‘Drop City’ by T. Coraghessan Boyle.

Photograph by Pablo Campos

Under Fire: Commune-goers have had dramatic reactions against T. C. Boyle’s ‘Drop City,’ but Boyle reserves the right to fictionalize historical events.

Good Old Daze

Were Sonoma County communes better than T. C. Boyle’s ‘Drop City’ might have you believe?

By Gretchen Giles

What if you owned a clean, easy stretch of land encompassing hundreds of green acres, sweet-water creeks, plenty of fruit trees, fertile soil, and a clear road to town? You’d open it to every comer, no questions asked, and deny its use to no single person even if, say, 400 strangers ended up building 100 shacks upon it with no ready sanitation, electricity, or running water–wouldn’t you? Furthermore, if the legal fees to defend such extravagant personal benevolence ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, you’d still do it–right?

Nearly shocking to contemplate some 30 years later, that’s exactly what Occidental painter William Wheeler did in fact do. It cost him his inheritance, lost him 20 years of his artistic career, and he would never ever do it again. But was it fun?

“Oh, yeah,” he laughs with a thick drawl. Wheeler’s Ranch, as his 320 acres of hillside ocean view is known, and the nearby former community of Morning Star Ranch find themselves newly fictionalized in author T. Coraghessan Boyle’s 15th novel, Drop City. Boyle’s single, smaller 47-acre parcel Drop City exists near Occidental in the ether of the author’s mind as a commune of the unwashed and underemployed who, in 1970, drop out of society and onto the land of Norm Sender.

Adopting Morning Star owner Lou Gottlieb’s own motto–Land Access to Which Is Denied No One (LATWIDNO)–the fictional Sender tells Marco, a hitchhiker he’s picked up on the road from Bolinas, “You want to come to Drop City, you want to turn on, tune in, drop out, and just live there on the land doing your own thing, whether that’s milking the goats or working the kitchen or the garden or doing repairs or skewering mule deer or just staring at the sky in all your contentment–and I don’t care who you are–you’re welcome, hello, everybody. . . .”

And so into Norm’s welcoming arms come hippies from the Haight-Ashbury, cool-cat “spades” who do nothing but drink wine all day, stoners, freaks, bikers, draft dodgers, runaways, aimless travelers with no destination in mind–the whole stinking drug-addled panoply of a suburban mother’s Nixon-era nightmare. Human feces coil behind every rock, toddlers are casually dosed with acid, a teenaged girl is raped to mild community consternation, the brown-rice mush is endless, and the Man just won’t leave them alone, man.

When the bulldozers finally arrive with warrants to tear down the temporary shacks, Quonset huts, tree houses, and lean-tos that compose Drop City’s rural metropolis, the denizens crowd into a bus and head north to Alaska, where fattened salmon and abundant blueberries encourage them to wreak chemically enhanced havoc upon the Promised Land and themselves. The book’s focus then shifts to Boyle’s imaginary town of Boynton, Alaska, and the steaming morass of Sonoma County’s Drop City is left far–and untidily–behind.

Ah, fiction. Were it only so simple. Were it only so crude.

Were it only just fiction.

Just the Facts

Writers are a treacherous lot, and the admonition to write about what you know often results in a print depiction of a real Molly transformed into a fictional Polly. Novelists’ family members grow gradually resigned to seeing that their relative’s latest work is more a veiled piece of intimate history than a work of imagination.

Boyle hardly bothers with the veil. Drop City was the name of a real commune in Colorado, and its North Bay location is an amalgam of Wheeler’s Ranch and Morning Star. He takes the interviewer’s loophole when asked if it’s merely a coincidence that the fictional Drop City patriarch Norm Sender’s surname is the same as Morning Star cofounder and actual person Ramon Sender’s.

“It’s more of a metaphoric choice than others,” Boyle assures by phone from his Santa Barbara home. He says that he’s spent “many summers up on the Russian River” and in fact hopes to spend a good, long, hot stretch of this coming summer here. Furthermore, Drop City is not the first work he’s set in this area. Budding Prospects, his third novel, is placed in the marijuana economy of Willits in Mendocino County.

But he doesn’t rely solely on outside inspiration. One of the novel’s two couples, Pan and Starr, hail from Peekskill, N.Y., as does Boyle. And he supplies the delicious–to hard-core fans–device of not only reintroducing his imaginary Alaskan town of Boynton, but of having his other couple, Pam and Suss, meet there in a kind of high-north wife auction, as in “Termination Dust,” the lead short story in his latest collection, After the Plague.

Drop City North, as the Boynton enclave is known, is founded just before the 1971 Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, in the last year allowing for that good old-fashioned homesteading, which is no longer legal. In an interview with the Columbus, Ohio, paper ThisWeek, Boyle mused, “You know, it’s just remarkable that such a thing ended in our time.”

What is perhaps as equally remarkable is that one generation of people was there to witness, participate in, and explode nearly every societal norm of the mid-20th century in just a few short years.

The Sweet Life: Sonoma County commune gurus Bill Wheeler (left) and Lou Gottlieb in a former incarnation.

Recent History

According to Ramon Sender, who is a composer and author as well as the administrator of the Noe Valley Ministry, the Virgin herself prompted the naming and founding of Morning Star Ranch. Lou Gottlieb, who died in 1996 and whom Sender describes as the “the standup bass funny guy” of the folk group the Limeliters, bought Morning Star from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s great-grandson, the poet John Beecher.

Beecher was a devout Catholic who lent the land for religious retreats, and the monks one day put all the many names of the Virgin into a bowl, intending to pull one out to name the land. Morning Star was the random pick, and Sender avers that the presence of the Virgin has informed the place ever since. He moved up there in the “apple blossom time of ’66.” By summer, Gottlieb and six others had joined him.

“What if you owned a piece of land and it suddenly became Lourdes?” Sender asks rhetorically. “How do you stem the flow, how do you deal with it?”

Sender himself tried to deal with it by posting such rules as “yoga at 8am, meditation at 9,” only to be laughably ignored by the growing procession of people who, alerted to Morning Star’s newly established community by the San Francisco-based group the Diggers, a coalition devoted to making food and housing free to everyone, began arriving each day on Gottlieb’s land.

“That whole summer of ’67 came down on us and it became obvious that it was going to be hard to control the flow of people,” Sender remembers. Gottlieb paid over $15,000 in fines (and that’s 1960s dollars) defending his right to welcome all comers, depleted his Limeliter royalties, and devoted almost more time to court appearances than idling away sunny afternoons in his orchard, including losing his bid to tithe the place to God. As the commune grew, sheriffs and health and building inspectors became as ubiquitous at Morning Star as the hippies themselves.

“We had some families with kids, but the environment became less and less conducive, especially because of the police, and the toilet situation was just out of control,” Sender says. “On that level, perhaps exaggerated by Boyle, he had a point.”

With county officials increasing their pressure on the Morning Star community, Bill Wheeler found himself called into history, stepping in to open his land when Morning Star faltered. “The reason that I did that was because I felt that it was the spirit of my generation, and I could not turn my back on what was happening, even though it created a certain amount of vulnerability for me,” he says by cell phone from his ranch, where he continues to live off the grid.

“The open-land movement was an aberration of those years and the Vietnam War and the craziness of our society back then,” Wheeler continues. “It was just crazy, there’s no way that it could continue to manifest itself. It worked in those days because there were so many people who were idealistic and loving, but there is so much criminality now that it would outweigh any kind of idealism and it would be impossible to do what we did back then now.

“But it was a lot of fun, and what was important to us was that there was a lot of art, there was a lot of music, and there was a lot of creativity.”

Musician and author Alicia Bay Laurel was among those whose youth, creativity, and idealism led her to Wheeler Ranch. Arriving as an established working ceramicist at age 19, Laurel blesses Wheeler for teaching her to garden, a skill that figures mightily in her hand-written and hand-drawn bestselling 1971 book, Living on the Earth.

Featured in the March 9 issue of the New York Times Magazine, updated for Y2K, and poised to be reissued this fall by Gibbs Smith publishers, Living on the Earth was written, Laurel says from her Hawaiian home, “because there was so much we didn’t know. Some of the things I learned from Wheeler Ranch, and some of it I learned at the public library. I felt that people should know how to garden, how to make our clothes.

“Most of us had just walked out of a life living in the city,” Laurel adds. “What we were was an outdoor crash pad, and a lot of us knew zip about living outdoors and zip about having babies without a hospital. There were a lot of mistakes of that kind.”

Drop Reading

Neither Wheeler nor Laurel has read Drop City, but Sender most emphatically has. As the editor of the online Home Free Home, a nonfiction history of the Morning Star and Wheeler ranches, and as the host of the MOST Post, an online forum for those communes’ alumni, he is nonplussed.

“I just had to push myself to finish the book,” he says. “I didn’t find any of the characters to be developed with depth; I thought that they were very flat in a kind of Zap Comic-y type of way. Furthermore, I didn’t recognize anyone I knew. I felt that Boyle took a couple of tragic incidents that occurred and kind of threw them all in to portray the worst of the times.”

In Drop City, a horse is fatally mauled in an auto accident, and one of the resident’s children almost drowns in the greasy muck of the swimming pool. In reality, a horse tethered near the temporary Marin commune of Olompali did escape to be killed on Highway 101, and a child tragically died there when who-knows-who wasn’t paying enough attention.

Boyle, who has corresponded with Sender about these complaints and who recently addressed his reservations live on the KQED 88.5 FM call-in show Forum, remains available to discuss such concerns but steadfastly defends his depiction.

“I’m not political, I’m not trying to dis communes,” he told Sender. “I’m just a fiction writer. As a free agent in society, I’m allowed to reflect on things in society which may not be the way that others do.”

Reminded of this radio exchange, Boyle reflects, “One of the nice things [about his recent book tour] was to be in contact with Ramon and others from the movement. My intention was not to glorify or vilify or even reminisce about it. I’m not writing a history of communes; I’m writing a piece of fiction for my own purposes.”

Boyle, who says that his research for Drop City stemmed almost entirely from Richard Fairfield’s 1972 book, Communes USA, agrees that “the whole concept of going back to the land and not being caught up in consumer society was good. I regret the passing of that. The Bay Area, with its dotcomdom and yuppiedom has become particularly bereft. In this overpopulated world, I don’t think that it’s possible to ever drop out in that way again.”

Boyle says that the main criticisms of his novel have been that it is either not sociological enough or that he focused too broadly on the negative. He dismisses the first complaint with the reminder that it’s fiction and addresses the latter by saying flatly, “I didn’t focus on the negative. In fact, I think that the book in the end becomes a celebration of community. I didn’t plan it that way; it’s just the way it came out.

“[Conflict] makes for a better story, it makes it more interesting. If everyone is perfectly content, it makes for a kind of dull read. In George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, when [protagonist] Jack Tanner goes to heaven, he realizes that it’s utterly boring.”

It Takes a Village

As with Morning Star, authorities also shut down Wheeler’s Ranch. With its 100 outbuildings bulldozed and burned in 1973, the commune closed. Wheeler’s daughter–born Raspberry Sundown Hummingbird, a name she shed in adolescence for the more practical Jessica–was one of eight babies born there.

The commune had been featured in the July 7, 1967, issue of Time magazine and its demise shown on the evening news. Walter Cronkite shook his head over the images of the downed, flaming buildings and proclaimed it “a damned shame.” Wheeler’s fortune, derived from a great-grandfather’s invention of a type of sewing machine, was shot.

Less dramatically, Boyle leaves his characters in their commune on Christmas night in Alaska. They still have six full months of dark and cold to endure, and their future is unclear. “The ending invites you the reader to supply the events,” he says. “Will Norm [who has decamped with his girlfriend] come back the following summer? Who are the people who belong, and who doesn’t? If I had written another hundred pages, it would just be more of the same. It could be another thousand pages, but for my purposes, the artistic vision that I had is complete.

“All of my historical novels have a coda that bring you up to date on the characters; in this one, I thought it would be detrimental.”

Detrimental, perhaps, because all of us can look back down the winding narrow tube of 30 years and see how it all turned out. The sixties, some posit, blew all of the rules apart but didn’t replace them with anything.

Sender is more pragmatic. “Whatever the hippies discovered, we are now the beneficiaries of. Health food, the ecology movement, the Green Party–so much of what was discovered then has become part of the mainstream culture now,” he says. “Certainly, much of it has been co-opted, changed, and corrupted, but the impulse to nurture Mother Earth, to return to her, and to reinvoke the tribal remain.

“Although we’re going through a kind of a strange time now, I hope that it’s a last hurrah of a fundamentalist right-wing orthodox wave of things. Maybe out of this,” he says hopefully, “will come a whole new movement of people.”

Bill Wheeler is content to exhibit his plein air landscapes at San Francisco’s George Krevsky Gallery, live peacefully, and throw his annual May Day party, when the ranch again becomes a place of communal gathering. “When it came to an end, it came to an end, so be it,” he says philosophically. “I still think that community is the healthiest way to live, because people take care of each other and there’s less crime and mental illness and the alienation that people feel.”

Alicia Bay Laurel becomes almost dreamy when asked if it was all worth it. “I don’t know if the word is nostalgic or if the word is envious, but I could do it,” she says, “all over again.”

From the May 15-21, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Photography by Michael Amsler

The Hearts of Men: L-R: Hari Meyers, Alan Ptashek, and Tommy Phillips, organizers of the Redwood Men’s Center retreat, look within.

Soul Men

Born of the men’s movement, still drumming up spirited discussions, the Redwood Men’s Center prepares for its annual all-male retreat

At just past 11 in the morning, an hour that dangles uneasily between late breakfast and early lunch, the sunniest corner of the Redwood Cafe in Cotati has been infiltrated by a cool triumvirate of extraordinary gentlemen. Hari Meyers, 63, Alan Ptashek, 53, and Tommy Phillips, 55–heads bent together like broken bobbleheads on a shelf, faces bright with expectant concentration–sit deeply engaged in low-volume conversation.

There are coffee cups on the table, sheafs of paper tucked inside a weathered manila folder–and is that a gnarled rain stick leaning against the wall? What, one has to wonder, is the fascinating focus of discussion on which this trio of conspicuous brainstormers have trained their collective intellect?

Would you believe they are talking about the soul?

Not their own souls, individually–not the souls of Hari, Alan, and Tommy–but the souls of men. As a group. As a gender. It is the state of men’s souls that currently engages these gracefully middle-aged representatives of collective manhood.

As organizers of the Redwood Men’s Center’s yearly all-male retreat and conference–this year titled “Living on the Verge: Our Wounded World, Our Healing Selves”–Meyers, Ptashek, and Phillips are keenly aware that the human soul needs its share of TLC. They believe that men who exclude themselves from that diagnosis do so at their own peril.

Every May for 13 years, Bay Area men of varying ages, ethnic backgrounds, and sexual orientations have been gathering to spend five days in a wooded setting with a hundred other guys. Originally dubbed the Men’s Professional Psychology Conference, it began as a modest convention of psychologists and healing professionals, gathering in hotel meeting rooms to make presentations and discuss psychology as it pertained to the health of men.

Since then, the event has evolved into a full-on retreat in the woods of Camp Gualala, where the men are housed in rustic cabins, surrounded by ancient redwoods along the banks of the meandering Gualala River. In this setting, the men employ drum circles, storytelling, art, aikido, and creative discussion groups to explore their own individual issues as 21st-century males.

“When we say ‘men’s issues,’ what are we talking about?” asks Ptashek. “We could be talking about sexism, racism, homophobia, gender identity–a lot of the things that are really hard for men to speak about when they are in the traditional barroom settings, the locker-room settings, the football-watching settings. Not to put those things down–they can certainly be soulful in their own way–but we were trying to make a safe place for a hundred or more men to gather for four days and, in the sense of the word conference, to confer with each other, to walk along a path in the woods together, to come into a circle where we open it up as a consult to hear what every man is reaching to say from his heart and his mind.”

Once established, the conference experienced a turning point a few years back during a weekend that had been titled “Restoration of Soul in a Culture of Death.”

“It was kind of a pretentious title,” admits Meyers with a shrug. “But what we came to was this: We realized that this culture we’re all swimming in, in many ways, promotes the death of the soul.” Shifting away from the purely psychological growth the conference had explored in its early years, and spurred on by the participating philosopher-writer Robert A. Johnson, author of He, She, and We, the organizers of the Redwood Men’s Conference found themselves focusing on the soul and ways to restore that sense of soul in our culture and our lives.

“We began looking at the work of Joseph Campbell and the hero’s journey, exploring what he calls ‘the stages of exile,'” Meyers says, “and what we’ve been asking the last few years is, what are the gifts we can make from the ruins of a dying culture, what gifts can we bring back to that culture?”

Meyers, a founding member of the Redwood Men’s Center conference since its beginning, is a local therapist, in addition to being an active performer and storyteller. Ptashek is a Sonoma County therapist who began doing “men’s work” in the mid-1980s, when the so-called mytho-poetic branch of the men’s movement–born of the work of such poet-philosophers as Robert Bly and Michael Meade–was just beginning to flourish.

Phillips, an attendee of the yearly conferences for about five years, is new to the organizing committee, though he’s been involved in the men’s movement for 10 years, tasting the flavor of different kinds of men’s groups, from the so-called chest-beating groups (“A lot of heady, cigar-smoking, feeling-powerful-as-a-man kind of stuff,” he says) to more introspective groups like the Redwood Men’s Center.

As a group, they are working to expand awareness of the conference to include more newcomers than ever before.

“We are putting out the call for other men to join us,” says Phillips. “Though we’ve always tried to include men from different backgrounds, there is a lot more room for diversity among age and cultures. We are definitely interested in outreaching.”

That outreach, he admits, can be difficult, since the things that go on at a typical men’s conference are so hard to describe to newcomers. Case in point: Throughout this morning’s coffee-break discussion, Phillips, Meyers, and Ptashek frequently describe the conference using terms such as “talk/process,” “Jungian archetypes,” “blessing elders,” and the potentially intimidating phrase “soul work.”

“It’s all quite powerful and quite beautiful,” laughs Meyers, “but it is kind of difficult to explain.”

Perhaps the best course is to stay focused on that all-important word “soul.” How, exactly, does each of these gentlemen define it? Not surprisingly, they each define it differently and with varying degrees of poetry and introspection.

“What I mean by soul,” explains Phillips, “is my deepest part, my essence as a man. Soul is that part of me that, when I hear music or a poem, or see something beautiful, is invoked so that I become more and more aware, aware that this is something of beauty and quality that I want to be a part of.”

“Soul means many things to me,” says Ptashek. “Soul is, in a moment of quietness and perhaps even melancholy, when I am near a stream in the woods and I suddenly find myself looking down, remembering people I love, feeling some of the losses in my life, and feeling the earth beneath me. Soul is the deep character, it’s the poem, it’s the essence of who you are that was not necessarily seen or heard or blessed as a child.”

“I’ll take a crack at it,” smiles Meyers, pausing 10 seconds before going at it like this. “I identify often with my personality,” he says. “I have a personality that I show to the world, and I often think that’s who I am–Hari Meyers, storyteller, this and that. But I’m aware that there’s something beyond that. The personality is conditioned, but the soul is not conditioned. It’s my universal part. It’s more the part of me that witnesses the world; it doesn’t act so much as it feels. My soul is that quality that transcends my personal preferences, my personal drama.”

And what is it that the soul–men’s souls, your soul, my soul–can expect to experience throughout the weekend?

“Well, as we’ve heard over the years, directly from the men who’ve participated in these weekends,” says Ptashek, “what happens is that their soul-needs–the soul-longings that they and you and I are all carrying–are heard, and recognized, and acknowledged. That’s extremely powerful and important.

“As we say every year,” he adds, “You cannot make a mistake here. The ancestors are with us. Our friends are here. We are looking to support each other. We are going to find our voices, and when we put those voices together, a thing of beauty happens that warms your heart and touches the souls of men.”

The 13th annual Redwood Men’s Center conference takes place May 23-26 at Camp Gualala. Costs vary. Some scholarships are available. Check www.redwoodmen.org or call 707.823.3601.

From the May 15-21, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Photo Courtesy of wesavetrees.org

Hug a Tree: An activist makes her way up to her perch high in the Freshwater Creek redwoods.

Out on a Limb

Tree-sitting activists weather high winds and strong controversy

By Patrick Sullivan

The three men in the video are huddled so closely together that a casual observer could mistake them for friends having a chat. But that impression doesn’t last long. A closer look reveals that one of the trio–a bearded guy with long hair–is sitting with his arms buried deep inside a metal pipe. Later it will turn out that this guy calls himself Jungle. Right now, it’s just clear that he has used this length of pipe to lock himself to a gigantic tree.

Standing beside Jungle in the tree is a bearded man in a yellow jacket. Suddenly, sparks start to fly. The yellow-jacketed man is using a power tool to cut open the pipe locked around Jungle’s arms. The third man stands beside a rope that’s been tied around Jungle’s knee and pulled so tight that his leg is sticking out to the side. The other end of the rope is tied off to a branch.

One of the standing men abruptly stomps down on that rope, eliciting a cry from Jungle. At another point, one of the men pushes his boot into Jungle’s ribs.

When the camera pulls back, anyone watching the video suddenly realizes that this strange conflict is playing out more than 100 feet above the ground, about two-thirds of the way up a towering redwood. The confrontation, which is taking place on a rainy April day near Freshwater Creek in Humboldt County, is being filmed from the branches of a neighboring tree by one of Jungle’s friends.

Before long, Jungle’s tree sit is over. He is cut out of his pipe and lowered to the ground, where he is handcuffed and arrested by waiting Humboldt County sheriff’s deputies. Then a lumberjack goes to work on the tree itself. The camera in the nearby tree keeps rolling, following the old redwood as it shivers, sways, and topples to the ground with a crunch.

Dramatic? Sure. Extraordinary? Not really. It’s just another skirmish in one of the most persistent social conflicts in Northern California: the nearly two-decades-old war over the fate of Humboldt County’s remaining old-growth redwoods.

Into the Forest

By now, most people know the players and the issues–or think they do. On one side is the Pacific Lumber Company, the biggest private employer in Humboldt County. The company, based in the town of Scotia and owned by the Houston-based Maxxam Corporation, has a fairly simply point of view. They own the trees. They want to cut them down. So they do.

On the other side are activists like Jungle. Where Pacific Lumber sees profits and jobs, these environmentalists see the casual sacrifice of ancient trees and the degradation of the fragile Freshwater Creek watershed.

These activists were disappointed by the 1998 Headwaters deal, in which the state and federal government paid $490 million in cash and land to Pacific Lumber to create the 7,500-acre Headwaters Reserve in Humboldt County. The Headwaters deal protected too few trees at too high a cost, say some activists. They doubt that politicians and judges will save the forests.

So Jungle and those like him take a more direct approach: They climb trees targeted for logging and then stay up there for days, weeks, months, and even years.

But tree sitting has been going on long enough to become more than just a tactic. It has graduated to the status of a subculture. It has its own celebrities, like Julia “Butterfly” Hill, whose two-year sit atop a redwood in Humboldt County generated international media attention and made Hill a celebrity. It has its own lingo: Know what “freshies” are? How about a “platform princess”?

And like most subcultures, tree sitting has its critics. Pacific Lumber calls the tactic illegal, dangerous, and irrational, and the company does press trespassing charges against tree sitters. “We’re very distressed that people are putting themselves in these dangerous situations,” says company spokesman Jim Branham. “But we’re on track to remove them as quickly and safely as possible.”

Even some observers unconnected to the logging industry question the safety of tree sitting. These critics point to two fatal accidents that took place in 2002, far from Humboldt County. Last April, Santa Rosa activist Beth O’Brien died after falling from an Oregon tree sit. Six months later, Robert Bryan was killed in a fall from a tree sit in Santa Cruz County.

Freshwater activists acknowledge that tree sitting can be dangerous. But they say that tree sitters in Humboldt County understand the risks and receive extensive training before they go up. And they argue that Pacific Lumber’s contract climbers are behaving irresponsibly by using inhumane tactics like pain-compliance holds to forcibly remove activists from their high perches. “They didn’t seriously injure me, but they easily could have,” says Jungle, who is 44, speaking a few days after his extraction.

This controversy has not slowed the migration up the trees. Indeed, the struggle’s latest hot spot–a stretch of Pacific Lumber-owned hillside in the Freshwater area northeast of Eureka–has become home to what may be the largest tree-sit community ever. The exact numbers change frequently, but as many as 16 Freshwater trees have been simultaneously occupied by activists.

And more tree sitters keep coming. The Freshwater sit, now about a year old, has attracted participants ranging from Humboldt County locals to Santa Rosa activists to people from as far away as Florida.

But a move from Orlando to Arcata isn’t the biggest change in store for these visitors. When activists go up the trees–whether it’s for a few days or a few months–they enter a world that’s nearly incomprehensible to anyone stuck on the ground.

Tall Order

Want to know–really know–how high an old-growth redwood really is? Standing at the bottom and looking up won’t do the trick. The only way to truly appreciate how tall these trees really are is to climb up one. But even barring accidents, such a climb is no joke–especially for the soft of hands and the out of shape.

The first difficulty is convincing your skeptical mind that the climbing harness will take your weight. You’ve seen it work for other people, you know it won’t let you fall, but you still have profound doubts. The person helping you checks and rechecks the straps as you look at the trunk that rises up before you. From this vantage point, you can’t even see the small wooden platform you’re aiming for near the top.

Then there’s the climbing itself. Remember those Batman movies? The Caped Crusader would shoot a grappling gun at the top of a building, set the hook, and then relax and enjoy the view as the cable pulled him effortlessly to the top.

Tree climbing doesn’t work that way. Not even close. Every foot of altitude you gain, you gain through the effort of your own muscles and the sweat of your own brow.

You put a foot into a special strap, push the weight of your body up until you’re standing, and grapple frantically with the rope to stay erect as you move a special safety knot up the rope with your hands. If you manage to advance the knot, you also advance your body a couple feet. But sometimes you can’t hold on, so you surrender and sink back into the harness to rest. Then you step again–and again and again.

After five minutes, you’re breathing hard and covered with sweat. And you’re only about 25 feet off the ground. After 10 minutes, the muscles in your right leg are burning. After 20 minutes, you realize that accepting those gloves you were offered would have been a really fine idea, because the climbing rope you’re wrestling with is starting to peel the skin off your fingers.

As you pause to rest yet again, you look up the tree and see that you’re not even halfway to the platform. Then you look down and realize you’re a whole lot higher off the ground than you’d like to be.

With your muscles on fire and your breath coming in pants, you start to consider giving up.

About this time, someone already up in the platform starts shouting down to you. Squinting upward, you can see only a vague shape with beard and long hair. But the words are clear: “Hey man, are you a smoker or something?” And then, more encouragingly, “Hey man, it takes a lot of heart to climb a tree. It really does.”

Maybe the strategy is to motivate you with condescension. If so, it works. You start to move again. Slowly at first. Then a little more quickly, but still pretty damn turtlelike considering you’ve recently seen someone make this same trip with barely a pause for rest.

This whole time, you’re not admiring the view–the rolling hills, the green forests, the ocean in the distance. You’re not even seeing these things, really. What dominates your vision is the trunk of this massive tree. Its solid bulk is your only connection to the ground, and it doesn’t take long for you to start to regard it with enormous affection. In your painful climb, it’s not you against the redwood. It’s you and the redwood.

Finally, after almost an hour of effort, you haul yourself up onto the wooden platform, which lies on top of a couple of branches and is lashed to the trunk. There, under a tent made of brown, plastic tarps, you savor your victory–or at least your avoidance of total defeat.

Then you look down. How high is this tree? Answer: amazingly high, 200 feet or more. And the view, now that you can sit comfortably and focus on something other than the tree trunk, is mind-blowing.

But as you turn to gaze around this tiny shelter, you think very hard about what it would be like to live up here for a few months. You wonder how long you’d stay sane.

Question of Trust

Some people hold up well. And a few can’t get enough. “It’s like being a kid,” explains a tree sitter who calls himself Trust. “You live up in a tree fort and have fun, and you also get to stand up for something good.”

Still, despite Trust’s professed enthusiasm for the lonely life of a tree sitter, he does seem pleased to have visitors. And as he descends on a line to talk to the small crowd gathered beside his tree on a sunny Sunday afternoon, he’s clearly happy to be getting new supplies. “Freshies!” he crows when he opens a bag of donated goods and pulls out a clean pair of socks.

Like most tree sitters, Trust won’t divulge his real name. He will say that he is originally from Florida and that he just turned 26. He celebrated that birthday on a plywood platform in a redwood that’s some 200 feet tall. He has been living up there for more than a month.

When tree sitters occupy a tree, they name it. Trust calls his redwood Everstein. Pacific Lumber calls it “9,” according to the numeral spray-painted in orange on the trunk. Whatever the tree is called, the company would like very much to chop it down. That distresses Trust.

“Some of these trees have been here since before my grandparents were born,” Trust says. “We’ve tried using the legal system to save them, and it hasn’t worked. This seems like the only thing left to do.”

For Trust, climbing Everstein didn’t require any agonizing reflection. He had been out in California for about five months, and he’d received extensive climbing training from experienced activists. Finally, on a clear night with a full moon, Trust decided it was time. “It was just like, ‘I’ve got to go up the tree, ’cause the [lumber company] climbers are coming tomorrow,'” he recalls.

He hasn’t regretted the decision–and not just because of the obvious benefit to the tree. From his perch, Trust looks out over a lush green valley and watches eagles and hawks flying below him. On clear days, he can see waves breaking out on the ocean. “I heard a cougar the other night,” he says.

But he has to know his sit can only end one way. Trust was close enough to hear Jungle screaming as he was extracted and arrested. Eventually, Pacific Lumber’s climbers will make their way up to Trust. He says he’s prepared.

“I hope they come,” he says. “Because I’m ready to face them. I’m ready to save this tree. And I’m ready to go to jail for however long.”

It’s hard to predict how long that stint in the slammer might be. The Humboldt County district attorney has pledged to prosecute tree sitters to the full extent of the law. But Remedy, the first activist extracted from a Freshwater tree by Pacific Lumber, had yet to be formally charged weeks after her arrest. She’s not sure when that will happen.

Remedy, 28, is certain of one thing: She wishes she were back in her tree. It’s been more than a month since climbers removed her from a redwood that activists had named Jerry (after the lead singer of the Grateful Dead, of course). She was extracted from her 130-foot-high platform just a few days shy of her one-year anniversary.

“I miss the tree very much,” Remedy says. “I miss being in the middle of it all, being right there when Pacific Lumber is doing their terrible deeds. To do a tree sit is to dedicate every second of your life to standing up to a giant corporation. It’s kind of a tough act to follow.”

Remedy’s recent history illustrates the way forest activism can radically change lives. Before she was a defender of ancient redwoods, Remedy was a bookstore clerk in Olympia, Wash. In 2001 she took nine days off work to visit activists in Humboldt County. She was supposed to return home on Sept. 11. That didn’t happen. Instead, she plunged into forest-protection work.

“Sept. 11 really was a huge sign that the world was going to hell,” she explains. “And I had to face the fact that I wasn’t doing much to help. I’m young, I’m healthy, I don’t have kids. And I didn’t have any excuses.”

Nuts and Bolts

But tree sitting is not simply the result of spontaneous decisions. It takes a surprising amount of work and planning. One of the key organizers for the sits in Freshwater is a slender, intense young activist named Lodgepole.

Lodgepole grew up in Idaho, but he’s lived in Humboldt County for about five years now. In tree-sitter slang, he’s one of the Freshwater campaign’s “bottom liners,” and he takes that responsibility seriously enough to express some frustration with fellow activists who are less focused.

As Lodgepole gives a tour of the tree sits that lie just a few feet from Greenwood Heights Road, he explains that safety is a priority in training climbers. He and his partner Annapurna offer related advice and information on the web at www.wesavetrees.org.

“Some people can learn the basics in a few hours,” Lodgepole says. “Others never really get it. But anyone who goes up has to learn everything.”

And just because you go up doesn’t make you useful. Lodgepole speaks disdainfully of “platform princesses,” people of either gender who get up in a tree and then won’t do any work.

As Lodgepole walks along the shoulder of the road, he periodically waves to passing drivers. A few wave back. Others just stare. One guy in a pickup presents his up-thrust middle finger.

Lodgepole shrugs and goes back to talking about construction. Setting up a tree sit, he says, requires a fair amount of labor and can cost hundreds of dollars. Activists scavenge, scrounge, and dumpster-dive for as much of the materials as possible–especially the wood, which they don’t want to buy new for obvious reasons.

There are basically two kinds of tree-sit platforms: little and big. The small ones are pretty simple–just a 4-by-8-foot plywood floor with some reinforcing joists and attachments to the tree. These are home to one tree sitter. The big ones are a cross between a community center and a fortress. They’re donut-shaped and completely surround the trunk of a tree, providing space for large gatherings and posing a tough barrier for timber company climbers. As many as a dozen activists can gather on these platforms.

For those up in the trees, food may be the most important organizational issue. Much of it is donated, and the staple is bulk goods, especially creative mixtures of oats and dried fruit. “We call it ORE–Oats Ready to Eat,” Lodgepole says with a grin.

He’s less pleased about discussing another major question groundlings always have for tree sitters: Where do they find a bathroom up there?

“I mean, I guess we don’t mind being asked about it all the time,” says Lodgepole, clearly minding. “But I think what we’re trying to accomplish out here is more important.”

With that caveat, Lodgepole explains how it works. Basically, solid waste goes in a bucket and liquid waste goes in a milk jug. Women use funnels, which are usually made by cutting the top end off a two-liter bottle of soda. The containers are periodically lowered down for disposal by activists on the ground.

Leaving the tree for bathroom breaks is frowned upon. “One sitter came down to take a shit, and the loggers tackled him and then cut down the tree,” Lodgepole explains.

Radical Reformers

As a veteran activist, Lodgepole can offer a slew of reasons why he’s going to all this trouble to convince Pacific Lumber to stop cutting these trees. But during this tour, he seems most upset by what he sees as waste and poor planning.

He points out one recently felled redwood–a 200-foot plus giant–that was cut on a very steep section of the hill. The tree was so heavy and the fall so great that large sections of the trunk were shattered into what Lodgepole says are unusable fragments. “Look at that,” he says with disgust. “They just turned it into toothpicks.”

Lodgepole isn’t the only critic of these activities. Humboldt County District Attorney Paul Gallegos is suing Pacific Lumber, alleging that the company neglected to reveal information in its environmental impact report that showed how increased logging would result in degraded water quality in places like Freshwater.

Farther up the road, Lodgepole comes across a logging deck, a flat clearing where Pacific Lumber has set up equipment to haul timber out of the valley below. He stands for a minute, quietly contemplating a hillside full of fallen trees.

Suddenly, the door of an old pickup truck opens, and a lumber company security guard emerges. The guard is an older man with a mouth full of bad teeth. At first, he’s simply angry. “Get out of here,” the guard commands. “You’re trespassing.”

But Lodgepole just stands by the road and starts talking. In fact, he unleashes a torrent of words.

“Look,” he tells the man, “we’re not against loggers. We’re just trying to protect the environment. You know what’s going on out here. You know they’re cutting all the trees. You know the streams are getting dirtier. You know there aren’t going to be any jobs left at the rate they’re going.”

The man stares at him.

“We just want reform,” Lodgepole continues. Then he offers some pointed criticism of Maxxam CEO Charles Hurwitz.

Finally, the guard cracks a dry smile. “If you can reform Hurwitz,” he says, “that’d be a hell of a good thing.”

From the May 8-14, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.