Adam raises his fears two nights later, over a tin of baked beans warmed on a fire of cones. “Destroying federal property. Serious stuff.”
“Oh, you’re a felon, buddy,” Doug-fir says.
“Violent crime.”
Douglas waves him away. “I’ve committed real violent crimes. Commissioned by the government.”
Mulberry clasps Douglas’s jabbing hand. “Yesterday’s political criminals are on today’s postage stamps!”
Maidenhair is far away, in another country. At last she says, “This isn’t radical. I’ve seen radical.”
Then Adam sees it again, too. A living, breathing mountainside, stripped bare.
SUPPLIES ARRIVE, bought with sympathizers’ donations. The camp is a small part of a network of efforts spreading across the state. There’s talk of an army walking arm-in-arm through the streets of the capital. A hunger striker, camped out for forty days and nights on the steps of the U.S. District Court in Eugene. The Spirit of the Forest, dressed in a quilt of green strips, walking a hundred miles on stilts down Highway 58.
That night, lying in his bag against the Earth, Adam wants to head back to Santa Cruz to finish his thesis. Anyone can dig a trench, pile up an earthwork, fasten himself to a lockdown. But only he can complete his project and describe, in measured facts, why people might care whether a forest lives or dies. But he stays on another day, becoming something new—his own object of study.
THE LONGER THE OCCUPATION LASTS, the farther journalists travel to come see. A squad of men in a Forest Service van ask them all to leave. The Free Cascadians stand them off and send them away. Two guys in suits from the congressional representative’s office drop by to listen. They promise to take the grievances to Washington. Their visit thrills Mulberry. “When politicians start to come around, something’s happening.”
Adam—Maple—agrees. “Politicians want to be on the winning side. Blow the way the wind does.”
Maidenhair murmurs, “The Earth is always going to win.”
Headlights swing by the main road one night, and shots are fired. Three days later, a deer’s entrails appear just outside the barricade.
A HULKING F-350 SUPER DUTY stops down the road, a hundred yards from the drawbridge. Two men in high-necked olive hunters’ jackets. The driver, young with a trim goatee, could be a C&W heartthrob. “Whadda we got here? Huggers! Hey—awright!”
A girl called Trillium shouts, “We’re just trying to protect a good thing.”
“Why don’t you protect what belongs to you, and let us protect our jobs and our family and our own mountains and our way of life?”
“The trees don’t belong to anyone,” Doug-fir says. “The trees belong to the forest.”
The passenger door opens, and the older man gets out. He walks around the front of the cab. Once, in another life, long ago, Adam took a seminar in the psychology of crisis and confrontation. Now he remembers nothing. The man is tall but stooped, gray hair falling in his face. He’s like a big grizzly pitching forward on his hind legs. Something flashes at the man’s wrist. Adam thinks: Gun. Knife. Run.
The old guy reaches the front left bumper and lifts the metal weapon. But the threat is soft, philosophical, perplexed, and the weapon only a metal hand. “I lost my arm at the elbow, cutting those trees.”
The heartthrob calls from the cab, “And I’ve got white finger, from working. You heard of working, haven’t you? Doing things other people need to have done?”
The old guy rests his good hand on the hood and shakes his head. “What do you people want? We can’t stop using wood.”
Maidenhair appears, walking through the drawbridge toward the men. The upright grizzly takes a step back. She says, “We don’t know what people can and can’t do. So little has been tried!”
The look of her sets the goateed driver on every kind of high alert. “You can’t put wood above the lives of decent people.” He’s stunned; he wants her. That much is clear to Adam a hundred yards away.
“We don’t,” she says. “We don’t put trees above people. People and trees are in this together.”
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“If people knew what went into making trees, they would be so, so thankful for the sacrifice. And thankful people don’t need as much.” She talks to the men for a while. She says, “We need to stop being visitors here. We need to live where we live, to become indigenous again.”
The bear-man shakes her hand. He walks back around to the passenger door and boards. As the monster truck pulls out, the driver yells to the assembled forces behind the drawbridge, “Hug away, huggers! Y’all are gonna get reamed.” He tears away in a spray of gravel.
Yes, Adam thinks. Probably. And then the planet will ream the reamers.
THE PROTEST enters its second month. It shouldn’t be working, as far as Adam can see. The hopeless incompetence of the idealist temperament should have crashed the place long ago. But the Free Bioregion rolls on. Word spreads through camp that the President—of the United States—has heard about the protest and is ready to halt all federal timber salvage sales, especially those resulting from arson, until the policy can be reviewed.
A BRIGHT, CHILLY AFTERNOON, two hours past the sun’s peak. Watchman is painting faces for storytelling that evening around the fire. Down the slope, someone blows an alpenhorn, bellowing like ancient megafauna at the falling sun. A marathoner named Marten sprints up to the ridge and trots into high camp. “They’re coming.”
“Who?” Watchman asks.
“Freddies.”
Like that, the day is here. They head down the path toward the glacis, where the moat and wall now stand completed. Down the pass, along the logging road that Adam hiked up so long ago, a convoy crawls, filled with people wearing uniforms of four different colors and cuts. After the lead Forest Service van comes a behemoth excavator, converted for assault. Behind it, more equipment, more vans.
The face-painted Free Cascadians stand and stare. Then the eighty-year-old minister with the necklace scar says, “Okay, folks. Let’s mobilize.” They move to their stations, locking down, raising the drawbridge, manning the wall, or withdrawing to defensible positions. Soon the convoy is at the gates. Two Forest Service men exit the lead van and stand in front of the palisade. “You have ten minutes to leave peacefully. After that, you’ll be removed to a place of detainment.”
Everyone on the ramparts shouts at once. No leaders: every voice must be heard. The movement has lived for months by that principle, and now they’ll die by it. Adam waits for a break in the hail of words. Then he, too, is shouting.
“Give us three days, and this whole thing can be wrapped up peacefully.” The heads of the convoy turn to him. “We’ve had a visit from the congressional office. The President is assembling an executive order.”
As quickly as he won their attention, he loses it. “You have ten minutes,” the officer repeats, and Adam’s political naïveté dies. Action from Washington isn’t the answer to this showdown. It’s the cause.
At nine minutes and forty seconds, the long-necked saurian excavator swings its ram over the trench and slams the top of the wall. Screams come from the battered ramparts. War-painted defenders tumble and run. Adam scrambles and is knocked to the ground. The claw hammers the wall again. It flicks out like a wrist and smacks the drawbridge. Another poke and the drawbridge sheers off. Two hard swipes at the brace-posts bring the entire barrier to the ground. Months of work—the most formidable barricades the Free Bioregion could build—crumble like a child’s Popsicle-stick fort.
The beast rolls up to the trench and paws the rubble on the far side. It takes the excavator only a minute to scrape the logs from the destroyed wall and slide them into the moat. The treads of the machine roll over the filled trench and through the downed wall. Cascadians, their face paint running, pour like termites from a cracked-open mound. Some head for the road. Several turn on the invaders with arguments and pleas. Maidenhair starts chanting: “Think of what
you’re doing! There’s a better way!” Police from the convoy are everywhere, cuffing and forcing people to the ground.
The chant changes to shouts of, “Nonviolence! Nonviolence!”
Adam falls fast, taken down by an immense cop with rosacea so bad he looks like one of the painted ecowarriors. Fifty yards up the escarpment, Watchman get his knees clubbed from behind and slides down the scree on his blue-painted face. Only the lockdowns remain. The excavator slows its surge up the road. It reaches the first tripod and nudges at the base with its claw. The tripod wobbles. Officers turn from their mopping-up to watch. Up in her crow’s nest, Mulberry wraps her arms around the tops of the shaking pylons. Each slap of the claw against the cone’s base flings her around like a crash dummy.
Adam yells, “Jesus. Quit!”
Others pick up the yell—people on both sides of the battle. Even Doug, from his bed in the road. “Meem. It’s over. Come down.”
The claw slaps at the teepee’s base. The three trunks forming the frame groan and bend. An awful creak, and one of the poles cracks. The crack starts a hundred rings deep in the cylinder of lignin and opens outward. The fir rips, tearing off the top of the pole into a punji stake.
Mimi screams, and her crow’s nest falls. The torn pole impales her cheekbone. She bounces off the spike and topples, riding the wood down and bouncing off a rock at the bottom. Douglas releases himself from lockdown and runs toward her. The driver of the excavator yanks the claw away in horror, like a palm protesting its innocence. But the backhand swings into the child clown, who takes the force of the retracting claw and crumples like a string-snipped marionette.
The war for Earth stops. Both sides rush to the wounded. Mimi shrieks and clutches her face. Douglas lies unconscious. Police run down to the caravan and call in the injuries. The dazed citizens of the collapsed Free Bioregion huddle in horror. Mimi rolls on her side in a fetal curl and opens her eyes. Trees in shades from jade to aquamarine skewer the sky. Look the color, she thinks, then passes out.
ADAM FINDS Maidenhair and Watchman in the milling crowd, surveying the losses. Maidenhair points up the rise at the four insurgent women still lying across the road, locked down into the ground. “We haven’t lost yet.”
Adam says, “We have.”
“They won’t dare take these trees now. After the press gets wind of this.”
“They will.” These and all the remaining ancients, until all forests are housing tracts or farms.
Maidenhair shakes her dirty tresses. “Those women can stay locked down until Washington acts.”
Adam catches Watchman’s eye. The truth is too brutal for even him to say.
A HELICOPTER AIRLIFTS the wounded to the level two trauma center in Bend. Douglas undergoes immediate surgery for a Le Fort III maxillary fracture. Mimi gets her ankle shoved back into place and her blown-out orbit patched. The ER doctors can do little for the trench across her cheek but sew it together until such a day as plastic surgeons might rebuild it.
The Freddies press no charges against the squatters. Only the last four women, who hold out for another thirty-six hours, are jailed. Then the remaining residents of the Free Bioregion of Cascadia leave the hillside and the extraction of wealth resumes.
And yet, and still: twenty-eight days later, a machine shed filled with vehicles in the Willamette National Forest goes up in flames.
IT ISN’T REAL. It’s no more than theater, a simulation, until they see the aftermath.
The newspapers run a photo: a fireman and two rangers inspecting a charred excavator. Five people pass the photo around Mimi Ma’s dining room table. A thought joins them, underground, as thoughts do so often now. Holy fuck. That’s us.
For a long time, there is no need for words. The shared mood swings like a volatile stock. But it settles into a passive defiance. “They’ve gotten as good as they give,” Mimi says. The twenty-two stiches in her face make each word sting. “We’re even.”
Adam can’t bear to look at her, or at Douglas, either, his face another bandaged mess. Adam, too, wanted this revenge against equipment that half blinded one of them and deformed another. Payback against the sadism of men. Now he doesn’t know what he wants or how to get it.
“Actually,” Nick says, “they’re still way ahead.”
IT’S A SINGLE ACT of desperation. But the need for justice is like ownership or love. Feeding it only makes it grow. Two weeks after the machine shed, they target a sawmill near Solace, California, operating for months under a revoked license and paying the nuisance fine with a week’s worth of profits. The woman who hears voices says how the attack must go. The trained observer does the stakeout. The engineer turns two dozen plastic milk jugs into explosive devices. The vet handles the detonation. The psychologist keeps them going. Deadly machinery burns better than any of them expected. This time they leave a message scrawled on the side of a nearby warehouse, spared because it’s filled with blameless timber. The letters are artful, almost florid:
NO TO THE SUICIDE ECONOMY YES TO REAL GROWTH
They sit hunched around Mulberry’s table as if they’re about to deal a hand of cards. Philosophy and other fine distinctions can’t help them now. A line has been crossed, the job is done; words are of no consequence. And still they can’t stop talking, although the sentences are never long. Still debating, when their argument’s conclusion has long since disappeared in the rearview mirror of their delivery van.
Adam watches his fellow arsonists, taking mental notes despite himself. Mulberry chops the air in slow motion. She lands the blade edge on a precise point in her open palm. “I feel like I’ve been at a continuous funeral for two years.”
“Ever since the blinders came off,” the child clown agrees.
“All the protests. All the letters. Getting beat up. Shouting at the top of our lungs, and no one hearing.”
“We accomplished more in two nights than we did with years of effort.”
Accomplishment is not something Adam knows how to measure anymore. What they’re doing—what he has done—is simply to make the pain stop long enough to bear.
Mimi says, “It’s not a funeral anymore.”
“Not a hard choice,” Nick says. His voice falls quiet, astonished by the ambush of common sense. “We destroy a small amount of equipment, or that equipment destroys a huge amount of life.”
The psychologist listens. There are other, much deeper deceptions at the heart of humans. He has thrown in his lot with the need to save what can be saved. A little time must be bought from the approaching apocalypse. Nothing else matters more than that. His thesis has its answer.
Olivia needs only lower her chin and the others fall silent. Her spell over them has grown with each crime. She has put her hand on a cut stump as big as a chapel. She has watched a forest die that was older than her species. She has taken advice from things larger than man. “If we’re wrong, we pay the price. They can’t take more than our lives. But if we’re right?” She casts her eyes downward in a shaft of thought. “And everything alive tells me that we are . . .”
No one needs her to complete the thought. What wouldn’t a person do, to help the most wondrous products of four billion years of creation? In the time it takes for Adam to think this thought, he realizes something else: The five of them are going on another run. One more. It must be the last. Then they’ll go their separate ways, having done what little they could to stop the race from killing itself.
ADAM HIMSELF DISCOVERS the story: “Forest Service Seeks Multi-Use Projects.” Thousands of acres of public lands in Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Colorado, offered for lease to private speculators and developers. Forests cleared for more end-time profit. The group hears the report in silence. There’s no need even to put the matter to a vote.
There are no letters or emails, and almost no calls. They communicate face-to-face or not at all. They live on cash. Nothing is written down. Mulberry’s engineering grows more sophisticated. She starts in on her best work by far, tipped by han
dmade underground tracts: The Four Rules of Arson. Setting Fires with Electrical Timers. The new design is more reliable. Maple and Doug-fir drive as far as fifty miles away to get her the needed supplies.
Watchman and Maidenhair surveil one of the newly leased sites—Stormcastle, in Idaho, in the Bitterroots, near the Montana border. Healthy chunks of public forest sold off to make way for yet another four-season resort. They make the journey and tour the site at night, when the place is abandoned. The artist sketches everything—the newly cut roadbeds, the equipment sheds and construction trailers, the footprint of the resort’s fresh foundations. There is zeal in his perfect sketches, and humility. While he draws, the actuarial-science dropout wanders the cleared ground, pacing out distances between survey stakes. She tilts her head, listening.
All five of them work in Mulberry’s garage, under a fume tent, in full-body painter suits and gloves. They assemble cascades of five-gallon fuel buckets and timer devices in plastic Tupperware. They mark on Watchman’s maps where each of the devices must go to create the most sustainable burn. They’ll send this one last message and be done. Then they’ll split up, fade back into invisible routine, having gotten the country’s attention. Appealed to the consciences of millions. Planted a seed, the kind that needs fire to open.
EVERYTHING GOES INTO the back of their van. By the time Mulberry’s garage door rises and they edge out, it’s like they’re headed toward the mountains for camping and a hike. They pack a police scanner. Gloves and balaclava masks for all. They’re all dressed in black. They leave Western Oregon in early morning. Any accident as they cruise down the interstate and the van will ignite in a massive fireball.
In the van, they chatter and watch the scenery. They pass through long stretches of Potemkin forest, vista curtains only a few feet deep. Doug produces a book of trivia questions and quizzes the others on the Revolutionary and Civil wars. Adam wins. They bird-watch—raptors along the highway’s corridor of small-mammal carnage. Two hours in, Mimi spots a bald eagle with a seven-foot wingspan. It hushes everyone.
The Overstory Page 37