T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

I'm watching Delbert Sakapathian's face. His expression says, Shit and die, all of you, you fools on a hill, you animal lovers and epicene rock stars; it says, I'm worth ten of you because I'm a human being still and you're just things in a cage. Chuy gives me a look. The two Als brace themselves. And that is the precise moment when Lily appears.

The noise she emits — a low chuff of warning or surprise-is so faint as to be barely audible over the sibilance of the rain, and anybody who hasn't watched her eat, sleep and scratch round her pen for ten years probably wouldn't have recognized it as an animal vocalization at all. I turn my head. That's all-just turn it, a simple flexion and release of the appropriate muscles — and Lily is gone, a brownish streak, black stripes, gray head, dodging past Delbert Sakapathian and the extruded old man to vanish into the storm.

For a moment, nobody moves. Then a breeze comes up, and that smell with it, and one of the tinfoil angels scratches its wings against the ceiling. That's when I step forward, not a word for Mac or Chuy or the two men standing on the doorstep. The doorknob is in my hand, the rain hissing like static, the smell of it, and then the door somehow swings closed till it hits the frame with a shivering thud.

And then? Then I bolt it.

A week later, I find myself sitting in front of a faux fire, rain spitting at the windows, April Wind crouched on a footstool at my feet with a tape recorder the size of a matchbox. She's wearing a denim dress with thin two-inch strips of material sewn randomly to it, fringed suede boots and a belt of what looks to be at least two boxes of Kleenex knotted together. The overall effect is of a big unfledged bird with buck teeth and a head too small for its body. Have I mentioned that I have no use for this whittled-down little stick of a woman? That I hate the past, have limited tolerance for the present and resent this or any other form of interrogation? That I'm sitting still for it for one reason only and that that reason is spelled A-n-d-r-e-a?

"So," April Wind breathes, setting the tape in motion with a practiced flick of her index finger, "tell me about the whole tree-sit thing, from the beginning, because I didn't join E. F.I Till after Sierra-well, till after she was already up there in the arms of Artemis. What I wanted to know is, whose idea was it-was she pushed into it by Teo? Or Rolfe? Or what's-his-name, Ratchiss?"

We're in the James Brown Room, surrounded by images of the Godfather of Soul, his sunken eyes, glistening pompadour and thrusting chin replicated over and over till the walls seem to shift like the walls of a planetarium and his multiplied eyes become the stars in the sky. It's quite a trope, I know, but then I'm suffering from indigestion, the gauze mask is like a smotherer's hand clamped over my mouth and my mind is already playing tricks on me. Papa's got a brand new bag, oh, yes, indeed.

"Or was this her own thing, something spontaneous, something she just had to do? For love of the earth, I mean?"

I'm fumbling around for an answer, suddenly ambushed by an image of my daughter that's as palpable as the portrait of the Famous Flames leering at me from the place of honor over the fireplace. She's twenty-one, long-limbed and lean, with the cleft chin she inherited from her mother and her mother's heat-seeking eyes, wearing running shoes, cut-off jeans and a thermal T-shirt. Her hair is in a braid as thick as a hawser, and there's no trace of the makeup she used to baste herself with when she was fourteen and terminally angry. I see a whole tribe of tree-huggers and vegans and post-hip hippies gathered round her, pounding on bongos and congas, somebody playing a nose flute, the spice of marijuana in the air and the big ancient trees rising up out of the duff like the pillars that keep the sky from crashing down. It's the first day, the day of the ascension, and her feet are on the ground still. And me? I'm in the picture too. I'm there to see her off.

"Well?" April Wind wants to know.

I try to shrug, but the catch in my shoulders makes me wince. It's the weather. It makes me feel twenty years older than I already am. "For love, I guess."

"Nobody put any pressure on her? You didn't, did you?"

I shake my head, and even that hurts. Pressure her? I tried to talk her out of it, tried to remind her what peaceful protest had got us in the Siskiyou and the whole sorry downward spiral that had spun out of that, but of course she wouldn't listen. She was fresh from Teo's Action Camp, in love with the idea of heroic sacrifice and so imbued with the principles of Deep Ecology she insisted on the ethical treatment not only of plants and animals, but even rocks and dirt. "Rocky?" I said. "Dirt?" She just nodded. She was lit up in the glow of all that attention, the cynosure of the Movement, the sacrificial virgin who was going to dwell in a tree while the rest of them went home to their TVs and microwaves, and I looked into her eyes and barely recognized her.

"Everything in the ecosystem has its integrity," she assured me, leaning back against her tree and sipping a concoction of papaya, wheatgrass and yogurt from a glossy red plastic mug with the Earth Forever! Logo stamped on it (another of Teo's ideas, and he was a marketing genius, all right, never doubt that. If there was an angle, Teo would exploit it). "Really," she said, glancing up as the drummers shifted into another gear and the dancers swayed round the trees with their goat bells and tambourines ajingle, "it's not just about wolves and caribou and whooping cranes-it's about the whole earth. I mean, you have to think about what right do we have to dig up the ancient soil and disturb the fungus and microbes, the springtails and pill bugs and all the rest, because without them there'd be no soil, and we have even less right to manufacture and mutate things into new forms-"

"Like that mug in your hand," I said. "Or that shirt that's going to keep you warm tonight?'

"Compromises," she said, "everything's a compromise."

This was in December of 1997, just outside of Scotia, in Humboldt County, California. I was an ex-con at the time, a jailbird, an absentee father, a name on a card in the mail, and I hadn't seen much of her over the course of the past four years. I didn't want her up in that tree-Teo wanted her there, Andrea did, all the northern-California Earth Forever! Tribe and their ragtag constituency were clamoring for Abut I was there to give her my love, unconditionally, and to worry over her and maybe tug on the long cord that had bound us together through all the years of her life and convince her to let somebody else-some other virgin princess or square-jawed dragon-slayer-deliver themselves up to the enemy. I knew this: once she set foot in that tree, she was theirs.

Deep Ecology-Adat-says that all elements of a given environment are equal and that morally speaking no one of them has the right to dominate. We don't preserve the environment for the benefit of man, for progress, but for its own sake, because the whole world is a living organism and we are but a humble part of it. Try telling that to the Axxam Corporation when they're clear-cutting thousands of acres of old growth to pay down the junk-bond debt accrued in their hostile takeover of Coast Lumber, and you find yourself in a philosophical bind. They're going to cut, and Earth Forever! Is going to stop them, any way they can. Hence Sierra, up in the tree.

I hugged her to me, held her for as long as she could stand it. Then I pressed a knapsack full of granola bars, dried fruit, books and toilet paper on her, and walked away from her, through the crowd and into the trees. I couldn't afford to stick around for the denouement-all this noise was designed to bring on the goons, and all these people were going to jail — but I waited long enough, on the fringes, to watch them haul her up the tree to the platform that already awaited her, one hundred eighty feet above the ground.