by Richard Bach
The day after the foundation was poured, buying groceries in town, my eye was caught by a new business on the mall: Custom Computer.
I walked inside.
"Leslie, I know that you are going to call me a silly goose," I said when I got back to the trailer.
She was covered with dirt, from back-filling water-pipe trenches for the solar panels on the hilltop, from running her Bobcat earth-mover mixing topsoils, carving gardens, from lavishing care and love into this final place we'd chosen to live.
So beautiful, I thought, as if the makeup department had streaked dust to accent her cheekbones. She didn't care. She was going to take her shower anyway.
"I know I went to town to buy us a loaf of bread," I said, "and to get milk and lettuce and tomatoes if I could find any good tomatoes. But do you know what I got instead?"
She sat down before she spoke. "Oh, no. Richard, you are not going to tell me you got . . . magic beans?"
"A gift for my darling!" I said.
"Richard, please! What did you get? We don't have room! Is there time to take it back?"
"We can take it back if you don't like it. But you will not not like it, you will love it. I predict: YOUR mind, and THIS machine . . ."
"You bought a machine? At the grocery-store? How big is it?"
"It's sort of a grocery. It's an Apple."
"Richard, your thought is very sweet but are you sure I need-an apple-at this time?"
"By the time you pop out of the shower, wook, you are going to see a miracle, right here in our trailer.' I promise."
"We have so much to do, already, and there isn't enough space. ... Is it big?" But I said not another word, and at last she laughed and went for her shower.
I hefted boxes down the narrow hallway, moved the typewriter off the shelf-turned-desk, put books on the floor, then lifted the computer from its foam packing and set it where the typewriter had been. I put the toaster and the blender in the broom closet to make room for the printer on the kitchen counter. In minutes, two disk drives were connected, the video-screen glowed softly.
Word-processing program inserted into one drive, I turned the machine on. The disk whirred, made whisking breathing sounds for a minute, then went still. I typed a message, scrolled it out of sight, till only a small square of light remained on the screen, blinking.
She came out of the bathroom fresh and clean, her hair gathered under a towel-turban to dry.
"OK, Richie, I can't stand the suspense! Where is it?"
I unveiled the computer from under the dish-towel. "Ta-da!"
"Richard?" she said. "What is it?"
"Your very own . . . COMPUTER!"
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She looked at me, wordless.
"Sit you down right here," I urged, "and then press the key marked 'Control' and at the same time press the 'B.' That's called 'Control-B.'"
"Like this?" she said.
The light-square vanished, and in its place the screen filled with words:
GOOD AFTERNOON, LESLIE! I AM YOUR NEW COMPUTER. I AM DELIGHTED TO HAVE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO MEET YOU AND TO SERVE YOU. YOU ARE GOING TO LOVE ME I THINK. YOUR NEW,
APPLE.
WON'T YOU TRY WRITING SOMETHING IN THE SPACE THAT FOLLOWS?
"Isn't that sweet," she said.
She typed.a tentative line: NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD PERSONS TO CAME TO THE
"I made a mistake."
"Move the cursor to the right of the mistake, then type Left-Arrow." She did, and the mistake disappeared.
"Does it have instructions?"
"It teaches you itself. Press the Escape key twice, then the M key a few times, and follow what the screen tells you. ..."
That was the last I spoke with Leslie for the next ten hours. She sat tranced in front of the machine, learning the
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system. Then she typed things-to-remember flies into it, building schedules, idea-lists; attacked correspondence.
The computer used no paper till the writing was finished and ready to print; no trees had to die to become paper thrown away for typing errors.
"Wookie," she said, after midnight, "I apologize to you. I am sorry."
"That's all right," I said. "What are you sorry for?"
"I thought you were being a silly gosling, I thought here's just what we need, a big electric toy in the trailer to put us right out in the rain, but I didn't say anything because it was your sweet gift. I was wrong! It's so ..." She looked up at me, searched the word and came down on it center-square: ". . . organized! It's going to change our lives!"
So enchanted was she with the powers of the computer that more than once in the days that followed I had to ask very courteously if it might be possible for me to have a few minutes at the keyboard. I wanted to learn, too.
"Poor dear," she said absently, as she typed. "Of course you want to learn. Just a few minutes more. . . ."
Minutes turned to hours, to days; interrupt her I refused to do. Soon I was back once again from the Apple store, a second computer in tow. For this one we had to set a drafting-table in the least-crowded corner of the trailer, making it the most-crowded corner.
Curiosities, the computers were, but they were compasses, too, through a forest of ideas and schedules and strategies demanding attention. In addition, they could whip out financial statements faster than the IRS could blink; pressing one key, we could bury them in financial statements.
By the time the little house was finished, we were both comfortably expert in driving our smart little machines. We
smoothed them to our personal design, switches set just so, extra memory-boards installed, electronics to link them by telephone to giant computers long-distance.
A week after we moved to the hilltop, the computers were running six hours a day, side by side on their desk in the bedroom-cornerrturned office.
Our vocabulary changed.
"I booted straight into a hang, wookie!" She showed me a screen full of frozen-ant lines. "Has that ever happened to you?"
I nodded in sympathy. "Yep. It's your disk or your drive," I said. "No. It's your 80-character board. Control-reset if you can, or re-boot on my disk. If it works on mine, it's not the board, it's your disk. Maybe your drive speed's off and it ate your disk I hope to God not but we can fix it."
"It wouldn't be the disk, or I would have gotten an I/O error," she said, full of frowns. "I have to be so careful about things that cause the whole program to blow up, or my computer to self-destruct. Like touching it, for instance ..."
Then we heard an impossible sound, the crunch of tires on gravel outside. Up our long steep forbidding drive, through five No Trespassing Keep Away At All Costs This Means You signs, had driven an automobile.
Out stepped a woman carrying a sheaf of papers, daring to invade our precious privacy.
I stormed from my computer out the door and met her before she had taken five steps.
"Good morning," she said politely, in a fine British accent. "I hope I'm not interrupting ..."
"You are," I barked. "Did you happen to notice the signst The NO TRESPASSING signs?"
She froze like a doe looking point-blank into the barrel of a hunting-rifle.
"I just wanted to tell you-they're going to cut all the trees and they'll never grow back!" She bolted for the safety of her car.
Leslie ran from the house to keep her from going.
"They're . . . who's they?" she said. "Who's going to cut all the trees?"
"The government," the lady said, looking nervously over Leslie's shoulder at me, "the Bureau of Land Management. It's illegal, but they're going to do it because nobody's going to stop them!"
"Come in," Leslie said to her, nodding a wordless Down, King, to me, as though I were the family attack-dog. "Please come in, and let's talk about it."
That was the way, hackles raised, I met Community Action-a meeting I had resisted since approximately the hour I had learned to walk.
forty
DENISE FINDLAYSON left u
s with a stack of documents, a dwindling drift of dust over the driveway and a dark sense of oppression. Did I not have enough troubles with the government that now it had to destroy the very land around us?
I stuffed pillows around me in bed, read the first few pages of the timber-sale Environmental Assessment Report and sighed. "This looks very official, wookie; seems like we chose the wrong place to build a house. What say we sell and move farther north. Idaho, maybe? Montana?"
"Isn't Idaho where they do the strip-mining?" she said, barely looking up from the document in her hand. "Isn't Montana where they have the uranium mines and the radioactive wildflowers?"
"I sense that you are trying to tell me something," I said.
"Why don't we put our cards right here on the bed and say what's on our mind?"
She set down the page of government microprint. "Let's not run away, unless you absolutely have to, before we find out what's going on. Have you never considered fighting injustice?"
"Never! You know that. I don't believe in injustice. We bring to ourselves every event, every . . . don't you agree?"
"Maybe," she said. "Why did you bring this one to you, do you suppose, the government cutting down the forest the day after we move in? To have something to run away from? Or something to learn from?"
A lover who is very smart, I thought, is a joy and sometimes she is a burr.
"What's to be learned?"
"If we want to, we can change things," she said, "how powerful we might be, how much good we might do, together."
My mind sank. She had been willing to die in order to change things, to end a war, right the wrongs she had seen around her. And that which she had set out to change, had changed.
"Aren't you burned out with Social Activism? Haven't you said Nevermore?"
"I have," she said. "I think I've paid my dues to society for the next ten lifetimes, and after the KVST takeover I swore to stay out of causes for the rest of this one. But there are moments . . ."
I sensed she didn't want to say what she was saying, that she was looking for words to suggest the once-unsuggestible.
"I can share with you what I've learned," she said, "but
not what I know. If you'd like to find out about your power for good, instead of retreating, I might come out of retirement. I don't have the smallest doubt: if we want to stop the government from cutting timber that won't grow back, we can stop it. If it's illegal, we can stop it. If it isn't illegal, we can always move to Idaho."
Nothing was less interesting to me than convincing a government to change. People squander lives, trying. At the end, if we win, what we win is the bureaucracy doesn't do what it shouldn't have tried to do in the first place. Aren't there more positive things to be done than keeping officials inside the law?
"Before we move," I said, "it might be worth a quick check to see that they're doing things right. Turn the computers loose on it. But, my little deer, I'm sure we won't find the United States Government breaking its own laws!"
Was her smile sweet or bitter? "I'm sure," she said.
That afternoon our computers in the woods flickered questions, fast as light, to a computer in Ohio, which flashed them to a computer in San Francisco, which fired answers into our screens: Federal law prohibits the sale and logging of nonregenerable timber from public lands. Summaries of eighty-two related cases followed.
Moving to the frail forest of southern Oregon, were we chancing into an alley last-minute before an attack of rape and murder?
I looked at Leslie, agreed with her unspoken conclusion. There was no ignoring the crime about to happen.
"When you have a minute," I said the next day as we watched our glowing screens. It was our computer-opera-
tor's code; asking for attention and in the same breath saying please don't answer if a wrong key-stroke is going to scramble your whole morning's work.
A moment later she looked up from her screen. "OK."
"Do you think the forest itself called us here?" I said. "Do you think it was psychically crying for help, tree-devas and plant-spirits and wild-animal guides changing a hundred coincidences to bring us here to fight for them?"
"That's very poetic," she said. "It's probably true." She turned back to work.
An hour later, I couldn't stay quiet. "When you have a minute . . ."
In a few seconds her computer's disk-drive whirred, saving data.
"OK."
"How can they do this?" I said. "The BLM is destroying the very land it's required by law to protect! It's like . . . Smokey the Bear, he's murdering trees!"
"One thing I bet you're going to learn, wookie," she said. "Governments have almost zero foresight and an almost infinite capacity for stupidity, violence and destruction. Not quite, but almost infinite capacity. The not-quite is when people get mad enough to stand in the way."
"I don't want to learn that," I said. "Please, I want to learn that government is wise and wonderful and that citizens do not have to take their own private time to protect themselves from elected leaders."
"Don't we wish . . . ," she said, her mind far down the road ahead of me. Then she turned to confront me. "This is not going to be easy. That's not a forest out there, it's big money, big power."
She laid a Federal document on my desk. "BLM gets a lot
of its money from the timber companies. The bureau gets paid to sell trees, not to save them. So don't think we're going to walk up to the district director, point to broken laws, and he's going to say, 'Gee, we're sorry and we sure won't do that anymore!' This is going to be a long, tough fight. Sixteen-hour days and seven-day weeks, that's what it's going to take to win. But let's not start any action that we don't intend to win. If you want to quit, let's quit now."
"We can't lose, anyway," I said, loading a new data-disk into my machine. "As long as the IRS can swoop down and seize a first-draft manuscript out of my computer, there's nb point in writing manuscripts. But I can write one hell of a timber-sale protest! The government won't have to seize what I write . . . we'll mail it to 'em direct. The Clash of the Bureaus, I can see it now: before IRS can decide whether to take my money, I'll spend it fighting BLM!"
She laughed. "Sometimes I believe you. Maybe there is no such thing as injustice."
Our priorities changed. Other work stopped while we studied. On our desks, on the kitchen counter, piled on the bed were thousands of pages about forest management, sustained-yield practices, erodible soils, fragile-lands regeneration, watershed protection, climatic evolution, endangered species, the socioeconomics of timber management versus the benefits of anadromous fisheries on marginal sites, riparian-zone protection, heat-transfer coefficients hi granitic soils, and laws, laws, laws. Books of laws. The National Environmental Protection Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the Endangered Species Act, NHPA, FWPCA, AA, CWA, DOI 516M. Laws leaped from
pages, through our ringers, into our computers; written in electrons, coded and cross-referenced, filed in disk after disk, duplicated in bank-vaults, lest something happen to us or the house where we worked.
When there was enough information to change minds, we began meeting with neighbors. Joining with Denise Findlay-son and Chant Thomas, who had fought mostly alone before we came, we pressed for help from others.
Most of the people of the valley were reluctant to get involved . . . how I understood their thinking!
"Nobody's ever stopped a government timber sale," they said. "There's no way to keep the BLM from logging whatever it wants to log."
Yet when they learned what we had learned, that turning forests into deserts was breaking the law, we found ourselves with a Save-the-Forest membership of more than seven hundred people. Our private hideaway in the wilderness became a headquarters, our little mountain an anthill as fellow workers came and went all hours to pour findings into the computers.
I met a Leslie I had never seen: total focused business-at-hand; no smiles, no personal asides, one-track one-rail single-minded concentration
.
Time and again, she told us. "Emotional appeals won't work: 'Please don't cut the pretty trees, don't ruin the landscape, don't let the animals die.' That means nothing to the Bureau of Land Management. And not violence either: 'We'll spike the trees, we'll shoot you if you try to kill the forest.' That means they'll do their logging with the Army to protect them. The only thing that will stop the government is legal action. When we know the law better than they do, when they know we can take them to court and win,
when we can prove that they're violating Federal regulations, the logging will stop."
We tried negotiating with the BLM. "Do not expect cooperation," she said. "Expect double-talk, defensiveness, we-don't-do-it-that-way-anymore. But talking with them is a step we have to take." She was right, every word.
"Leslie, I can't believe this transcript! Have you read? The Director of the Medford BLM sat there and told us, on tape! Listen:"
RICHARD: Is what you're telling us that you need to have a lot of people make an outcry about this, against the logging, or that it would make no difference what people say?
DIRECTOR-. If you are asking me a personal question, very likely it would not.
RICHARD: Whether you get four hundred signatures or four thousand . . .
DIRECTOR: We get petitions like that. No, it wouldn't make a difference.
RICHARD: If there were forty thousand signatures, if the entire population of Medford, Oregon, protested the sale, would that make a difference?
DIRECTOR: Not to me.
RICHARD: If there were professional foresters who were objecting, would you listen to that?
DIRECTOR: No. I am not concerned about public outcry.
RICHARD: We would like to see what has made you so certain that this is worth going ahead in spite of so much public outcry.
DIRECTOR: Well, we are doing it.
RICHARD: Have you ever changed a timber sale because of a protest by the people? DIRECTOR: No. Never.
She scarcely blinked, watching her computer-screen. "Good. Load that under Lack of Good Faith. It's disk Twenty-two, after Sale Violates National Environmental Protection Act."
Rarely did she show anger at our adversary. She documented evidence, entered it into the files, built her case for court.