T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

"And this" — Teo was grinning, squatting over his big calves to rummage through his backpack and produce a scuffed rag of leather that looked like a deflated volleyball- "is a deflated volleyball. All you have to do is stuff it in the pipe, inflate the piss out of it and toss some debris up against it for camouflage. Soon as the water starts to flow-goodbye, road."

"Perfect for ten- or twelve-inch pipe," Andrea added. She was in a pair of khaki shorts and a T-shirt, her legs and arms tanned the color of iced tea, plastic wraparounds for sunglasses, Angels cap askew, halo and all. This was her hiker's disguise-that and the map in her hand — and she stood at the edge of the road shuffling her feet and grinning as Teo produced a bicycle pump and bent to his work. "Of course," she continued, "for bigger pipe we use a drill and those little eye screws? You know what I mean, Ty — the kind of thing you use for hanging plants? You just screw four of them in, or maybe six, depending, and then stretch some chicken wire across the gap:'" Right, and for really big pipe, pipe you can walk through" — Teo was off the road now, down in the gully, wedging the ball deep into the culvert- "you use a pickax, just punch holes in the bottom of the thing, I mean really tear it up, because eventually the water 'Il seep in underneath and undermine the whole business."

"It's really pretty easy," Andrea said. She was enjoying this, a little field trip, she the professor and Tierwater the student. Call it Ecodefense 101, or Monkeywrenching for the Beginner.

Teo's face, peering up from the culvert, a grin to match hers, the sun glancing off the shaven dome of his head: "Not to mention fun. You're having fun, aren't you, Ty?"

"I don't know-am I? What if somebody comes, what then?"

"We're hikers, Ty, that's all," Andrea said. "Here, look at my map. Besides which, there's nobody within ten miles of us, and all the loggers are hunkered around watching the game-"

"What game?" Tierwater said. "Is there a game on today?"

"There's always a game, football, basketball, hockey, championship bowling, whatever — and they're all watching it and getting liquored up so they can go out on the town and get into a brawl someplace. We don't even exist. And nobody 'Il know about this till spring runoff."

Fine. But would it save the forest? And beyond that, would it save the world? Or would it only serve to provoke the timber company all the more, like the Oregon fiasco? Where had that gotten them? What had that saved? Even the press was bad, portraying Tierwater as a subspecies of violent lunatic (two of the flattopped kid's teeth had been knocked loose, and the building inspector claimed he'd suffered a bruised windpipe), and Earth Forever! As a collection of unhinged radicals dedicated to killing jobs and destroying the economy. Still, as he shouldered his pack and moved on up the road, Tierwater understood that he didn't care, not about the press or the organization or the trees or anything else: all he cared about now was destruction.

"You see, Ty, what I wanted to tell you is you're in a unique position." Teo shifted his own pack with a twist of his shoulders and took two quick steps to catch up. "My hands are tied — I mean, they're watching me day and night, phones tapped, the works — but you're Tom Drinkwater now, you're nobody, and you can have all the fun you want. Right here, for instance, where the road narrows by that bend up there? See it? Perfect place for a spikeboard."

"What's a spikeboard?"

"Maybe a four-foot length of two-by-four, studded with sawed-off pieces of rebar, set at a forty-five degree angle. You anchor the thing in the road with two L-shaped strips of the same rebar-invaluable stuff, really, you'd be surprised-maybe a foot and a half, two feet long, so the board doesn't shift when they run over it. Then you just kick some dirt on top of it and it's practically invisible?'

Andrea, loping along, all stride and motion, hands swinging, eyes electric with excitement: "That slows them down all right." She let out a barely contained whinny of a laugh that rode up into the trees and startled the whole world into silence. And then Teo laughed along with her — a soft nasal snicker that sounded as if someone were drowning a cat — and Tierwater joined in too.

An hour later they arrived at their destination, a bald spot carved out of the mountain at the end of the road. On one side was the unbroken line of shadow that was the forest; on the other there was nothing but a dome of rock and debris that fell away into the valley below. There were machines everywhere, naked steel and scuffed paint glinting in the sun. It was dry underfoot, the duff scattered and pulverized, crushed twigs poking out of the soil like bones, dust like a second skin. In the center of the bald spot, a thin coil of smoke twisted up into the air where a heap of charred branches, crushed pine cones and other debris had been swept up by the Cats and left to smolder over the weekend.

They scouted the place as thoroughly as they could from the cover of the trees, then stepped out into the open. "Don't worry, Ty, we're only hikers, remember?" Andrea said. "And it's not like we're trespassing. This is still the Sequoia National Forest, and whether the Freddies would admit it or not, we have as much right to be here as the-what does that say on the loader over there? Can you read that?"

"Cross Creek Timber Co.," Teo read.

"Right-as the Cross Creek Timber Company."

They walked right up to the machines, Teo and Andrea alternately lecturing about the most effective way to disable them, pointing out the salient features of a Clark scraper, a shovel loader and a pair of Kenmore log trucks parked nose to tail at the mouth of the road. Tierwater didn't like being out in the open in broad daylight, even if there was no one around. He kept looking over his shoulder, expecting to catch the quick glint of the sun flashing off a pair of binoculars from the cover of a blind, or worse — a couple of forest rangers, with sidearms, ambling across the burned-over field. Or cops. Or FBI agents. And this was yet another movie, and he the reluctant star of it. What did FBI agents look like? Robert Stack? Tommy Lee Jones?

"See, they burn it over to put something back in the soil," Teo was saying, squatting to sift the blackened dirt through his fingers. "Gets rid of the debris too. Then they come in and plant in their neat rows and twenty more acres of old growth become a plantation."

They were in the shadow of the shovel loader, a big crane-like thing that heaved the logs up onto the trucks once the Cats had knocked them down and the trimmers had removed the branches. Andrea slipped on a pair of cheap cotton gloves and unscrewed the filler cap on the crankcase. "Right here, Ty-this is where you pour the sand, tonight, when it's dark. Medium-grit silicon carbide is even better, but obviously we're not going to haul anything extra all the way out here. And don't forget your boots."

All three of them, at Teo's insistence, had slipped sweat-socks over their hiking boots before they emerged from the woods-to cover up the waffle pattern on the soles. It was daylight, and they were hikers-only hikers, nothing but hikers — but they were taking no chances. "I won't," Tier-water promised. "But I tell you, I don't know if I can wait till dark. I'm here, the machines are here, the fucking artificial pines are down the road — I wouldn't mind torching the whole business, plantation, Cats, the whole flicking thing."

"I know, Ty," Andrea said, and her hand was on his arm, a gentle hand, a persuasive hand, a wifely hand that spoke volumes with a squeeze, "but you won't."

When the lesson was over for the day, the three of them retired to a creek bed half a mile away and Andrea spread out a picnic lunch-smoked-duck sausage, Asiago cheese, artichoke hearts, fresh tomatoes and baguettes, replete with a stream-chilled bottle of Orvieto. They drank a toast to Tier-water's first covert action-coming action, that is — and then Andrea and Teo shouldered their packs and headed up the streambed to the trail that would, in three hours' time, take them back to Ratchiss' cabin. And Tierwater? He settled in to feel the sun on his face, read a book, watch the sky and wait till the day closed down and the moon rose up over the bald spot on the mountain.