Ron Huber describes an effort to save a thousand year old Douglas Fir from being cut down in Oregon in June 1985. Based on his account of the incident written in Linn County jail on jailhouse stationary.
THE BATTLE FOR MILLENIUM GROVE
by Ron Huber July 1985
( First published in a slightly different form in the Earth
First! Journal, Vol. 5, #7 as "Battle for millenium grove, giant crane
attacks tree sitter"
Part One
With a WHOOSH-CRACK!! a great old Dougas Fir swatted the earth, exploding apart before my eyes. The mighty limbs, torn to pieces, sprayed about like roadkill viscera, much to the delight of a small mob of Freddies. They turned toward each other, smirking, and I roared into the shocked air. Their pale oval faces turned up toward me. From eighty feet in the air, Freddies (US Forest Service agents) look like boy scouts.
I gave the assembled brownshirts the appropriate digital salute and hurled a grapple into the upper reaches of my neighbor, a cedar.
The grapple, a pair of spikes knotted together on the end of a long anchor rope, flew twenty feet and fell across a thick cedar branch. I tugged the rope and the grapple snugged into the crotch of branch and trunk. I gave it a hard yank
- -nope, it wouldn't break loose....
Quickly, I lashed the end of the grapple line to my platform's suspension rope.
"Hey, Freds!" The four boy scout faces skewed back toward me: Carla Jones, Freddess investigator/federal agent; Jim Christiansen, Eugene special agent-in charge and treespiking investigator (looks like George Bush); Dale Wilson, USFS fire management officer, and a weathered ranger I knew as Dick Olsen. "Cut this tree here," I pointed to my anchored neighbor, the cedar, "and this platform's gonna bite the dust!"
The Freddies gaped. The Battle for Millenium Grove was on.
Willamette Industries, a major forest killer with headquarters in Portland had been taking advantage of the new Reagan Administration political climate by putting hundreds of acres of wild forest to death, grinding ancient forest giants into pulp for brown paper bags, middle aged trees into 2 X 4s and plywood, and the young into poles and pulp chips.
Like other cancers, Willamette Industries is spreading. From a small outfit in the Oregon Coastal Range, the company has metastasized across Oregon and into Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Louisiana. Willamette owns 224,000 acres of Oregon forest and a slightly larger amount in the southern states.
One of the big powers of Oregon, its corporate interlocks include First Interstate Bank of Oregon, Tektronix, Standard Insurance Company, Pendleton Woolen Mills, Pacific Power & Light, Oregon Portland Cement, NW Energy Company, Flight Dynamics, and Northwest Natural Gas, among others.
Marketing 10% of all particleboard and 6% of all plywood sold in America, the Willies were posting hefty profits for the first and second quarters of 1985. William Swindells, president, CEO and chairman of the board of Willamette Industries, awarded himself a hefty pay raise, upping his salary from $340,000 to a more respectable $375,000 a year.
=============================================
DRYGULCHED.
The Freddies had caught Earth First! with its pants down. Five days into
this action, the half dozen other tree climbers elected to abandon their
platforms, which spread in a net across the towering douglas firs in this
"Squaw Three" timber sale site that was threatened with imminent death.
Much against my pleading off they went on a beer & resupply foray into
Corvallis--more than 50 miles away. A single elfin ground support
person stayed behind.
I couldn't believe that the others would leave their charges undefended; True, it was late Friday afternoon, and the freddies and loggers had left hours earlier. But the memory of Jakubal sheepishly re-appearing, treeshorn, in the support camp, weeks earlier, was too vivid for me to yield to the urgings of the others that I join them.
Sure enough, in less than an hour, a logging foreman, a fed and two county sheriffs drove up. While I bantered with this attentive audience, making mock CB calls to my long departed affinity group with my walkie talkie, I franticly knotted together grapples to try to tie off neighboring trees to my platform, rendering them, I hoped, uncuttable. The first one snagged, held.
I swung another grapple at a nearby tree. Missed. Swore as the spikes slipped off the rope's end and fell to the ground. "Just don't make grapples like they used to" I said to my audience of feds and deputies
Five loggers arrived in a crummy. Furious at the others' stupidity I could do little but rail at the assembled death squad.
"You motherfuckers....Got all the forces of the state out protecting you loggers today huh?" I taunted them. "Fucking pansies."
They ignored me.
You greedy bastards!" I shouted. "These trees were old when fucking Columbus was here!"
"God dang it", I muttered, "I tell you, if we ran an operation as well as you guys do you'd never cut these trees."
Just then a chainsaw lit off, biting into the first of the empty platformed trees.
Finally I succeeded in grappeling a second tree. "YeeHaa", I yelled. "That's two down and twenty more to go!"
But the banshee howl of the chainsaw was joined by a second one, the two sounds sobbing together in a weird moaning hell-symphony as the saw operators wielded their fell tools.
"Listen to the bastards....
Suddenly, a pair of tree killers were at the base of my friend the cedar. "Yee HAW!" one of them crowed, waving the five foot blade of his Stihl chainsaw with anticipation.
"Okay Freds!" I shouted over at the clot of deForest Servicers. They swung around toward me, as the saw belched and roared below, I gave the rope knotting my platform to my neighbor tree a tug.
You are killing the lungs of the world!" I shouted into the snarling noise of the saw. The logger stabbed my friend in the belly hacking a wedge out of her. She began swaying.
I'd already cleared the deck of my platform. When the terrible moment came at last and the cedar began to fall, my grapple rope held her for a second or two, transmitting her death throes to my tree via the platform.
"See you in the next world," I told her, as my platform reared to vertical from the strain of her weight.
The rope parted. My treeship heeled back to level as the cedar slammed to earth.
"Fuck you!" I yelled, shaken.
In the space suddenly cleared by the cedar's deathdive, the young face of the tree killer appeared. He was a lankhaired blond fellow, with red suspenders hitching up his raggedy edged pants. He tilted back his helmet, peered upwards and said in mock surprise, "Hey, its a cowboy."
His buddy (they work in pairs, these Willie loggers) cracked a laugh and said, "Hey, you had your chance to come down..."
The first cutter restarted his saw and swung his blade against my tree. Deputy Sheriff Dave Freeman, honest Big Red, who had toted Earth First heavyweight (in both senses of the word. Mike Roselle to a sheriff's Blazer a month earlier during the first tree sitting action on Pyramid Creek, had just left for the day, leaving me and the trees at the mercy of the Freds & Willies.
Suddenly it wasn't all that hilarious in the big woods, with the cruel eyes of the federales and the parachute jokes of the whooping loggers bringing a sinking feeling in my gut.
"Wilson!" I shouted. The USFS fire management officer couldn't hear me over the saw's racket, but he was already watching, eyes wide with fascination.. A couple of weeks ago we'd been discussing fire safety in his Sweet Home Ranger District office, joshing each other about silent agitators. Now.... ?
I pointed at the logger buzzing away at the base of my tree, made the cut-throat sign and hefted a heavy jar of corn nuts significantly. Wilson shrugged helplessly. Carla Jones flicked her eyes approvingly from me to chainsaw and back, while Christiansen was enjoying the sight of a huge tree being killed on the other side of the clearcut by another pair of fellers. Dick Olsen's expression was somber. He looked ashamed of his cronies.
My escape tower had been my neighbor the cedar, and she was down there already. The trees to which my platform was lashed were twenty feet away, one hell of a jump... Did I really trust those grapple ropes? Visions of Tarzan....
The logger's tin helmet winked in the brilliant sunshine as he came around my tree, his blade gouging treeflesh.
It was an easy shot: eighty feet down with a slight southwesterly breeze. I could definitely put the SOB away.... if he kept cutting my tree. What would CFAG (The Cathedral Forest Action Group) think if I offed him?
They'd be pissed....fuck'em. I ain't gonna let him take this tree down!
I cocked my arm, ranged him for the last time, shot a quick look at Wilson - his earnest mustached face was tight with tension. Hanta yo, bitch, I thought, and turned to deal with the logger below......
But he was now gutting my downed neighbor, bucking off her yet-living limbs on the now sunny forest floor. His buddy sat on a rotten log smoking a cigarette in the tinder dry forest.
Jesus Christ, I was probably safe. I set down the jar of cornuts, took a slug of oversweetened coffee (Hayduke's right - energy!) The saws below sputtered to silence. One PM! Fire regulations said no more logging today.
"Hey Carla," I said, feeling brave again. "You oughta go check that logger's cigarette ashes over there. He might have started a fire, you know."
She shook her head as if to bring herself back from a dream. "Uh...I don't do cigarettes. Not my department."
The Freddies, the logging foremen, and the firewatch gathered around the back of one pickup, smiling, satiated by the orgy of destruction they'd just been privileged to watch.
The loggers wordlessly climbed into the back of their crummy. "Really good, y'all," I told them. Just look at all those dead trees. History is going to piss all over you for messing up this wilderness."
Smug over their partial victory, they ignored me and toyed with a new twin mufflered saw.
They all left, finally, in a stinking convoy bumping over the crudely bulldozed road away from the roadless area. I yelled after them, "Multiple use! Sustained yield!" and checked my harness. I held a safety meeting with myself.
The firewatch stayed. He was troubled, but thoughtful. "You gonna stay up there?"
I shrugged, looked around at the thousands of still living trees thriving in the clear mountain air, then down at the , grotesque tangle of dying forest below my platform.
"I guess so. Yes. In fact, definitely!"
"Got food?"
"Lots. And you know what?"
"What?"
"Earth First! takes care of its own."
"They better hurry."
"They will."
ALLIES.
For weeks, Earth First!ers from Texas, New Mexico, Maryland,
Virginia, California, Oregon and Washington resupplied and
spelled one another. Running resupply at carefully random
intervals, from 2am to high noon, they succeeded in keeping
the trees occupied and safe from saws. The police prowled about
and occasionally busted unwary closure violators.
A sneak attack by the Willies took the lives of a large percentage of the protected trees, but the savagery of the attack, in which a logging truck loader operator wielded a log like a baseball bat to beat at the occupied trees and their attached ropes, has left Willamette Industries open to charges of reckless endangerment.
Depositions have been taken and already the Freddies and Willies are showing signs of cracking - the Cathedral Forest Action Group's Sheep Creek Sanctuary twenty five miles east of Sweet Home has been recognized by the Freddies as an ecological resource study area, or some such label, and thus NOT TO BE LOGGED.
Tree climbing definitely unnerves the Freds. In talks at the Sanctuary on July 22, District Ranger Lenny "Loose Lips" Lucero and his boss Mike "Cut'em down" Kerrick repeatedly begged us to cease tree climbing because of its hazard to life and limb. But they know the real danger is to their plans to de-forest the national forest
We expect as lot more platforms to be taking to the skies - over America. Happy Climbing!
ENDGAMES
The day of the main Freddie assault began quietly; another
vivid orange sunrise over Jumpoff Joe Mountain fading into the
hard crystal blue of the drought-ridden Oregon summer sky.
The now-diminished bird symphony, a prominent feature of arboreal life for the past many weeks, rose and fell. The light grew and the remaining forest settled into its day job: photosynthesis and pheromone communication, while hundreds of its dead and dying compatriots large and small steamed out their life fluids on the richly humus forest floor - now exposed to direct solar radiation for the first time.
I whispered a greeting to the rising sun and the newly awakened forest. Hardly a minute had passed when the air was shaken by internal combustion noise. Two pickups and a cherry picker pulled into the stand. I frantically cleared the deck for action, hanging my gear on spikes that I had previously driven into the tree.
"What was that, Christiansen?" I asked.
He was excitedly telling me in a triumphant but quavering voice that I might as well come down now. Then he remembered himself and informed me in graver tones that I was in violation of a federal closure order: "Will you obey the order and leave now?"
I told him I had no choice in the matter given the ongoing slaughter of the forest hereabouts. Besides, given the extraordinary drought conditions prevailing, an Earth First! firewatch was necessary to monitor conditions....
"There'll be no Earth First! firewatch!" The prospect seemed to frighten him. Earth First!ers here, and watching over the forest ...... Brrrr!
They backed the big yellow and white utility cherry picker towards me.
"Well, well, Christiansen," I said, "what's your boy gonna do when he gets up here? I've got some coffee, but he'll have to bring his own cup."
Christiansen squawked something, but my attention was taken by the bearded young fellow with spectacles who had clambered into the narrow cup at the top of the picker's arm. It was a two-person picker basket--with a space for me.....
"Well, let's get to it," I said. The picker's arm rose
into the air, the occupant deftly wafting himself past a hanging
banner toward me. I scrambled to my feet to meet him. He
stopped just out of range, as if to look my position over.before
rising up to me. We looked at each other....
"Too short. Can't reach him."
I hooted, sat back down with legs dangling over the platform, shouted, "Next?!"
The picker slunk off. I gave the loggers and cops credit for scaring the shit out of me, and gently mocked Christiansen: Why don't you call my mommy? 'Oh please Ronnie come on down!" The crew laughed and split.
All quieted down, some birds sang a few notes. My guests over at the support camp, fresh arrivals from Maryland and Utah, seemed kind of stunned by it all. I urged them to go get word out of the Freddie attack.
Finally Wenatchee, crow-cawed from the fireroad below and the elf's horn tooted: signal to turn on the CB walkie talkie Dael got his ears on, told them what was going on.
Other people began to appear. Down on the distant logging road, I could see...
...a whole row of parked Earth First!-mobiles! My heart soared. Allies! A convoy from the Round River Rendezvous. None too soon. But my mini-stand was surrounded with the invisible barriers of a federal micro-closure on my tree and its remaining compatriots; they had to stay at shouting distance.
Later in the day, far, far down the road, I could hear an eldritch howling like an angry implacable Midgard Serpent come to gnaw at the World Tree. Its moan echoed off Jumpoff Joe and Soapgrass Mountains. In the growing shriek, Deputy Dave Freeman drove up. He got out of his car and called to me.
"Ron, they're coming to take you down now, so don't do anything to put yourself or us at the risk of dying."
"Yeah, okay Dave," I told him as I knotted prussiks into loops for my boots. I hooked my climbing rope to a sling on a mighty branch above me and tugged it tight.
"Dooooooooom," howled the monster coming up Squaw Creek Road. "Dooooo0000000ooooom!" It was still a mile away. I yelled to the others. "It's coming!" They scrambled to good vantage points from beyond the cop closure zone around the tree and took out their cameras.
PARTY TIME!
A caravan of trucks rolled up, the servants of the noisy
beast, still far down the canyon. Christiansen hopped
out of his blue 4x4 station wagon and yelled "Come on down NOW,
Ron! Its all over. We've got a crane higher than your tree.
So just lower yourself down and spare yourself a struggle..."
"Hell, Christiansen, if they're bringing a crane, I can
get a free ride down anyhow. Right?"
I nervously checked and rechecked my ropes and cords. A brief covert "safety meeting" reassured me. I breathed deep and stretched. The curious Freddies, Willies and deputies , many of them clicking away with their cameras, watched like the opposing camp's cheerleaders.
The sinister howler finally hove into view: a telescoping crane atop an 18-wheeler body, with a tiny glassed-in cab. Christiansen was gaily skipping about with excitement. "See! See! It's bigger than your tree! Now come down and we'll give you a nice cold soda, eh?" -
It did look like the Midgard Serpent. Long and deadly, it crawled up the curving road through the clearcut, howling until I couldn't hear either my affinity group or the Freddies. Finally it was abreast of my tree.. It grunted one last time and quieted.
With a triumphant gleam in his.eye, one last chance to "skeedaddle."
"And if I don't?" I asked, swinging easily in the light airs on my floating platform. "Whatcha gonna do, good buddy?"
"We'll send someone up there to kick your ass!"
Deputy Freeman looked pained. He and Deputy Ives had been tapped for the honor of bringing me down.
"Remember the Middle Santiam!" I yelled back: The earth First!ers over in the forest cheered wildly. I grinned in spite of myself. This was funner than shit!
I tried to think of some more quotable lines, but then Ives and Foreman climbed into the crane cage and were raised toward me.
Be careful there, buddies." An idea occurred to me as the crane's
serpent head neared the tree, the two cops still far below in their box.
"Oh hell," I said, and tossed my last grappel rope (two patio nails knotted onto a rope's end) over and into the monster's pulley system. If it choked the cable the deputies would be stuck in midair; they'd have to call back the cherrypicker. If it just snagged on, I could tie the crane head off to my platform.keeping them, I hoped , from raising the deputies up to my level.
The grappel snagged, tangled, fell. "Look out!" I barked, frantically waving at the rope.
The cops looked surprised at the pair of spikes suddenly hanging in the air next to them
They backed off the crane arm a pinch and the deputies pulled the rope free.
The crane swung above me next, this time when the wrecking ball/hook came past me, I grabbed the cotter pin holding the cage secure. It was loose. I shook it, showed 'em I could snatch it off REAL EASY, and Ives frantically signaled the blond crane operator to move the thing away from me. I wouldn't have REALLY yanked it out. That'd've put my buddies Freeman and Ives in danger. No violence, here, folks.
They decided to rush me. The box was raised to my level and swung over at me!
Freeman grabbed at my platform, I entrusted myself to the fates and stepped off the platform, dangling 80 feet or so in the air only etrier stirrups and harness, and yanked hard at my playform's northern suspension lines.
Like a dream, the platform rose to vertical, interposing
itself between me and the grasping deputies. I had barred
the door on those bastards.
Quickly, I tied the platform upright: FORT MILLENIUM!
Their assault stymied, the deputies decided to parlay. We peeked over the edge of the sudden wall at each other and broke into silly, sweaty grins.
"Look here, Ron," Deputy Dave said, his knuckles clenched white around the bars of the crane cage. "here's what we're going to do: You come into the cage," (No way, Jose, I thought to myself, checking my prussiks) "and we'll go down to the ground."
"The Forest Service will cite you for being in a closed area", he said, "and I'll arrest you for criminal trespass You'll be released in Albany for $50. Your gear will be taken down safely."
"And the tree?" I asked, slapping her flank protectively. "They're going to kill her, right?"
Deputy Dave said, "Yeah, 'fraid so."
"Well, dang it, I'm not up here just for fun, you know."
"I know, I know," he said. Chris Ives, helmeted, watched me. Damn it, he was familiar with climbing gear, because when I "adjusted" my prussiks so's I could head for the branch above, he ratted on me to Dave, who got a hurt look on his sunglassed face.
I changed the subject. "Okay guys, about what you said, fed citation, criminal trespass my stuff taken down ...whatever happens, I gotta discuss it with my support crew." I waved over at them.
They whistled and howled back. Animals.
At first Dave wouldn't go for it. I told him we were an affinity group and I couldn't do anything without consulting them. He shrugged, resigned.
I yelled over to them and the wiseass crane jockey revved his engine, drowning out my voice.
I twisted around in my harness. "Shut that fucker down, you four-eyed sonofabitch!" I screeamed, and put a note of panic into my voice. Deputy Dave saw my gesture He turned to Chris, who flipped on his radio and spoke curtly into it.
The motor quickly revved down and shut off.
I hooted at my support folks and told them of the deputy sheriff's offer. They yelled back, "Have it put in writing!"
I flashed a V for Victory sign. More hoots filled the air and I roared back a grizz growl that echoed off Soapgrass Mountain up and down Squaw Creek. As the echo dissipated I noticed the deputies and others below gaping at me.
"That's a secret Earth First! code," I told them. They nodded seriously.
RACING THE SUNSET.
It took almost an hour to get Deputy Dave to write out
the list of promises. The sun was creeping toward the horizon
and he was clearly desperate to get me down before dark. He
even threw in and agreement to allow the Earth First!ers to
spirit away my platform and other stuff, without the Freddies
getting to paw through my belongings.
I looked at the list, which was scribbled on a 3 x 5 piece of paper. I waved it at the Earth First!ers and read it aloud. They conferred. "You might consider staying up there," they suggested.
The assembled law guys bristled. "That's easy for them to say, Ron," Deputy Dave said. Look. They're down there on the ground. This is just..."
"Like a movie?"
"Right!"
"Hey you guys!" I shouted over to the enviromeddlers, "Fuck you!"
Me and the cops laughed. Then Ives said, Yeah Ron, there are three people in trouble here: you me and Dave. None of us really want to be up here. I want to go home." He looked it, too, earnest face dripping sweat.
"Me, too, Ron," said Dave. "We been up since dawn." He looked at his watch. "it's 7:46. Let's cut out the games. "You have to come down and its my job to get you down. I don't particularly want to be up here, I want to be home with my wife. So let's have a decision here."
He put on a somber expression. Ives' face put on a poker expression, too. He added, "So we'll give you until 8 o'clock to think about it.
I swung around in my harness to the south where the Earth forces stood, while keeping the platform between me and the deputies. The sky was coloring toward rich red. The shadow of my tree fell across the clearcut over to the yet living forest as if my tree's spirit was leaving its body, blending into the rest of the trees.
I looked to the four directions: thousands of living trees held their arms high to the south and west; savagely scalped Sheep Creek was across the watershed to the north with Harter Mountain retaining a few stands like a Mohawk haircut. .
To the east, freshly shorn Squaw Creek's stacks of "PUM" (Piled Unutilizable Material) gave mute evidence of Unit 6's fate-to-be: Death of Yggdrassil and the neighboring tree to which it was cabled in order to support the Earth First! banner; dragging the dead tree bodies to the loading deck for transport to Willamette's pulp mills; bulldozing of the trees' leafy guts into crematorium pyres.
And finally, the firemen: like those in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, they would appear with tanks of kerosene on their backs to torch the unit, killing off the remaining bio sphere - the shrubs, the herbs, the fungi, insects, microbes, rodents and birds injured by the falling trees, thousands and thousands of organisms seared and choked to death so that a few years later the Freddies could have a tree farm planted which would replace the thousands of species organized into the entity of a living forest with a plantation of enslaved Doug fir clones. It was like replacing a wildlife refuge with a chicken coop. No way.
I waved Dave's note at my allies, then slowly, deliberately stuck a corner in my mouth, chewed until the whole note was in my mouth - a sodden inky blob of wood fiber. I spat it into my hand and launched into phase 2:
RONBO'S LAST STAND
With the sun heading for the western horizon, there was
little time remaining for the Fredskis to dawdle. It might
be possible to continue this curious standoff for some time.
A dark forest would be a safe forest for me but not for their clumsy mechanical beast. They'd have to retreat and another precious day of life might be gained for the tree.
Deputy Dave reiterated the note, and said I had to either hop into the cage or they'd come and get me. The sun, oblivious to my efforts or theirs, had sunk nearly to the forest rim to the west. It was getting to that now or never time. The deputies knew it.
"Ron, doggone it, you have got to come down from the tree. It's after 8 o'clock. I'll give you a few minutes, then you're coming down. With your cooperation or without it!
Grrr. I looked around at the forest which was just starting to unwind after a long day at the photosynthesis factory. A few early arrivals for the evening bird concert flapped uncertainly about.
"It's late, so late, little birdies," I told them. Their sharp little bird eyes glittered in anger.
I turned back to the waiting deputies. "See y'all upstairs." I stepped into my jury rigged etrier, my right hand already grasping the rough curve of Tree's skin.
"Deal's off!" Deputy Dave shouted, redfaced and angry. With a signal, the deputies bade the crane operator to move them in at me. The dull dragon head thrust crudely against Yggdrasil's canopy. Some smaller branches crunched.
"Get away from here!" I shouted. "The branch! That thing's breaking the branch!" I gestured wildly. Deputy Dave shot a quick look up at it, but then his gloved hand shot out and caught me by my waving arm.
"Hey!" I yelped, tugging free from his grip, but that sent one of my boots over near Deputy Ives, who snatched at it, but couldn't hold it without abandoning his grip on the cage he was in.
We all groped around like that for a few minutes, getting a little breathless as we experimented with the outer fringes of nonviolence. Finally Ives got a bearhug around me from behind. I had my legs firmly wedged under their cage, however, and he physically couldn't pull me up and into it.
"Don't scratch," Dave ordered, for Ives and I were cheek to cheek."Hey, no problem, Dave," I told him, almost indignant. "I mean, we're buddies, kinda."
It was strangely true. After months of occasional contacts and our previous meeting up in the Pyramid Creek area, I was getting to like these mountain deputies. Hardly a mean bone in their bodies. Not like those flatland cops in the Santiam last year dragging protesters around by the beard and hair. Ives held on to me with his bear hug while Freeman tried unsuccessfully to dislodge my boots from below their cage.
Then he brought out his knife. I tried to twist away from Ives, but that only let him get better leverage. Freeman reached over the yawning gulf with his Swiss Army knife and WHIM slashed an etrier. Ives forced a cop carabiner at my harness.
I steered him into putting it on my 8-ring rappelling aid, which I could jettison in an emergency.
But my etrier! He was already after the one looped over my left boot. I danced my leg around but still he got it - sliced it through! I was squirming, trying to slide my sweaty body around to face my attackers. Hard going. We were all cussing with effort.
"Shit!"
"Goddammit, Ron!"
"Get the hell out of this tree! Go! Go!"
"I've got to piss!" That was a good one to yell, because Ives laughed and said, "me, too!"
Big Red Freeman chuckled, but then the treacherous fellow whipped out the steel handcuffs and tried to slap-cuff my wrist.
"Cheaters!" I yelled flapping my arm around. He missed.
Then Ives relaxed his bear hug and locked my thumb back.
He held me steady as Freeman tried again - and got the cuff over my wrist. Click. He hooked the other cuff to a cage stanchion.
Gotcha!
But I wasn't giving up that easily. I was still three- fourths outside their damn box and if I could rehook around another loop in my jury rigged etrier....could still stalemate things...sunset coming fast...already set down there on the ground.....
But the deputies, trained professionals, were apparently used to dealing with cuffed crazies. One of them grabbed me by the hair to pull me in.
"Aha!", I yelled. "Just like the Middle Santiam!", referring to a recent incident where another deputy sheriff had torn out a great hank of hair and some of the scalp from a nonviolent sit-in logging road blockader's head while trying to pull him off the road by his ponytail.
He released my hair. I managed to keep my body from the waist down out of the cage, with my ass wedged against the upper stanchion. They tried to pull me in my brute force, but it made the stanchion cut into my back. My outraged screams quickly convinced them that further yanks would be dangerous.
"Damn! Lower the crane a little," Freeman told Ives to tell the crane operator, but when Ives looked down he saw the crane operator out of his seat watching with his wife and daughter whom he had brought along, like this was an adventure movie.
Deputy Dave almost blew a gasket. Livid with rage, he ordered the crane driver back into his seat and told him in no uncertain terms, "Don't get out of that seat!" "Asshole," he mumbled, wiping sweat from his eyes.
"Real chickenshit outfit down there," I agreed.
The crane lowered us a hair and the deputies cut another
of my safety lines. I was now two-thirds in the box, but was
still hooked by my last line that ran directly to the tree from
my belly. Dave grabbed it and brandished his knife. Terrible
moment!
"Don't do it, Dave," I pleaded, but he swiped and the thin sharp blade cut my lifeline like butter. Ives waved the crane down, and Yggdrasil seemed to rise above us, as though she was standing up. Her branches gleamed in the last golden rays of sunlight as we in the steel box descended into the shadows, my legs waving goodbye to one swell tree.
When we hit the ground, Christensen and the other Fred, Dick Olsen, crowded around and they all yanked away bits of sliced etrier and strap, cut off my harness and unsnapped the cuff from the stanchion. My feet hit the ground and I, winking to the deputies, fell forward like a stiff. Christensen and Olsen held me up, then Deputy Dave scrambled out of the cage and half carried me away from it. He lowered me to the fine dry dust, formerly living humus, that covered the ground below Yggdrasil. I kissed a piece of broken wood in the dust. "Howdy, earth!"
The loggers laughed, Freeman searched me(didn't find the little baggie of pot in my crotch). Christensen went up in the crane to retrieve my stuff. With my hands cuffed behind, Freeman put me in the passenger's seat of his Blazer.
Then he went over and hung out with Ives, both of them cracking huge smiles of relief and gulping down Sprites. Christensen carefully retrieved my gear and it was all carried past by a succession of Willies and Freddies - guitar, duffel, crapsack, grapple, sleeping bag, other junk - all going into the Fred Wagon. Thieves.
"I read your journal." commented one young Willie, a road staker. "You need to improve your punctuation."
"Keep the hell out of my stuff!" I told him. "Dave, hey Dave!"
"Yessir." The deputy appeared from where he'd been shooting the shit with the others.
I told him I didn't want this guy or others stealing my diary or other stuff, and he went off to take care of it.
Then the loggers got out saws.
"I'll give you a thousand bucks if you leave that saw off," I told them. The deputy rolled my window shut.
While their attention turned to the slaying of my trees I managed to shake the baggie down my pants leg to the floor and kicked it under the seat.
They assaulted the unoccupied smaller tree first. I started smelling treeblood through the still-open vent window. Then there was the awful tap of the wedges, and it fell. WHACK!
"Murderers!" I yelled through the vent. The young mother looked surprised: Who, me?
Then the loggers walked up to my tree. One of them had a saw on his shoulder, the other had ax and plastic wedges. They ignored my catcalls and headed to Yggdrasil, who stood there, impassive, magnificent, a green goddess with scratchy skin.
One logger solemnly raised his ax handle and measured her tilt.
"If he cuts you, fall on them," I telezapped Her.
It began.
The sawman huddled at her feet, but it was not in prayer that he knelt there, his face hidden from view like a penitent at the confessional.
GET ...AWAY...FROM..THAT...TREE!" I was getting downright stentorian because the sonofabitch was actually biting his metal thing right into Her! Slitting her guts like a carrot.
But she stood there, stoic as a flaming Vietnamese monk, and even when the second logger began tocking at his cruel wedge, she remained motionless, despite being girdled and wedged, despite the incredible shock to her circulatory and electrochemical systems from being chainsawed.
Forest fall. Some presence seemed to slip through the very fabric of the air. The squat logger had risen, and Yggdrasil took a step to the northeast and cast herself to Earth.
-Ron Huber
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