they do theirs.”
On the way back to camp I stopped at a rise in the road and walked a short distance to an outcropping where I could see over the valley. A family of sooty grouse, startled from the underbrush by my footsteps, scattered ahead of me. The mother zigzagged frantically back and forth to draw my attention while her babies scurried to safety. I sat on a large rock and thought about my conversation with Roger. I could wait a week. But not much longer. We needed to finish up our work and get back to town soon. Process the samples before they dried out. I was supposed to teach a summer course the beginning of July and was scheduled to speak at a conference in Lima in August. With all the distractions, I hadn’t worked on either. But I couldn’t leave until my trees were safe. A river of green flowed out before me across the landscape. No clear-cutting visible, easy to tell myself Roger was sincere. A few trees. Keep the men working. I didn’t need to worry. I bade farewell to the family of grouse hiding in the bushes and headed back to the car. I was glad I stuck to my guns over the tree-sit. Obviously, the company was watching.
• • •
Life in camp reached a state of strained equilibrium. The protesters manned the blockade during daylight hours. Terry checked in with the tree-sitters nightly, coordinating the delivery of food and water. Paul appeared to have forgiven me and we spent long days in the canopy. Grace and Esther turned out to be more than helpful, relieving the original members of the group of a number of tasks, performing most of the cooking and laundry, although I had to insist they stop ordering us all to wash up before dinner. The two women earned a place in Marcel’s hall of fame by baking chocolate chip cookies in a tiny solar oven that materialized from Esther’s pack. Esther carried a walking stick with a metal tip everywhere she went, which she used to pry PCF’s survey stakes from the ground. “This messes them up,” she’d say, tying the offending stake to her day pack for later disposal. They organized evening lectures on the history and techniques of non-violent civil disobedience, where they quoted Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. ad nauseum.