Torched (11 page)

I winked back.
If only you knew.

Blue greeted me at the Greyhound station with a rib-squeezing hug. Instantly, I felt awake and alive. Only a few minutes earlier, I had been exhausted from the long bus ride and from the hours of studying I had put in for my finals. My grades had gotten so bad that I needed Marijean to cram with me. I prayed that all the last-minute efforts might bump my grades back up into B territory. Or at least to a C-plus.

After Blue released me, I collected my backpack from underneath the bus. It was heavy with the items Coyote had told me were essential for a tree-sitter: wool socks, pants and hat; a headlamp; T-shirts; binoculars and a sleeping bag. Wool seemed like overkill for what was shaping up to be a hot summer, but Coyote said that where we were going, it might snow no matter what the calendar said. I had also brought food—granola, chocolate, dried fruit and water. Although part of Blue’s job was to help supply the sitters, I had been warned there would be times she wouldn’t be able to make it in.

Blue led to me to her unlocked orange Volvo. “Do you need to pee?” she asked as I threw my backpack into trunk. “We’re renting a motel room not too far from here, and I could stop by before we head out.”

“Yes, please. I couldn’t bring myself to go on the bus.” I wrinkled my nose. “The whole back half of the bus smelled like disinfectant.”

“You’d better enjoy a flush toilet while you can.” She grinned as she started the car. “From now on, it’s going to be a bucket.”

A bucket.
I had known that, of course, but I still didn’t want to think about it.

Blue drove a half mile to a cinder block motel that had been painted white about fifty years earlier. She unlocked the door to reveal a soulless, musty-smelling space with two sagging beds and weird stains on the walls. At the back lay the bathroom, as well as a tiny kitchen with a dorm-sized refrigerator and an ancient white oven. “This looks like the kind of place where people don’t ask too many questions,” I said.

“Which is the polite way of saying it looks like a dump.” Blue gave me a crooked smile. “We’re just trying to keep a low profile.”

As I washed my hands, I eyed myself in the bathroom mirror. Was I ready for this? Was I ready to climb a tree and spend days hundreds of feet in the air? Then I remembered Matt’s face when he had hugged me good-bye at the bus station. No matter how angry I had been, if it meant saving his life, I would do it. I would do anything.

“So how are the sits going?” I asked when I came out of the bathroom.

Blue shrugged as I followed her out to the car. “We’re slowing the logging down, but I worry that it’s not enough. The lynx needs more than what we’re saving.” As we pulled out of the motel parking lot, she said, “You’re lucky, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were brought up already knowing what’s important. Would you believe that when I joined MED, I was a cheerleader living in a sorority?”

I tried to picture her without black overalls and wearing makeup. Actually, with her cute little pigtails, Blue looked the part. I imagined her turning cartwheels, jumping up and down and clapping her hands.

“What made you change?”

“Hawk was going to school then. He was in one of my classes. We got assigned to do a project together. He talked about things I’d never heard about. It was like he opened my eyes. I saw how bad things were and how they were only getting worse.”

“So you joined MED?”

She nodded. We turned off the highway, and suddenly there was nothing around us but darkness and the impression of trees lined up right to the edge of the road. I could barely see her. “It wasn’t long before I was tearing up some experimental seedlings at Portland State’s research lab. That was my first action.” She made a sound that was a cross between a sigh and a laugh. “But I got caught. The university made me a deal. They said they would drop the charges if I dropped out. But even though I left school, I stayed with MED, because they are the only ones who are really dedicated to making a difference. Hawk and I, well, maybe we’re not always on the same page about methods, but we agree that we have to do
something
to save the planet before it’s too late.”

I looked out at the blackness. Even though Blue had switched to high beams, it was as dark as if we were driving through a tunnel. “Sometimes he scares me a little—he seems so intense,” I said.

“It’s practically a requirement for being a MEDic. Anybody who’s willing to put their freedom on the line is going to be a little intense. Like, Coyote is trying to be one hundred and eighty degrees different than his family, especially his grandfather—has he told you about him?”

I nodded, feeling jealous that he had shared those stories with other girls in MED. “A little bit. What about the others? Why are they part of MED?”

“Liberty’s stepfather is a vice president at US Bank—she’s always trying to shock him. She’s probably friends with Meadow because Meadow was a total emo when they met, which freaked out Liberty’s stepdad. And then Liberty met Hawk when he was protesting outside a ski resort. That’s how she and Meadow both got involved in MED. Grizz probably should have been born two hundred years ago. Then he could have been a real mountain man. Jack Rabbit goes to Reed College and smokes a lot of weed, but he wants to become an environmental lawyer. And Seed is kind of a lost soul who lives with a million stray animals. She even has a baby raccoon that she found by the side of the road.”

“My parents’ friends are all kind of like that,” I said. “Counterculture types, that’s the way they’d put it.”

Blue sighed. “I just wish I had had my eyes opened sooner. I’m embarrassed when I think of how I used to live my life. I treated everything like it was disposable—clothes, cell phones, whatever. I never thought about the impact I was making. That’s why you’re so lucky. You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”

If you only knew.
I was glad it was dark, that she couldn’t see the blush that made my face feel like it was on fire. “But it wasn’t like
I
made the choice to grow up the way I did. It wasn’t really my decision. Just like how you used to treat everything like you could throw it away—that wasn’t really
your
decision, either. You were just doing what your parents taught you. We can only be responsible for the decisions
we
make.”

For a long moment, the only sound was the thrum of the tires. Then Blue said, “But are you saying that you’re only doing this because it’s your parents’ idea?”

“Of course not,” I said quickly. “I can see what’s happening to the Earth as well as my parents can. Maybe better, because they’re more used to the fact that it’s all screwed up. It’s just that I didn’t really start to think about it seriously until recently. And if my parents hadn’t been who they were, it might have taken a lot longer.” Looking for a way to end the conversation before I heard her praise my honesty again, I yawned. “I’m going to take a little nap,” I said, leaning my head against the window.

Although I hadn’t meant to, I really did fall asleep. I woke up forty-five minutes later with a crick in my neck. Blue was nosing the Volvo into a small clearing next to a narrow road. She pulled behind a line of trees and turned off the engine. “We’ll leave the car here and hike in. It’s a couple of miles.”

“In the dark?”

“We’re away from the city. We’ve got the moon and the stars. And Mother Earth will guide us.” The words “Mother Earth” should have sounded silly, but they didn’t.

We got out of the car. Blue put on a headlamp. I fished mine out of my pack and did the same. The small circle of light it provided was only enough to sketch in the barest outlines of what was in front of me. We shouldered our packs and headed into the forest. I followed close behind Blue, trying not to step on dead branches that cracked noisily.

At first I shivered in the chill air, but in a few minutes I had warmed up. With the help of the full moon, my eyes slowly adjusted so that I could see beyond the light from my headlamp. We were on some kind of trail. Every now and then, Blue stopped to check a compass.

“If we’re going where the logging is, couldn’t we just take a logging road in?” I complained after I had tripped over a stone or a root for the dozenth time.

“Sorry!” Blue said. “We don’t want to take the chance of them stopping you before you even get up in the sit. Just be glad you’re not hauling in the pieces of plywood to make it.”

When we got to a rise, I could see stars twinkling in one part of the ridgeline. There was a gap in the velvety fullness of the forest where a swath of trees was already gone. “Is that where they are cutting?” I pointed to the space.

“Yeah. There’s nothing there now but stumps.” Her voice was bitter. “No way any lynx is going be able to hunt or den there.” After a long moment, we both turned and started walking again.

We hiked for nearly two hours. We skirted rocks and roots, climbed over fallen trees. When Blue finally stopped, I almost ran into her.

“Here we are,” she said. “That’s your tree.” She pointed to a tall tree about fifty feet away. A faint line of rope ran up the length of the trunk.

Waiting for me.

I craned my neck, my eyes straining to see. Way, way up in the branches, I could make out a tiny blue square that caught the light of the moon. It looked like a broken kite.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Is
that
the sit? It’s so tiny.”

Blue walked up to the tree and patted the trunk as if it were an animal. Next to her hand, the rope snaked up into the darkness. It was only about the width of my thumb. I couldn’t even see where it ended.

“This tree has stood here for hundreds of years. We call it the Old Man.” Blue stroked the trunk with her palm again and said, “Give me your hands.”

Obediently, I held them out. She took a roll of white first-aid tape and began to wrap my palms and fingers. In the light of my headlamp, the tape had a ghostly glow.

“You’ll thank me for doing this,” Blue remarked as she finished my left hand and started in on my right. “Otherwise, your skin would get ripped to pieces. We call it tree-climber’s stigmata.” Finished, she stepped away from me and put the tape back in her backpack. “Okay, that should keep you from getting too banged up.”

Next, Blue pulled a contraption of padded straps from her pack and handed it to me. Following her instructions, I awkwardly stepped into the harness and pulled it up around my hips. Shaped roughly like a figure eight, the harness had holes made of straps for my legs. The strap around my waist held two latching metal hooks that I knew were called carabiners, as well as a brass-colored piece ending in a long loop that Blue said was a belay device. It felt strange to have the straps between my legs, like wearing a giant diaper. But I welcomed the distraction of Blue pulling and tugging at me as she adjusted everything. It was the only thing that kept my mind off the climb I faced.

She took two black loops of rope and threaded them through the carabiners on my harness. Then she tied one loop on the bottom of the rope and another about waist high. “Okay,” she said. “These are prussic slipknots. When one doesn’t have weight on it, you can slide it.” She demonstrated, pushing it up a couple of inches. “When you put weight on the prussic, it cinches onto the rope and holds you in place.” She jerked. The loop held firm. “Basically, what you’re doing is transferring your weight back and forth. With your right foot in the foot loop, you stand straight up and push the top loop up with your hands. Next you sit back in the harness, which is held in place by the top loop, and you slide the foot loop up until your right leg is straight out ahead of you. Then you pull both legs under you and stand up. It feels kind of like pumping your legs on a swing. And you start all over again.”

“Lather, rinse, repeat,” I said.

“And sooner or later, you’re at the top.” She rechecked the straps and clapped me on the back. “Okay, let’s see you do it.”

I stepped up into the foot loop, which was about eighteen inches above the ground. My weight stretched the rope taut. A bubble of panic welled in my throat. Could I really trust all the knots on which my life now depended? Promptly forgetting everything I had just learned, I tried to slide the top prussic up. It wouldn’t budge. Then I tried to slide the bottom knot. It wouldn’t move, either.

“What’s wrong?” Panic arced my voice so high that it squeaked.

Blue shrugged. “You’re not moving your legs enough.”

I brought both my knees up higher and succeeded in moving the bottom knot up three inches. That allowed me to slide the top knot up three inches. Three inches down, one hundred seventy-four feet and nine inches to go.

“Try to enjoy the climb,” Blue said. She stepped forward and stood on tiptoe to pat me on the back. “Don’t worry, you’ll do fine.”

I felt silly, dangling only a few inches off the ground. With a herky-jerky rhythm, I began moving like an inchworm up the rope. I was close enough to the trunk that I braced my feet against it every time I moved the knots.

By the time I got twenty feet up, sweat was running down my spine. Why had I worn a long-sleeved shirt? I looked at my watch. I had been working for twenty minutes and I wasn’t anywhere close yet. From the ground, Blue gave me a thumbs-up.

The weight of my pack thumped against my back with each pull. The muscles in my right leg were burning. Finally, I reached the first branches, forty or fifty feet up. Solid ground, sort of. But climbing higher was still just as much of a struggle. It was like hopping on one foot up twenty flights of stairs—and with only empty air on either side.

At about seventy-five feet up, my right forearm was so cramped it felt like my muscles had been replaced with rocks. My hands were numb. Despite the tape, the prussic cords were cutting deep notches across my knuckles. Sweat seeped into them, stinging viciously.