The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story (30 page)

I stuffed pillows around me in bed, read the first few pages of the timber-sale Environmental Assessment Report and sighed. "This looks very official, wookie; seems like we chose the wrong place to build a house. What say we sell and move farther north. Idaho, maybe? Montana?"

"Isn't Idaho where they do the strip-mining?" she said, barely looking up from the document in her hand. "Isn't Montana where they have the uranium mines and the radioactive wildflowers?"

"I sense that you are trying to tell me something," I said.

"Why don't we put our cards right here on the bed and say what's on our mind?"

She set down the page of government microprint. "Let's not run away, unless you absolutely have to, before we find out what's going on. Have you never considered fighting injustice?"

"Never! You know that. I don't believe in injustice. We bring to ourselves every event, every . . . don't you agree?"

"Maybe," she said. "Why did you bring this one to you, do you suppose, the government cutting down the forest the day after we move in? To have something to run away from? Or something to learn from?"

A lover who is very smart, I thought, is a joy and sometimes she is a burr.

"What's to be learned?"

"If we want to, we can change things," she said, "how powerful we might be, how much good we might do, together."

My mind sank. She had been willing to die in order to change things, to end a war, right the wrongs she had seen around her. And that which she had set out to change, had changed.

"Aren't you burned out with Social Activism? Haven't you said Nevermore?"

"I have," she said. "I think I've paid my dues to society for the next ten lifetimes, and after the KVST takeover I swore to stay out of causes for the rest of this one. But there are moments . . ."

I sensed she didn't want to say what she was saying, that she was looking for words to suggest the once-unsuggestible.

"I can share with you what I've learned," she said, "but

not what I know. If you'd like to find out about your power for good, instead of retreating, I might come out of retirement. I don't have the smallest doubt: if we want to stop the government from cutting timber that won't grow back, we can stop it. If it's illegal, we can stop it. If it isn't illegal, we can always move to Idaho."

Nothing was less interesting to me than convincing a government to change. People squander lives, trying. At the end, if we win, what we win is the bureaucracy doesn't do what it shouldn't have tried to do in the first place. Aren't there more positive things to be done than keeping officials inside the law?

"Before we move," I said, "it might be worth a quick check to see that they're doing things right. Turn the computers loose on it. But, my little deer, I'm sure we won't find the United States Government breaking its own laws!"

Was her smile sweet or bitter? "I'm sure," she said.

That afternoon our computers in the woods flickered questions, fast as light, to a computer in Ohio, which flashed them to a computer in San Francisco, which fired answers into our screens: Federal law prohibits the sale and logging of nonregenerable timber from public lands. Summaries of eighty-two related cases followed.

Moving to the frail forest of southern Oregon, were we chancing into an alley last-minute before an attack of rape and murder?

I looked at Leslie, agreed with her unspoken conclusion. There was no ignoring the crime about to happen.

"When you have a minute," I said the next day as we watched our glowing screens. It was our computer-opera-

tor's code; asking for attention and in the same breath saying please don't answer if a wrong key-stroke is going to scramble your whole morning's work.

A moment later she looked up from her screen. "OK."

"Do you think the forest itself called us here?" I said. "Do you think it was psychically crying for help, tree-devas and plant-spirits and wild-animal guides changing a hundred coincidences to bring us here to fight for them?"

"That's very poetic," she said. "It's probably true." She turned back to work.

An hour later, I couldn't stay quiet. "When you have a minute . . ."

In a few seconds her computer's disk-drive whirred, saving data.

"OK."

"How can they do this?" I said. "The BLM is destroying the very land it's required by law to protect! It's like . . . Smokey the Bear, he's murdering trees!"

"One thing I bet you're going to learn, wookie," she said. "Governments have almost zero foresight and an almost infinite capacity for stupidity, violence and destruction. Not quite, but almost infinite capacity. The not-quite is when people get mad enough to stand in the way."

"I don't want to learn that," I said. "Please, I want to learn that government is wise and wonderful and that citizens do not have to take their own private time to protect themselves from elected leaders."

"Don't we wish . . . ," she said, her mind far down the road ahead of me. Then she turned to confront me. "This is not going to be easy. That's not a forest out there, it's big money, big power."

She laid a Federal document on my desk. "BLM gets a lot

of its money from the timber companies. The bureau gets paid to sell trees, not to save them. So don't think we're going to walk up to the district director, point to broken laws, and he's going to say, 'Gee, we're sorry and we sure won't do that anymore!' This is going to be a long, tough fight. Sixteen-hour days and seven-day weeks, that's what it's going to take to win. But let's not start any action that we don't intend to win. If you want to quit, let's quit now."

"We can't lose, anyway," I said, loading a new data-disk into my machine. "As long as the IRS can swoop down and seize a first-draft manuscript out of my computer, there's nb point in writing manuscripts. But I can write one hell of a timber-sale protest! The government won't have to seize what I write . . . we'll mail it to 'em direct. The Clash of the Bureaus, I can see it now: before IRS can decide whether to take my money, I'll spend it fighting BLM!"

She laughed. "Sometimes I believe you. Maybe there is no such thing as injustice."

Our priorities changed. Other work stopped while we studied. On our desks, on the kitchen counter, piled on the bed were thousands of pages about forest management, sustained-yield practices, erodible soils, fragile-lands regeneration, watershed protection, climatic evolution, endangered species, the socioeconomics of timber management versus the benefits of anadromous fisheries on marginal sites, riparian-zone protection, heat-transfer coefficients hi granitic soils, and laws, laws, laws. Books of laws. The National Environmental Protection Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the Endangered Species Act, NHPA, FWPCA, AA, CWA, DOI 516M. Laws leaped from

pages, through our ringers, into our computers; written in electrons, coded and cross-referenced, filed in disk after disk, duplicated in bank-vaults, lest something happen to us or the house where we worked.

When there was enough information to change minds, we began meeting with neighbors. Joining with Denise Findlay-son and Chant Thomas, who had fought mostly alone before we came, we pressed for help from others.

Most of the people of the valley were reluctant to get involved . . . how I understood their thinking!

"Nobody's ever stopped a government timber sale," they said. "There's no way to keep the BLM from logging whatever it wants to log."

Yet when they learned what we had learned, that turning forests into deserts was breaking the law, we found ourselves with a Save-the-Forest membership of more than seven hundred people. Our private hideaway in the wilderness became a headquarters, our little mountain an anthill as fellow workers came and went all hours to pour findings into the computers.

I met a Leslie I had never seen: total focused business-at-hand; no smiles, no personal asides, one-track one-rail single-minded concentration.

Time and again, she told us. "Emotional appeals won't work: 'Please don't cut the pretty trees, don't ruin the landscape, don't let the animals die.' That means nothing to the Bureau of Land Management. And not violence either: 'We'll spike the trees, we'll shoot you if you try to kill the forest.' That means they'll do their logging with the Army to protect them. The only thing that will stop the government is legal action. When we know the law better than they do, when they know we can take them to court and win,

when we can prove that they're violating Federal regulations, the logging will stop."

We tried negotiating with the BLM. "Do not expect cooperation," she said. "Expect double-talk, defensiveness, we-don't-do-it-that-way-anymore. But talking with them is a step we have to take." She was right, every word.

"Leslie, I can't believe this transcript! Have you read? The Director of the Medford BLM sat there and told us, on tape! Listen:"

RICHARD: Is what you're telling us that you need to have a lot of people make an outcry about this, against the logging, or that it would make no difference what people say?

DIRECTOR-. If you are asking me a personal question, very likely it would not.

RICHARD: Whether you get four hundred signatures or four thousand . . .

DIRECTOR: We get petitions like that. No, it wouldn't make a difference.

RICHARD: If there were forty thousand signatures, if the entire population of Medford, Oregon, protested the sale, would that make a difference?

DIRECTOR: Not to me.

RICHARD: If there were professional foresters who were objecting, would you listen to that?

DIRECTOR: No. I am not concerned about public outcry.

RICHARD: We would like to see what has made you so certain that this is worth going ahead in spite of so much public outcry.

DIRECTOR: Well, we are doing it.

RICHARD: Have you ever changed a timber sale because of a protest by the people? DIRECTOR: No. Never.

She scarcely blinked, watching her computer-screen. "Good. Load that under Lack of Good Faith. It's disk Twenty-two, after Sale Violates National Environmental Protection Act."

Rarely did she show anger at our adversary. She documented evidence, entered it into the files, built her case for court.

"What if we were psychics," I said to her once, "and we knew how and when the director is going to die? If we knew he's got two days to live-day after tomorrow, a ton of logs is going to roll from a truck and smash him? Does that make any difference, how we think about him now?"

"No," she said.

The money that IRS refused to accept turned into commissioned studies: A Preliminary Water Quality Survey of the Grouse Creek, Waters Gulch, Mule Creek and Hanley Gulch Drainages of the Little Applegate River and Beaver Creek Watersheds of Jackson County, Oregon; A Report on the Anticipated Effects of the Scheduled Timber Harvest Activities Within the Proposed Grouse Creek Timber Sale Area on Anadromous Fish and Habitat; Economic Review of the Grouse Creek Timber Sale. Eight others, with equally catchy titles.

Once in a while we'd stand on our little hilltop and look at the forest. Unkillable as the mountains, we used to think. Now we saw it as a fragile family of plants and animals

living together in blended harmony, balanced on a chain-saw-blade, tilting toward extinction from foolish logging.

"Hang on, trees," we'd shout to the forest. "Hang on! Don't worry! We're going to stop them, we promise!"

Other times, when the going was hard, we'd just glance out the window from our computers. "We're doing our best, trees," we'd mumble.

The Apples were to us as Colts to gunfighters. The BLM allows the public thirty days to prepare a timber-sale protest before the wheels turn and a forest is destroyed. It expects to receive between two and ten impassioned pages from citizens pleading for environmental mercy. From us, from our organization and its home computers it got six hundred pages of fact documented up one side down the other, incidents and examples for proof, bound in three volumes. Copies to senators and representatives and the press.

It was constant, full-time battle for twenty months, fighting the Bureau of Land Management.

All my airplanes were sold. For the first time in my adult life, weeks passed, then months without a single airplane flight, without once being off the ground. Instead of looking down from the lovely free machines, I was looking up at them, remembering how much it had meant to me, to fly. So this is what it feels like to be a groundling, I thought. Grf!

Then one Wednesday, to Leslie's grim certainty and to my utter astonishment, the government withdrew the timber sale.

"The sale involves enough improprieties in BLM rules and procedures that it can't be legally awarded," the assistant state director of the Oregon BLM told the press. "In

order to comply with our own procedures we had no choice but to withdraw the sale and reject all bids."

The local BLM director was not crushed to death under logs. He and his area manager were transferred out of state, to other parts of the bureaucracy.

Our victory celebration was two sentences long.

"Please don't forget this," Leslie told me, her computer cooling for the first time since the struggle began. "You can't fight City Hall is government propaganda. When the people decide to fight City Hall, just a few little people against something huge that's wrong, there's nothing-nothing!- can stop them from winning!"

Then she fell on the bed and slept three days.

forty-one

OOMEWHERE IN the midst of the BLM fight, the IRS clock struck midnight unheard. Internal Revenue had languished nearly four years without a decision, a year past the time I'd had the option to dissolve the million-dollar debt in bankruptcy.

While the BLM battle raged, we couldn't spare a moment to consider bankruptcy; when it was done, we could think of little else.

"It wouldn't be fun, little wook," I said, plowing manfully into my fourth attempt to bake a lemon pie the way her mother did. "Everything would be gone. I'd be starting over from nothing."

She set the table for dinner. "No you wouldn't," she said. "The bankruptcy book says they let you have 'tools required for your trade.' And there's a bare minimum you can keep, so you don't starve too fast."