A Friend of the Earth (44 page)

There's a pioneering stream of sweat working its way down my spine, the inside of the car smells like the old cat–house at the San Francisco Zoo, and the stiff no–nonsense seat of the Olfputt is crucifying my back. We've been on the road for four hours and we haven't even reached Bakersfield yet. ‘Crank the air–conditioning, will you?' I hear myself say.

‘It's on full.' Andrea gives me a smile. She's enjoying this. For her it's an
adventure, one more take on the world and let's see what shakes out this time.

I'm stiff. I'm aggravated. I need to take a leak. Plus, Petunia's got to have a chance to do her business, if we ever hope to leash–train her anyway, and up ahead – we're crawling now, vroom–vroom, up and down over the pits and into and out of a gully the size of the Grand Canyon – I can make out the lights of a restaurant, El Frijole Grande. ‘What do you think about some lunch?' I say.

The lot is gouged and rutted and there's wind–drift everywhere, tumbleweeds, trash, what used to be a fence, the desiccated carcass of a cat
(Felis catus)
. I step shakily out of the car – the hips! the knee! – and fall into the arms of the heat. It's staggering, it truly is. The whole world's a pizza oven, a pizza oven that's just exploded, the blast zone radiating outward forever, particles of grit forced right up my nose and down my throat the instant I swing open the door – accompanied by the ominous rattle of sand ricocheting off the scratch–resistant lenses of my glasses. I'm just trying to survive till I can get inside the restaurant, thinking about nothing but that, and yet here's Andrea's face, still floating behind me in the cab of the 4x4, and she seems to be screeching something, something urgent, and suddenly I'm whirling round with the oxidized reflexes of the young–old just in time to catch Petunia's leash as she comes hurtling out the door.

Leggy, stinking, her fur matted till it has the texture of wire overlaid with a thin coating of concrete, she rockets from the car, airborne for the instant it takes to snap the leash like a whip and very nearly tear my abused shoulder out of the socket. But I hold on, heat, age and the exigencies of a full bladder and enlarged prostate notwithstanding. This is the only Patagonian fox left in North America, and I'm not about to let go of her. She doesn't fully appreciate that yet, new to leash protocol as she is, and she goes directly for my legs, all the while snarling like a poorly sampled record and trying to bite through the muzzle while her four feet, sixteen toenails and four dewclaws scrabble for purchase on the blistered macadam.

I'm down on the pavement, born of sweat, and Petunia's on top of me, trying to dig a hole in my chest with her forepaws, when Andrea comes to the rescue. ‘Down, girl,' she's saying, jerking at the leash I still refuse to let go of, and all I can think is to apportion blame where blame is due. This was her idea from the start. She didn't want to bring a cage along – 'Don't be crazy, Ty, there's no room for it' – and she reasoned that
Petunia was doglike enough to pass. ‘They are the same species, aren't they?' ‘Genus,' I told her – ‘or family, actually. But they still make an awful mess on the rug.'

At any rate, the wounds aren't serious. The back of my shirt is a collage of litter and pills of grit, and two buttons are missing in the front, but Petunia hasn't managed to do much more than break the skin in three or four places before the two of us are able to overpower her. Despite the wind and the heat, we manage to hobble–walk her around the lot until she squats and does a poor, meager business under the front tire of a school bus draped with a banner reading
Calpurnia Springs, State Champions, B–League
. (Champions of what, I'm wondering – desert survival?) After a brief debate about what to do with her next – we can't leave her in the Olfputt in this heat – I decide to chain her to the bumper and hope for the best. Then we're inside, where it's cool, and the hits of the sixties – reconfigured for strings – are leaking through hidden speakers while people of every size, color and shape flock past in a mad flap and shriek.

The place is more arena than restaurant, massed heads, jabbering voices, the buzz and tweet of video games. The theme is Mexican – a couple of shabby parrots and half a dozen drooping banana trees in enormous pots – but the smell is of the deep–fryer, deep–fried everything. I'm bleeding through the front of my shirt. My pants are bound to my crotch with sweat. ‘I'll bet they don't have a bar,' I say.

Andrea doesn't respond. She's a ramrod, eyes like pincers, sprung fully formed from the tile in front of the
please wait to be seated
sign. Run five minutes off the clock. Run ten. We're still standing there, though three hostesses in their twenties have managed to seat whole busloads ahead of us. What it is, is age discrimination. We young–old, we of the Baby Boom who are as young and vital in our seventies as our parents were in their fifties, we who had all the power and
invented
the hits of the sixties, have suddenly become invisible, irrelevant, window dressing in an overpopulated, resource–stressed world. What are all these young people telling us? Die, that's what. And quickly.

They don't know Andrea. In the next moment she's got a startled–looking hostess with caterpillar hair in the grip of one big hand and the manager in the other and we're being led to our table right in the middle of that roiling den of gluttony and noise, sorry for the wait, no problem at all, enjoy your meal. I want a beer. A Mexican beer. But they don't have any beer. ‘Sorry,' the twelve–year–old waiter says, looking at me as if my brain's been ossified, ‘only
sake.'

What else?

Andrea orders the catfish enchilada and a
sake
margarita, and after vacillating between the catfish fajitas and the
Bagre al carbón
before finally settling on the former, I lift my glass of
sake
on the rocks and click it against the frosted rim of her margarita. ‘To us,' I offer, ‘and our new life in the mountains.'

‘Yes,' she says, a quiet smile pressed to her lips, and I'm thinking about that, about our life together as it stretches out before me, a pale wind–torn sun in the windows, voices roaring around us, and I can't help wondering just what it's going to be like. We could live another twenty–five or fifty years even. The thought depresses me. What's going to be left by then?

‘You're not eating,' she says. A dozen kids – children, babies – run bawling down the aisle, ducking under the upraised arms of as many waiters, and disappear into the sea of faces. They are infinite, I am thinking, all these hungry, grasping people chasing after the new and improved, the super and imperishable, and I stand alone against them – but that's the kind of thinking that led me astray all those years ago. Better not to think. Better not to act. Just wave the futilitarian banner and bury your nose in a glass of
sake
. ‘Mine's good,' Andrea says, proffering a forkful of pus–yellow catfish basted in salsa. ‘Want a bite?'

I just shake my head. I want to cry.
Catfish
.

Her voice is soft, very low, so low I can barely hear her in the din: ‘You know' – and she's digging through her purse now, a purse the size of a steamer trunk suspended from two black leather straps – I have something for you. I thought you'd want it.'

What do I show her in response? Two dog's eyes, full and wet and pathetic. There is nothing I want, except the world the way it was, my daughter restored to me, my parents, all the doomed and extinguished wildlife of America – the white–faced ibis, the Indiana bat, the margay, the Perdido Key beach mouse, the California grizzly and the Chittenango ovate amber snail – put back in their places. I don't want to live in this time. I want to live in the past. The distant past. ‘What?' I ask, and my voice is dead.

The rustle of paper. The strings rumble and then reach high to wash all the life out of a down–tempo version of ‘Sympathy for the Devil.' I watch her hand come across the table with it, a sheaf of paper – real paper – and the bands of type that are like hieroglyphs encoded on it. And now I'm holding it out at arm's length, squinting till my eyes water and patting down my pockets for my reading glasses.

‘I borrowed it,' she says. ‘Stole it, actually.'

I'm about to say, ‘What? What is it?,' when the glasses find their way to the bridge of my nose and I can see for myself.

It's a manuscript. A book. And the tide, suddenly revealed, stares out at me from beneath the cellophane wrapper of the cover:

MARTYR TO THE TREES:
THE SIERRA TIERWATER STORY
BY APRIL F. WIND

I already know how it ends.

But here it is, a concrete thing, undeniable, a weight in my hands. April
F
. Wind? And what does the ‘F.' stand for? I wonder. Flowing? Full of? Forever? I riffle the pages, the crisp sound of paper, the printout, the stuff of knowledge as it used to be before you could plug it in. No need to talk about the inaccuracies here, or the sappy woo–woo–drenched revisionism or New Age psychoanalysis, but only the end, just that.

Sierra set the record. Set it anew each day, like Kafka's hunger artist, but, unlike the deluded artist, she had an audience. A real and evergrowing audience, an audience that made pilgrimages to the shrine of her tree, sent her as many as a thousand letters a week, erected statues to her, composed poems and song lyrics, locked arms and marched in her name till Axxam showed black through to the core. In all, she spent just over three years aloft, above the fray, the birds her companions, as secure in her environment as a snail in its shell or a goby in the smooth, sculpted jacket of its hole.

In the beginning – in the weeks and months after Climber Deke's frustrated effort to dislodge her – the timber company initiated a campaign of harassment designed either to bring her down or to drive her mad, or both. They logged the trees on all sides of her, the screech of the saws annihilating the dawn and continuing unabated till dark, and all around her loggers cupping their hands over their mouths and shouting abuse.
Hey, you little cunt – want to put your lips around this? There's five of us here and we'll be up tonight, you wait for us, huh? And keep the slit clean, ‘cause I got sloppy seconds
. At night they set up a wall of speakers at the base of the tree and blared polkas, show tunes and Senate testimony into the vault of the sky till the woods echoed like some chamber of doom. They brought in helicopters, the big workhorses they used for wrestling hundred–foot logs off of remote hilltops, and the helicopters hovered there beside her
tree, beating up a hurricane with the wash of their props. It was funny. It was a joke. She could see the pilots grinning at her, giving her the thumbs–up sign, A–OK, and let's see if we can blow you out of there. Do you copy? Roger and out.

They tried starvation too. On the morning after Climber Deke made off with the lower platform and all her cooking gear and foodstuffs, the hired goons established a perimeter around the grove and refused to let her support team in. For three nights running, in the company of a loping, rangy kid named Starlight who haltingly confessed that he was in love with my daughter and wanted to marry her as soon as she came down from her tree, I lugged supplies in to her, and for many more nights than that I wandered the dark woods with a baseball bat, just praying that one of those foul–mouthed sons of bitches would try to make good on his threats. Sierra was unfazed. They couldn't intimidate her. ‘Don't worry, Dad,' she whispered one night as she descended as low as she dared to collect the provisions we'd brought her (Starlight straining against gravity from the top rung of an aluminum ladder while I braced him from below). ‘They're all talk.' Her face glowed palely against the black vacancy that was her tree. ‘They're scared, that's all.'

Andrea and Teo got the press involved – ‘Coast Lumber Starving Tree–Sitter,' that sort of thing – and the timber company backed off. The support team returned, more determined than ever, the lower platform was rebuilt and Coast Lumber turned its back on the whole business. If my daughter wanted to trespass in one of their trees, they weren't going to deign to respond. Because any response – short of suspending all logging and restoring the ecosystem – would be used against them, and they knew it. They would wait her out, that was their thinking. The longer she stayed up there, the less anybody would care, and before long she'd get tired of the whole thing, hold a press conference and leave them to strip every last dollar out of the forest and nobody to say different.

By this point, Sierra had begun to take on the trappings of the mad saint, the anchorite in her cell, the martyr who suffers not so much for a cause but for the sake of the suffering itself. She became airier, more distant. She'd been studying the teachings of Lao Tzu and the Buddha, she told me. She was one with Artemis, one with the squirrels and chickadees that were her companions. There was no need to come down to earth, not then, not ever. She didn't care – or didn't notice – that she was the idol of thousands, didn't care that she was incrementally extending the record for consecutive days aloft till no one could hope
to exceed it, and she barely mentioned Coast Lumber anymore. Toward the end, I think, she'd forgotten what she was doing up there in that tree to begin with.

The end, that's right – this is about the end of all that.

Can I tell you this? I was there – her father was there – when it happened. I'd moved out of the house in Tarzana, leaving the mosquito fish and mallards – and my wife – to fend for themselves. Why? I was embarrassed. Ashamed of myself. All along I'd been wrong about Andrea and Teo – there was nothing between them, and after we left Sierra in her tree that first weekend they both sat across the table from me at a Jack in the Box restaurant in Willits with the drawn–down faces of the martyred saints and made me understand that. (Later, long after it was over between Andrea and me, they'd have their time together, and I couldn't help thinking I was the one who'd been campaigning for it all along.) The parole board gave me permission to move to Eureka, where I had a job fined up – a nothing job, clerk in a hardware store, but it was enough to get me out of L.A. so I could be close to my daughter. I packed the Jeep while Andrea was at work. I left a note. I don't know – we never discussed it – but I think she must have been relieved.