The Walbran - CHAPTER 7 - Part 8

As Autumn came in the family hosted one last gathering, inviting every protester who wished to come for Thanksgiving. Randy’s development was full to capacity with 32 people for three days, a combination of protester and family friends, including the Johnsons. He had a full sound system and his black light theme in operation, plus a chain of Christmas lights on a blinker that ran the span of the rope that suspended the tarps on the center, as well as on both sides. There was a cross on the end with blinking red lights hanging from the same rope, not quite life size. Birthdays were celebrated, Jon’s included. Breakfast was an operation involving the cracking of over 60 eggs that were spiced with sautéed veggies and scrambled. Randy recruited the entire group to bring an inch thick steel cable over 100 feet in length down to the bottom of the valley where the South Walbran joined with the East using a new trail the family had built. He planned to erect a cable car there high above the river, so that the two camps would be joined by a trail. They even envisioned cliff jumping out of the cable car into the pool, at least 25 feet. It was more than sufficient depth. The pay off for the descent was the opportunity to swim in one of the most beautiful swimming holes in the world, if you could take the cold. Or you could just come there to look at it. Your option.













The last project for the weekend was a swing of bungee jump proportions. The camp on Glad Lake 9 at this time was also next to a steep roadside ridge, much like Rolly’s ridge but a little less steep and without any trees. Off in the distance at the top of the camp there was a tall tree that had fallen so it was wedged tightly between two others. It ran directly parallel to the ridge. It was perhaps 15 feet above the roadside and maybe about 25 feet away. Randy had decided that from this limb reaching into space they were going to build a swing. He even made a platform at the roadside so that when you got on the swing you jumped off at the edge and, after grazing the ground on the descent, you cleared a stump and at the top of the swing’s trajectory you were staring off into the woods with a gradual descent below you, a vista of an over 100 feet drop. If you fell at the top of the swing’s trajectory, you were looking at possibly lifelong injury or even death, for the drop into the jagged rocks and ruined trees below could easily be 40 feet depending on how you fell. Obviously it was going to be terrible. To build the swing Randy and a young man named Colin had to climb to the very end of the suspended log to hang it.



Jon put some of his personal carving on the base. (The swing still exists as an art piece.) Many of the protesters tried the swing and so did family members. Rahab’s foot caught underneath the swing on the way down between the swing and the ground, probably tearing a muscle internally. She was in unspeakable pain and by the following day blood had visibly pooled in her ankle, not a bruise but red.

People kept using the swing after she was injured. Randy tried it for a third time after that, and one of the ropes snapped on him at the top of the trajectory, when the swing was out at its highest point. He was sailing into space. The rope that snapped whipped past him and he had the wherewithall to grab it under his armpit, which enabled him to grab it with his other hand. He to managed to swing back to the ridge like Tarzan. Though he hit a rock face first in the process, he was relatively unhurt apart from the fact that he nearly passed out. Rahab’s injury in comparison was permanent. Jon was angry because he knew Colin had done the knots wrong for friction and abrasion; he had questioned Colin on whether he knew the proper technique going in. Colin had assured him he knew what he was doing. Undeterred Randy repaired the swing doing the knots correctly and as winter came in both Judah and Zeb had the moxy to try the swing on their own in the snow and made a point of filming what it was like to be on it.

After that weekend Randy, Sylvia, Rahab and Jon went into town for more supplies. Rahab could not walk. In town she had a dream that the camp was flooded under three feet of water and that the tarps were all gone. A windstorm came the next night. In the Walbran it was of such ferocity, in the range of 120 kilometer winds, that the entire camp was blown away. It was a dreadfully traumatizing experience for those who were still there, who were Jim W., the Johnson family, and the five younger Cummins children, a situation so overwhelming that they were helpless and nothing could be done. The tarps blew so wildly that night that Talitha was lifted off the ground trying to hold one of the lines. Children were sitting in the tents to keep them from blowing off the edge and they were still moving, edging closer. The next day they were going down the ridge to fish for things like cutlery, not to mention tarps and tents. They hadn’t had any sleep and were soaked through. When the storm hit the family in town got ready to go back as fast as they could, only to find devastation.

Randy was still determined to winter there that year and had agreed on Jon’s bender design. Boughs were being gathered for the purpose but it was getting cold enough coming into the start of November that Rahab and Sylvia took all the younger children into town. When the first traces of snow fell four RCMP officers appeared up the road and evicted the family for the last time.

The RCMP and Fletcher-Challenge had not kept true to their word, even though they went on the record. Even though the family were now in a clearcut where no logging activity could possibly take place. They evicted them on the pretext that they were going to put the road to bed, taking out culverts and replacing them with open ditches. This was a new ‘environmental’ measure that wasn’t done consistently (had more to do with recycling culverts), and it certainly wasn’t done by digging a 16-foot deep trench at the mouth of a spur line with 8-foot sides piled high. They made a particular point of digging up the entire length of road where the camp had been located for the 110 foot span so it could never be used as a camp site again. It was also done on the line of the ‘bridge to no where’, which insured many intrepid vehicles coming to the Walbran for the sake of recreation would pay a heavy price.

Only Judah, Randy and Zebedee remained in the camp when the RCMP came down the road. Judah filmed the exchange while they were given a deadline that forced many of the family to pull over 36 hours without sleep in order to pack the camp, as anything left after the deadline imposed was going to be destroyed. Randy bartered for time. The deadline was in three days at 6:00 am. At the close of the conversation the RCMP Corporal noticed the swing suspended at the side of the road, hooked for the next run. He did not know what to make of it and had to ask, "What is that?"

"Why, it’s a swing. Want to try, go for a ride?"

The RCMP officers stared at it in visible shock.

"What’s the matter? The protesters did it. We did it. Don’t have the____?" That is blank because Randy did not actually say "balls"; he said it through body language with a light chuckle. Even on cold blue pale film caught on a wintry day it was readily apparent that the Corporal turned a nice tinge of green.


Postscript: In 1998 a passive blockade in the Walbran was violently attacked.

The foreign multi-national Fletcher-Challenge divested its name by creating the Canadian subsidiary ‘TimberWest’ that intrinsically wrapped itself in the lives of local communities by such incentives as creating share packages for all of their workers. They set records for raw log export in 2005, and in 2006 the share dividends from this amounted to $76.3 million cash, which is how you buy community cooperation while simultaneously shutting down local saw mills and a thriving economy.

Incidentally the Canada-US softwood lumber agreement, which was arrived at because stumpage fees are so punitive in BC that it amounts to a massive public timber subsidy, just happens to exclude raw logs from the agreement, meaning the export taxes of %15 that apply to all products once quotas are reached do not apply to raw logs exported to the US. In effect the treaty is designed to depress value added manufacturing in Canada and creates a hefty incentive to export raw logs to the US, generating work for saw mills and pulp mills in the United States rather than Canada.

The decades long battle to make Canada’s economy a base function of ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’ dependent on raw resource export has met with great success.

There are more photos of the Walbran Valley here.

The Walbran - CHAPTER 7 - Part 7

Haddon was a very different place. The tree stands were mixed; even around Anderson Lake there were clear boundaries made by fire and much younger stands of trees. Around Haddon the trees were much younger, a natural second growth, and the river was a quiet creek, a trickling melody that tinkled rather than the rippling symphonic rush that lulled them by the bridge at night. The water was not the deepest emerald but had a pale aqua quality. The place felt like rest. Jon was finishing a raised floor made out of cedar shake for a large donated canvas tent that would make the main camp at Haddon, well into the woods. The structure had already been somewhat in place before he arrived; he was just finishing it. They worked on it together, much the same as working with Randy to make camp. There was also some equipment, and Jon had been supplied with a video camera for the new camp. At night they trekked out to where the spur line was being plunged into the valley. It was more than a year later before Rahab had the opportunity to make the hike from Y-Camp to Haddon on her own with Zeb, her sister Talitha and Doron. It was then she saw what treasure they were pursuing, for the valley between Anderson Lake and Haddon possessed grove upon grove of immense Sitka Spruce. That night they had a simple goal. Jon needed her to figure out how to operate the camera; they had to get footage. MacMillan Bloedel were so desperate to stop a park from being created they were punching that road in 24 hours a day, working at night with floodlights on one machine. John had scouted the night before and he said that the trees they felled to make the road, they weren’t even bothering to take them out. They were burying them under the road, which meant that via their decomposition it wouldn’t take long for the road to become useless. That was not their concern. So she filmed the giant machine working at night with its floodlights, to show that this was happening. She had scarcely felt a more ominous sense of industry’s soul-less foreboding in her life.

In the mornings they were woken by squirrels deliberately dropping pinecones on their rain tarp from high above in the tree-tops, which was loud and more effective than any alarm clock. Their rhythms were guided by the sun. The squirrel vocabulary easily sounded irate, got very expressive and came across like swearing. When she sat on a log over the stream alone one afternoon, a squirrel cursed her out volubly for blocking his bridge, skittering from side to side looking for a way to pass until she proceeded to move and let him. It was clear he felt it was his. They spent a tranquil seven days, joined shortly by Marianne so they were three sleeping in the same tent. Marianne took her on a hike alone where they crested the watershed and entered the Carmanah. The speed at which she could hike the slope left Rahab gasping and hard pressed to keep up, especially since she hadn’t eaten. (It was many years before she learned she had exercise-induced asthma.) Marianne was the only woman who had wintered in the Walbran alone in a camper trailer. She was familiar there, bisexual and independent, a Wiccan; she had traits Rahab admired though she’d been taught to avoid witchery at all costs. Marianne gave her a bee pollen elixir to drink when she tired and advised her to use a sponge for her period, giving her one. When they smoked on the side that was Carmanah Rahab had to lie on a log for all around her strobed green and orange; she felt like she was going to faint but lost her vision slowly to the green and orange instead. As she began to close her eyes the sun through her lashes looked like descending formations of angels coming through the treetops that were descending on the slope below them, so she kept her eyelids that way, half-closed. On the seventh day they did mushrooms together and Jon went running, whooping through the hills. They could hear his calls while they sat together over the stream naked, watching the bottom shadows that betrayed the turbulence in the still appearing water, which looked like the underside of the surf undulating ever so slowly. Marianne said the water bugs were fairies. Rahab never would. But she kept a story of one in her mind like an unspoken treasure. And in a way that acknowledged a triangle existed Marianne said she was actually more interested in getting together with her, which Rahab declined as delicately and kindly as she could, declaring she wasn’t bisexual. Marianne’s joking rejoinder was that was fine, she was a lousy lay. So in actual truth it existed in a circle where each loved the other more, and lasted not much beyond those seven tranquil days. For when Marianne crossed the bridge, Jon had fallen for Marianne, who would inevitably break his heart; all was sensed from the beginning.

Their intimacy and quiet was broken by Steve who appeared out of the bush with a look of excitement that could hardly be matched. “Come”, he said, barely able to contain himself, “Go get dressed, I have something I have to show you!” He would not of course reveal his surprise until they were upon it, taking them back into the woods where the new main camp was to be, to present them…Rolly, back, alive, escaped, and well and in the flesh. Rolly wanted more than anything to see Jon. Well, he’s up on the hill some where on mushrooms. You can hear him from time to time. We’ll have to go and see if we can call him. To call him we should get out into the open so let’s go to the stream by the dry streambed. Rolly was carrying a towering pack. When they got to the dry streambed there were several logs they had to duck under on the way, some by crouching, so Rahab took Rolly by the hand to help him with his heavy pack. Rolly’s trial had been such that he said he felt she was like an angel leading him back to the light; that was the moment he finally felt freed of his ordeal. Marianne could yodel exactly like the Arab and Palestinian women, a very loud cry. She alternated between that and her circular clay flute until she got Jon’s attention and they began calling back and forth tracking each other by sound until he came crashing onto the river pebbles and ran straight across the stream at the sight of Rolly resurrected. Rolly escaped! By getting out by Haddon, he would miss the RCMP at the security gate. A ride had been coordinated to come get him and take him to what would be his home for quite some time, Victoria. With Rolly and Steve they caught up on events and learned that the confrontation had become so serious that CSIS had been brought in by helicopter in order to dispatch with the fearsome former Green Beret. A squadron of RCMP had raided Y-Camp itself, and it so happened that Bea had managed to save the canoe from them. They had tried to grab it but she paddled out of reach, forcing the entire squad to walk the water up to their knees, stumbling through the little rapids on the slick stones to perform their little raid. They turned the camp upside down and searched everything. Rolly had not managed to escape until Day 5 of his confrontation. And he’d done so in the face of three squads of RCMP who had roved the woods searching for him. Heads must have rolled.

Eventually there was a raid on the house he was living, which was on Speed Avenue and somewhat notorious. Knowing the heat was on, the family coordinated for him to live in the basement across the street at one of their neighbours and lifelong friends, Michael, who had travelled with them to Israel. Rolly was there for a few months, their second harbouring of a fugitive. And while he was there they settled in conversation one night and he orally told him of his five-day confrontation from the beginning to the end, from when he and Rahab had said good-bye to when they greeted one another again. With his permission the family recorded it on audio-tape as they listened in rapt silence. As this is remembrance from that night 19 years ago, it is not expected to be perfect.

For their support and friendship Rolly bequeathed them with something very precious, seeds from the largest Sequoia in the world. You are not permitted to approach the largest Sequoia. It is fenced. It is surrounded by pavement and parking so humans can drive right up to it without even having to get out of their cars. It has been named ‘General Sherman’. Rolly was so roiled by the ludicrousness of all this, the lawn, and the fact that it couldn’t reproduce, that he broached the restrictions by leaping the barrier fence, grabbed a pine-cone and fled. From the cone he was able to get the seeds. Of these four germinated, and presumably there are existing survivors living in the Walbran Valley on Glad Lake 9 where the family came to live from 1992 to 1997.

Rolly’s platform sit began in earnest with Dana and the Saltspring family’s arrest so there were no witnesses, and an order went out to go get the ‘cherry picker’. When he resisted, grappling with the officer on the picker, they graduated to a second utility crane that was longer. When he excrement-ed himself, they initiated a new strategy. In the meantime there were three squads of RCMP including an attractive female blond officer. They started putting her forward to negotiate and speak with him, an unspoken sex-appeal ploy. Rolly repudiated that one by taking it all the way. He masturbated to her publicly and let out a massive whooping howl when he was done. At night they graduated from not just a continual spotlight but sirens (or was it loud music?) blaring continuously to insure he was constantly sleep deprived.

The new strategy was to attach new lines to the existing lines that were suspending the platform. They sent up their loggers in the customary way, customarily chain sawing every limb as they went, leaving a heap of boughs on the roadside. They brought in two large utility trucks and suspended a net in between them attached to the trucks. They used the trucks then to manoeuvre the net as needed. The loggers who had gone up all the trees the platform was suspended from were responsible for attaching new cables to the lines. (It was all quite experimental stuff. Would they hold?) Then they cut the existing lines the platform was suspended on and gradually began lowering the platform into the net. On first approach when he got close enough, Rolly took out his knife and ripped the net, well enough that they had to suspend operations and replace or repair it, and start again. The next time they began lowering him, they were swinging him more towards the side of the road. The roadside was the edge in every sense. It went not quite straight down. It was one of those very hazardous slopes formed by the road stones and gravel that slides with you and starts to cascade if you dare go down it. It would have jagged large rocks jutting and jumbled throughout from the original blasts. Very hazardous. It was almost an 80 degree slope, and it went straight down to the Walbran riverbed itself, a distance of at least 50 meters.

No one’s ever been over the edge, the edge that Rolly is swinging to. Rolly has weighed in his mind the question of escape, he has weighed and weighed. He has decided upon rolling the dice. He had five. And when he posed the question he roll the dice. He rolled complete sixes. He rolled sixes with such consistency he deemed the fates were with him on the matter of escape, and that was his fate. As they are swinging him lower and lower, Rolly is eyeing the pile of boughs heaped on the edge and decides he could land there. In a swift motion he grabs one of the suspended lines, slices it with his knife, and literally swings over the heads of the astonished loggers and officers below him, well over twenty. He lands in the pile of boughs and rips down the slope as if his life carried no risk at all. By the time he reaches the bottom, he is pursued only by Teddy, one of the company supervisors. It is there he registers he has lost the Bible in the dash down the slope. He plunges headlong into the Walbran river, which is so cold Teddy just stands on the bank and lets him go. He wouldn’t swim it in the interest of catching Rolly, whereas the protest campers did so for recreation. Rolly does two days hiding naked in the woods without food. He has to, as the entire camp has been raided. He does not know whether it might still be watched and there have been constant patrols. More forces were brought in for the search. When this dies down somewhat, (they could have won this contest if they had put a squad at Y-camp 24/7), Steve encounters him while going out to look for wood at night, standing stock still next to a tree in the rain and the dark, barely visible like a stock-still ghost. Rolly did not speak. They gently bring him in by the fire, finish getting him clean, and give him a haircut and complete shave, taking off his long hair and beard. They get ready for the hike to Haddon the following morning, and send someone into town to make arrangements to come back via Haddon to pick him up and get him out.

That was Rolly’s last stand.

As for Dana and the Saltspring family, it was the one time the RCMP went slack. While they took their names, they didn’t run checks on them. Dana gave them a fictional name, Kahlil Gupta, very common for where he was from. They were all released that afternoon without charge. From that day forward, Dana was Kahlil.

One of the more priceless things Rahab ever witnessed was how local television newscasters were forced to describe something they could hardly believe was happening and could hardly manage say with the gravity required, that was an utter affront to their reality. They were forced to trumpet to suburbanites that a man was sitting on a platform in the Walbran smeared in excrement. Not long after someone appeared in the Walbran named Chad. His rejoinder about hearing that news-story was that news from the Walbran normally made it as far as Ontario, but the e-man made it as far as Quebec.

Life in Haddon continued when Rolly was gone. They had to get ready for a major gathering over the weekend; a bicyclist rally that pedalled all the way up to the Walbran in support of saving it. They were coming out to camp and this brought a lot of people. Early to arrive were a Wiccan couple who were friends of Marianne. They came from Saltspring and had been travelling in a VW camper bus. Syd came too. In terms of supply efforts he was a perennial presence. Preparations began, and there was another tree platform to erect. Jon was responsible for setting up another canvas tent for people to stay in and Rahab accompanied him. It was at this moment there was a pause and she saw him in that aspect where he was beautiful, an angelic selfhood. Syd came through and stopped as if encountering a force field, gave an odd look and continued on. Later in the weekend a group of them went to set up the tree platform where the clearcut was marked to go in. Rahab maintained her family’s policy of not being civilly disobedient and so decided the thing she should do is pray for the platform over the time it was set up; she faced the sun over the hours as it crested and set. She prayed for every contingency she could think of, including miraculous protection in case of an accident, returning to the themes over and over again. The Wiccans came along for the platform set up. One was probably transgender, so androgynous that Rahab wouldn’t even consider asking her what she was; it took her two days to decide. She was Albino, and after the platform was finished told Rahab she was powerful and should consider becoming a witch.

She got labelled the ‘Twin Peaks’ girl for her all black, and for being able to pacify Stella Blue, Marianne’s blue heeler cross, by talking to her. The dog was pregnant and went on a tear against another female dog that was brought to camp. For hours she barked and chased the invader out; no one could bring her to heel and no admonishment from Marianne made a difference. Stella Blue was a dog who growled and barked savagely at men wearing hardhats or even baseball caps. If she saw a logging truck, she gave chase and tore after it. People would gasp in fear she’d be run over. Rahab knelt in front of the savage Stella and managed to project with her words (the words themselves were meaningless). She felt herself projecting the emotion of the words to the dog, who sat head uplifted and still, and she filled the space with the empathic emotion of why it was needless for Stella to attack and gave her the feeling she emanated of peace and tranquillity. After she finished speaking to Stella, the dog was mercifully silent for the rest of the night and never maintained the territory again.

After a weekend celebration and setting up of camp with a huge delivery of supplies that accompanied the biker caravan Rahab was back on her way to the Lower Walbran to rejoin her family, who had returned to Glad Lake 9, the spur that they had been told by the logging company and the RCMP they could use indefinitely. She drove with Marianne and Jon (on one ride out of the valley she doubled Marianne on her motorcycle) and after a long ride passed the ‘V’ in the road where the precipice blockade occurred and rounded the corner to find the new camp her father had erected. It came into view on the spur below, a vast long span of green tarps and blue. His new operation was under 110 feet of suspended tarps that were hung over a long suspended rope and grommet-ed together at each seam and roped with anchors to the ground. Many pallets were brought in as flooring for the sake of additional tents and many areas of ground were raked out so that many more people could be housed in the Walbran Hotel. A generator was running incessantly. He’d even been so audacious as to bring up one or two of his black lights and was running the generator to try them. Stella Blue saw him in his baseball cap and turned utterly savage. It was the worst first meeting (between Randy and Marianne) that anyone could have pictured. Rahab herself had a sinking feeling about the camp. She didn’t want to leave the woods. Who would want to live in a clearcut? The generator represented everything about development; the hammering of its engine was incessant aural invasion after hearing only the trickle in Haddon and the Walbran for two weeks. Not as loud but more unceasing than a chainsaw, and loud enough to be heard as soon as they turned the bend, when it felt like a horrific noise. Even Mordor had sprung to mind, just something devilish. Arriving at what was to be ‘home’ was aural assault. There was something in her father’s purpose that seemed to mirror the rest of the world, how driven he was about making this bigger, bigger, better, but he was oblivious that he couldn’t really provide the answer for what. In the personality clash between Randy and Marianne it was already apparent how not many would have an interest in coming to the Hotel, at least not for long. As it was the distance from the centres of activity made them inaccessible for the most part. Though Randy had a mind to change that. Jon and Marianne departed for town.

After they had left Haddon tragedy struck with the next tree sit blockade. A woman named Kathy from Toronto became trapped on her descent from the platform. She had not been supplied with food well enough during the sit and was weakened, probably due to how much more difficult the RCMP made that to do. Erecting a barrier anyone would be arrested for passing meant a tree-sitter would be availed no food supplies. Kathy had also felt pressure to volunteer for the sake of the trees and the movement because there simply was hardly anyone eligible left who had been trained to sit. The arrests had culled too many of the experienced. People who were tired had gone into the city to recharge.

Kathy had very little training. There is a rope method, had she had known it, where when she lost her carabineer hook-up and couldn’t re-latch it, the rope method could have gotten her down. As it was she fell 70 feet after she could no longer hold the rope because she’d lost too much skin on her palms and simply didn’t have the strength anymore. The people there tried their best to break her fall with a sleeping bag, which must have helped. Paul W. says what saved her was that she fell directly in an upright enough position onto a piece of flat ground. She broke her left leg and one of her vertebrae shattered, but her spine was completely intact. She was in traction for 8 months, followed by two different braces for nearly two years. The doctors considered it a miracle her spine was not severed and were too scared to operate, not even to get the bone fragments out. Both Jon and Paul W. felt enormous guilt for not being present at Haddon to help and guide Kathy, to keep her from falling.

MacMillan-Bloedel made good press out of the tragedy; the local news treated it as a heroic charitable act that she was saved by the logging company flying her out to the hospital in their helicopter. MacMillan-Bloedel sent her parents in Toronto a bill of nearly $1000.00 for the transport. At the same time they made a second tree-spiking allegation that was utterly false. They found two large 10-inch spikes extruding 7 inches from a pine that had been used to help pulley a platform up. When tree spiking is done for the sake of sabotage, there would be far more than just two spikes involved. Also they are driven into the wood fully to conceal them and in actual serious efforts concealed with a patch of bark. It’s really a pointless operation if the logger can see the spikes in plain sight and easily remove them before taking a chainsaw to a tree. Malicious spiking conceals the spikes. A sabotage spiking can even be announced, and the spikes must be buried in such a quantity that while the loggers may discover them, they may be stopped by the perpetual nagging fear that they might not find them all, plus the extra labour of getting them all out. With a metal detector they will identify them so in effect you are dealing with a method of serious delay unless such sabotage is totally unexpected. It is a question of whether they are more likely to give up than risk the tedium of saving timber that presents a risk to both loggers and the sawmill, where the labour costs of redeeming it are simply not worth it. At any rate the fabrication on MacMillan Bloedel’s part made good press.

postscript: there are more pictures of the Walbran Valley here.

The Walbran - CHAPTER 7 - Part 6

After the first eviction the policy of the logging company was to keep evicting them so they would always have to move. By keeping every one moving they had less energy to dispense on anything else, a retreating battle. It also spread them all out; the protesters began maintaining a core camp in the woods and the remnant of the one by the road that was more temporary but necessary for a number of things including coordinating road blockades. The road camp was forced to move up onto the line called Glad Lake 50, a considerable walking distance, which forced the protesters to move their forest base camp upstream between the fork where West branch of the Walbran met the South. That was still a long haul, required a new trail to be built, and meant you had to cross the river and get wet every time you wanted to travel between the two. A canoe was brought in and stationed for the crossing. The family was on their third eviction from the second spot they’d been moved to, which was at a large fork in the road built to width to accommodate a semi that had to rotate, a logging truck. It was the exact spot they’d disembarked from the company tour bus in 1990.

When the RCMP forced the family to move again Randy asked to have a site that they and the loggers were amenable to the family staying at indefinitely. The RCMP deliberately came and forced the family to move at the crest of three days of solid rain, when they were the last solid base helping the bedraggled wet protesters. During one of these encounters Rolly was hiding in the camper trailer while the RCMP were outside. It was sitting in the camper trailer that Rolly told Rahab his plan for his next tree-sit, his final solution. Rahab was so struck by the prospect that while he was asking her opinion, she was too dumbfounded to offer one. She had the queer sense that he couldn’t be that serious and well if he was, then it was up to him, which was basically how she responded.

Randy argued his way out of this particular move (by physically measuring and demonstrating that a semi could still rotate and turn at that bend in the road even with their camp in place, and that they’d have to do very little to accommodate one), but it wasn’t long until it happened again. It was during the final exchange that it became clear the RCMP negotiator was calling a company director on satellite phone in order to receive orders on what to do. This time Randy made the logging company drive him all through the valley and up the spur lines until a spur line was agreed upon that the family could indeed stay at indefinitely. It was far away from the bridge and all the active logging lines, nearly five km away by road. But in order to have the logging company on the record saying that wouldn’t interfere with their activities and having guaranteed they could stay indefinitely, it was worth the move. It was in the middle of a clearcut on a spur line called Glad Lake 9. One of the ironies in the Walbran was in the original map names of two lakes in the watershed, Sad Lake and Glad Lake. The surrounding environs of Sad Lake were logged. Glad Lake was inside the park the got created.

The children were sorely crestfallen at the prospect of moving to a clearcut, and one so far away from everybody else. When the family packed from their third eviction and went into town to regroup, Rahab asked to stay out in the valley camping by herself and join the protesters. That’s how she ended up being present for Rolly’s last stand and joined with the camps at GL50 and ‘Y-Camp’, which was on the point between where the West and South river joined and hence got its name. The first thing she learned joining the camp at GL50 came from Mack and was fairly alarming. The company supervisors, three of them, had come into camp to basically speak with those they had identified as the leadership, Mack included. What they told them was that that Randy had never paid any taxes historically and that they did not know how he made his money, and that he didn’t have a job. The truth was he’d managed to raise a family of seven on an income that had existed entirely below the eligible tax bracket and had come by the miracle privilege of living rent free in a home he never bought because the landlady had identified him as a man of God upon meeting him. She’d given him a singular living arrangement for his whole family in a sizable former duplex in 1977. He had no existing job on paper nor historically because he was still tithed to by the majority of the parishioners from his former Church, which had its inception as far back as 1971. She herself worked and so did her brothers as soon as they turned 15. She tried to explain some of this to the protest campers though it was hardly likely to be believable compared to what had been insinuated, that he was a drug dealer. It was obvious the supervisors had come in an attempt to divide and conquer. What seemed more disturbing was the question of how they had come by this information in the first place?

But that was nothing compared to what followed, when Ursula their welfare caseworker notified them that there had been a child abuse report filed against them. Telling them of course was against regulation but she was a member of their church and broke the rules. Furthermore she was in a position to determine who had filed the report and she did, even though it had been filed anonymously. It turned out to be a retired RCMP officer in social services who had never once laid eyes on them. The accusation was that the parents were providing the children with marijuana. Knowing about their arrival ahead of time, Randy insured the whole conversation took place in the driveway. After all the living room had a four themed light show in it that the kids had helped create. He was able to wrap the caseworkers in a knot by saying, “I knew you were coming two weeks ago. When did you know you were coming?” The caseworkers asked to see the four youngest children who were at issue, and they dutifully lined themselves up. They asked Zur if he knew why they were here and Zur replied, “You are here because we are in the Walbran Valley.” The case was dropped.

In the meantime Rahab felt a tentative unease as she took up camping by herself for the very first time and trying to integrate with the protest camp at the same time as a person who had dealt very little with people ‘outside’. It came easily enough. She threw in her first woodland acid trip as soon as she was settled for good measure. She decided on a woodland purpose so there was some direction to this advent/consideration of a first ever try at bushwhacking into the woods, without a compass, and additionally doing it on acid. She was going to try and find Jon’s tree, the fantastical large one he’d found wandering and told her about, just based on his verbal description alone.



She failed at this quite miserably. In all probability she didn’t travel far enough, nor hug the ridge she was supposed to find it on closely enough. The ridge was intractable; she couldn’t even reach the edge. A long time later she learned the probable basis for this by swimming the river alone; it rapidly graduated into a narrow sheer canyon with both sides over 90 ft. high, one of the most beautiful sights she ever witnessed in her life. Swimming it, it was long, took over forty minutes and turned her extremities blue on a summer day. She’d been weaned away from this edge of the ridge as it graduated and became un-traverse-able; she simply couldn’t go forward. In the course of her wandering she came upon a second ridge that she speculated was ‘it’, but that faded to oblivion. Had she made it past the canyon she could in no way see in the woods, she might have gotten back to the edge she was directed to find. As it was she became inevitably lost as there’s no other definition for wandering in the trackless woods with no sense of where you’re supposed to be going. After some fruitless trekking in an attempt to gain some sense of orientation with the sparse directions she’d been provided, and a consequent reckoning where she realized she lost her brother’s precious pipe and her scarf and ended up crying at the sum of events, she stood at an impasse that had nothing to do with the terrain. She’d nearly fallen off a rather barren ‘nurse’ log whose diameter was likely taller than she was in an attempt to gain the ridge, and despite saving herself from the fall gained a massive bruise. She had found a large Red Cedar, yes indeed. But it had not been on a ridge as Jon described. Since it was grand in comparison to many, but she intuited not near the grandiosity Jon had described for the one he’d found, well for reasons unknown she identified it as having an almost feminine quality. That it was not ‘the’ one did not have great relevance; though she wished to have found it, she’d found this one, standing alone among those that were much smaller than itself. It was the one she sat with communing in silence.

Later after the near fall and gaining the ridge she prayed with a tear streamed face, standing wedged between the ridge overlooking the forest and a slender stump that terminated shortly enough that it almost reminded her of a pulpit, that she’d find the things she had lost. The sun must be high heading West but she couldn’t see it. Then she made her descent back to camp, regained her first ridge, and the beautiful river. As the sun began to set high over the hill that divided the Walbran from the Carmanah she saw it shot with a rim of magenta light that seemed to shoot permanent bolts of the same across the sky like immense bolts of lightening, perhaps three of them. It was the only hallucinogenic aspect of the entire trip.

The water of the river, which was firmly real and no illusion, was oh so much, much more than that. The turbulence between the rocks was at a simple level and shallowness where she could see the water shadow beneath on the rocks, every detail of the flow. The sun shone through as it set. In this there was the most pronounced inverted bubble shadows skimming across the rocks at the same velocity as the water, for it was the water’s shadow. And the turbulence, having a prismatic quality, meant it refracted light as well as producing shadow. And what produced the bubble shadows that possessed a rim of light that verged on the divisions in the rainbow, and skimmed along the rock bottom at the speed of water? She could not tell. While she could see all the other turbulence in the tracery of the surface and the shadow it produced, she could hardly discern what produced those refracted bubbles, which gave the water a sprite like quality. She stared at the water entranced until the sun’s set behind the hill took the sight away from her. Then she resigned herself to the challenge of trying to reintegrate back into the camp.

She had never been so scared to enter camp. She was terribly paranoid they might recognize she was on acid and how they might frown upon it. But she carried herself as best she could, concealed her petrified sensation, and it gradually receded. She would have lost most of that night’s sleep to the drug. She eventually confessed to Steve that night that she’d done a trip and lost her brother’s pipe and he regaled her saying they would look first thing tomorrow. One other camper came and they found the bag with the pipe within moments. She made the trek alone to find her scarf and discovered it rather close to the pulpit, which is where she’d realized she’d lost everything. But she never found the great tree. She was just happy for her own keepsake and to have not lost her brother’s. And the water was no hallucination; she’d known that in the moment. It was not the last time she ever saw the bubbles, just by far and away the most fantastic.

She slept right by the river on what almost came close to being a sand bar (these stretches tended to grow blueberries and thimbleberries); it took very little modification to make it flat for her tent provided she had secateurs, which being used for trail building were in good supply. What she does remember is that she paid dearly going into the blockade as it turned out to be the first in a series of nights with little to no sleep. By Sunday night (perhaps two nights later) they were all meeting on the gravel road of Glad Lake 50 in order to plan their next blockade, which they intuited would be their last stand, or close to it. It was Marianne who proposed that if they were going to commit to a blockade that night they should go out with a bang. She thought they should have two simultaneous blockades, one being a platform, and that they should repeat the precipice blockade a second time. She proposed that the platform should be in the newly designated blast zone on GL50 to prevent the road from being built any further. The rock formation was such that it would have to be dynamited. The Workman’s Protection Act regulated that no one could be within 1000 meters of an active blast zone, which would really prevent them from making any further ‘progress’. This was a stupefying-ly daunting proposition in the sense that there was only one night to do it all; no one had every erected a suspended platform in the dark; plus there was the prospect of the second blockade simultaneously, which had been the most challenging they had ever tried. Plus they no longer had the van to use for ballast weight. That had been removed quite quickly as the precipice blockade was something neither the loggers nor the authorities wanted to encounter again. It was Rolly who supported Marianne’s proposition, and that was when he made his proposition public to all, though surely anyone who had been donating to said 5 gallon bucket must have known about it.

What Bucket? Let’s get ‘round to this the round about way by saying that Rolly was a protest veteran at the Nevada nuclear underground testing site. And that at this moment he volunteered himself to be the sitter in the blast zone platform Marianne was proposing. He goes on to say that he has been preparing himself mentally for this moment and knows this will probably be a very serious confrontation, and that he is ready for it. And that back in Nevada as the protest escalated he had found one remaining technique that worked; he’d found a way by which the authorities wouldn’t lay a hand on him when he stood there, wouldn’t dare touch him. Wouldn’t dare arrest him after they’d dragged the remaining resisters away. And that he had decided that maybe he should attempt that here, which brings us back ‘round to the 5 gallon bucket. The bucket was full now, solely of camper contributions, so Rolly declared he felt safe enough using it, -the bucket contents. What were the bucket contents, you ask? Rolly is preparing to do what he did in Nevada, which is get naked and smear himself in excrement. That’s what’s in the bucket.

The protester circle reaction to this mimics Rahab’s reaction when he told her in the camper trailer. It is silent, and then one person says how if he is serious about this and he is the one who is going to be in that platform then it is up to him how he chooses to carry that out. Rolly points out that with the height they are looking at with the roadside trees where they are thinking of erecting the platform, in addition to doing it in the dark, he thinks they are not going to be able to put the platform out of reach of the ‘cherry-picker’, meaning the knuckleboom loader. That means he is going to have to resist coming down, and this is how he plans to do it. Having gone through the inevitability once before with Colin on the precipice blockade most everyone understands the implications. Rolly can’t be violent to resist arrest. No one else has any notion of how to actually resist arrest without having the charges be escalated against him or her. This is actually so extreme and novel he may actually get away with it. What exactly can they charge him with if he just sits there smeared in excrement and they don’t want to touch him? Besides which, there are simply no other options anyone can think of. And Rolly is the sitter. He gets to decide.

With common accordance among the group they set about deciding who was going to do what, which team would work on the precipice blockade and which team would work on the platform in the GL50 blast zone. Jon was part of the platform group as expected. Rahab was hesitant at incriminating involvement because of course the last exhortation she received from her parents when they left was ‘don’t get arrested’, so she ended up trekking back for supplies and tools that were needed from Y-Camp with another Frank, who was mild mannered, middle aged but youthful looking and blond, whom she gradually became good friends with, but that came later. Frank may have been trying to get her away from the platform erection, which was just as well because there came an impasse where something went wrong; Jon got trapped without sufficient equipment on the rope midway between the platform and the tree and could have died if he had fallen. Apparently it took him quite a while to extricate himself out of the situation; she missed it all. When they left he was operating on one of the lines to the four trees it would take to bring the platform up, and he was climbing up there on the tree limbs at 40 feet in the dark without a harness or any equipment, unlike anyone else.

The precipice blockade was erected with an even shorter log than the previous one which meant it wasn’t going to last, and Rolly was in for his confrontation pretty much from the get go. What was amazing was the form of ballast the protesters had managed to hold it using no more than rocks and small logs. Dana from Singapore and a family with one child from Saltspring Island had volunteered to be Rolly’s witness support, and had set up camp on the road within eye-shot of his platform. They were trying for a brief morning sleep. After getting to survey the precipice blockade Rahab made one last run of several back to Y-camp to do with equipment and supplies; she brought Rolly back her Bible. Rolly was now aloft and had a makeshift tarp canopy, a bucket for a toilet, a bucket for supplies, and obviously the notorious 5-gallon bucket, which must have been some haul. Along with the last food supplies she passed up she offered him her Bible and he took it. The thinnest in the world, it had a marbled black and blue cover and leafs trimmed with gold. He asked her to take the stirrups and some remaining equipment back with her so it would not be confiscated. She spent the entire long walk back in the sun calculating how late it was, wondering how soon the loggers would get through the precipice blockade and whether she’d see the convoy crest the hill in front of her and so be arrested for aiding and abetting for the climbing equipment she was carrying.

Dana and the Saltspring family (child of four included) were arrested before noon because the RCMP deemed they were not packing quickly enough when they proceeded to force them to move a kilometre away from the platform. Everyone was fearful that Dana would be deported, and they knew that thanks to his having been a conscientious objector who refused to finish his compulsory service with the Singaporean Army, this meant he’d be going to military prison. (His objection may have had some relation to the fact that his entire lower calf was crushed to a pulp by a steel girder whilst building a bridge for said army. You would question why, after an injury like that, why did they not just release him from service?)

The outcomes of these matters were lost upon the particular people alluded to here because Rahab and Jon both discovered they had lost the ability to sleep the next night, though Jon’s was forced by being in transit. Jon was far enough along that on the highway trip between the Walbran and the city he found he was hallucinating a bear crossing the highway when there wasn’t one. He’d lost four straight nights of sleep now; her position was similar. After the platform was finished and they lost another night, it was basically decided that Jon needed to go to Haddon for some rest and recovery. He probably hiked there, which wasn’t a short trek; taking it easy it would take two days. Haddon was at the top of the valley in a different Tree Farm license called TFL 44, which was run by MacMillan Bloedel. MacMillan Bloedel was on a major push right now to thrust their spur line as far as they could to Anderson Lake to prevent a park from being created in the Upper Walbran Valley. It was where the next tree sit confrontations were planned to take place and Jon would be responsible for setting up a new base camp. Rahab was planning to follow the next day with more camping supplies. With the motorcycle panniers she could carry all that she needed, but had only been driven on the road route to Haddon once. She lost her way on her motorcycle among the endless spur lines, had to return to camp at dark to get better directions and try again tomorrow. There were no maps. The motorcycle route was entirely through clear cuts and only met forest at its end, the end they were fighting for. It involved going up the hill sides to return back down into the valley. If she had gone farther, made it far enough to judge and guide herself by morphology, she might have made it. The directions got her lost in the spurs. The second time it all made sense, and she found him.

postscript: there are more pictures of the Walbran Valley here. Note of clarification: the 'Mariane' in this photo series is not the Marianne the narrative.

The Walbran - CHAPTER 7 - Part 5

Rahab still rates this day as among the worst she has ever experienced and it is burned in her memory that it was a Thursday. It was the day she felt wrested of her citizenship, found it to be utterly worthless in the face of a foreign corporation. The RCMP arbitrarily kicked her off land that belonged her (as it belonged to all the BC public who were residents and Canadian Citizens) by massaging an injunction at will for the sake of a foreign corporation. As the evictions progressed, because the injunction was subject to what the company defined as where it was actively working, they were subject to watching the RCMP call and take orders from directors at Fletcher-Challenge with every eviction. By the third eviction of the family this happened right in front of them, though the RCMP were loathe to admit who they were calling.

This was the day she watched the bridge to nowhere become just a bridge to another capillary in the latticework of ugly habitat destroying roads splayed across the province that served no other purpose other than as inroads to its destruction, for the company has never yet been able to fulfill its purpose with that bridge, which was to put clearcuts smack in the middle of the biggest groves between the confluence of the west and southeast branches. (Though they still want to.) In other words the most ‘profit’ they probably derived from this day’s ‘work’ was the fact that they destroyed the protest camp. The road they attempted with it is a meaningless gouge into what is now parkland and the clearcut at the other end a pittance, except that it cut into the heart of the Walbran and wreaked blow down and stream damage for years to come in the areas where everyone walks.

It was the day she watched the first tree at the end of the road felled; it was over 850 years old. Due to its sheer size the Red Cedar took the remainder of the working day to kill, and when it crashed the logger responsible sang a song to celebrate. Protesters cried out at the sight. Jon counted the rings after it died; he gave up at 846 when he still had perhaps 200 years to finish. It was around 14 ft. in diameter at the base. He took some of the core wood and carved Rahab a crucifix. One of the same size and scope died as blow down in the woods within two years thanks to the clearcut they drove in. It fell on the stream and the trail.

Even as the sense of mourning at the death of the tree rocked her and she heard the logger sing she understood how the grieving was based in herself. It was in her and all their minds that this bridge was the last line that should have never been crossed; the Walbran itself had been broached years earlier before they reached the heart of it. She didn’t even know at the time precisely where the boundary to the watershed was. And this was what humans had done to the earth since time immemorial, what was happening all over the world. It was the last wave of annihilation ascribed as ‘how the West was won’ continuing a remorseless rampage of destruction a mere six kilometres from the last coast fed by human demand unconscious of it own consequence. It was that unconscious greed industrialized, the logger who estimates he’s cut down a million trees in his lifetime, without even registering the implication of what it’s taken to maintain his livelihood, compounded by the many there are like him aiding and abetting corporations that are robbing them and their future generations blind by robbing the land, feeding massive pulp and paper mills that were shortly and easily outmoded as the precipitous volume of wood they demanded to run went into decline.

On that morning despite the fact that there was a bridge of more than a 40 ft. span and additional distance on both sides beyond that in between where the day’s logging was to commence and The Walbran Hotel, meaning there was no possibility of physical danger from the logger’s work site and it was irrelevant whether they were inside or outside the 100 meter distance prescribed by law, despite the fact that they were in no way inhibiting logging activity as prescribed by the injunction since everyone had already driven past the camp to what was now a ‘work site’ rather than the entry into primeval wonder, the RCMP arbitrarily placed their barrier for the active logging zone and the enforcement of the protection injunction right on the other side of the Walbran Hotel, putting it inside.

Everyone asleep in the tents that morning was hauled out one by one by the RCMP, befuddled sleepy tourists, including a girl who had just arrived from Sweden. Rahab felt overwhelmed. She tried to tell the RCMP that only her father knew the packing system for the camp and how it all fit into the trailer camper, besides which, it was too large now to ever fit. There was even a surfboard on the wall of the camper trailer canopy. (Why in heck had someone brought up a surfboard?) She was told she would either pack or be arrested. The entire protest camp, no matter how far it extended into the woods, was dismantled under the same orders. Everyone was driven out; it had nothing to do with where the perimeter defined as the active logging zone to enforce the protection injunction was supposed to end.

Jon had just built a new bender camp well within the woods and certainly beyond the ‘active logging zone’ perimeter of 100 meters that day. It’s not like anyone was measuring. He’d asked Rahab and Zeb to help him collect the curved cedar branches he needed which gave name to the structure. The RCMP came in and drove everyone out, taking the bender canopy apart and confiscating the first stove the protest camp had ever had. It was at that point Alan just sat on the ground in Jon’s precious bender and refused to move. He was arrested. In the minds of the campers they had been out there long enough it was the equivalent of losing their home. The main protest camp was by the riverbank at the end of the road; what Jon had built was intended to be the new one on higher ground to avoid heavy rainfall when the river burst its banks with the express intent of giving the protesters a core relief camp away from the main road, the loggers and the tourists that were becoming more and more frequent. The trail that descended to the main protest camp from the road was ploughed and turned into gouges of mud by skidder that hauled a log up and down the slope repeatedly for just that purpose. The main camp and Jon’s new base camp were completely dismantled.

As Rahab and Zeb went about packing The Walbran Hotel under RCMP surveillance she happened to look up into the trees on the slope and see Jon crouching and watching her. The expression that blazed in her eyes was such that Jon put his face in his hands in grief and disappeared. Later she found out that Jon’s tent had been found even though it was hundreds of feet inside the woods off-trail and well concealed. The RCMP had woken him in the morning by dragging him out by his ankles. To slip across unnoticed to the road built side of the bridge this may very well have been the time he used the 5 inch lip of the girder under the bridge to cross back and forth unseen by both the RCMP and the loggers, easily over 30 feet above the river below. Later he painted ‘Wilderness Forever’ on the girder with his customary Celtic knot work.



By the end of the working day Rahab and Zeb had managed to pack the entire camp alone. Without a place to sleep now, no vehicle to move it with and no sense of what to do next they tried to assess in a state of shock the same state in everyone around them. They regrouped, accepted the pack job was as secure as they could make it, and began packing for themselves with one small tent to go into the woods. The focal point where the shock transmuted to active anger was Jesse, and his way of dealing with the pent up anger was to start a bonfire. There were curious dynamics at work. The logging company had brought in a fire truck in the afternoon that looked like it belonged to the 1940’s. They had parked it smack in the middle of the two camps, meaning between the Walbran Hotel and the Protest Camp. They had destroyed the First Aid tent in order to park it. And with the fire truck they planted a 24-hour security guard, who soon multiplied into three with a large camper trailer stationed right in the middle of the two camps. A logging company normally never involves itself in fire prevention, and the Walbran was the last such place it may have been needed. They’d brought in this fire truck that barely even ran in order to place a security detail in the middle of camp. The fire truck was never even started the entire time it was there.

And strangely in a day that was heavy on symbolism and bare on any actual work, they’d left and stacked a heap of freshly logged and split firewood at the end of the bridge. This could very well have been the wood from the protest camp, newly stacked, but there seemed to be more of it. This stack had a fallen tree they had just sawed down that morning going straight into this pile of firewood that had been left. Jesse in his anger was gathering all the scattered split wood lying around and adding it to the stack. He had the makings for a prodigious bonfire. Rahab was staring at it thinking, if fire succeeds in setting on the log, it has the ability to transmit to the forest itself. This potential had to be stopped. The male anger and aggression manifest in Jesse had no course but destruction. The males in the camp were either completely incapacitated by what had happened or angry, besides which nearly everyone had vanished. Jon appeared at this point and didn’t give a damn about the fire; he was so angry he’d rather see it burn like a funeral pyre. They were all devastated by the loss of the forest they knew. It was a funeral on so many levels it needed an expression, loss of primeval life, loss of country, loss of justice, loss of the camp. The security guard was watching everything on the bridge; he had been placed to report and if need be allege another act of ‘destruction’ that would be blared and blazed way beyond its existing potentiality in the first place. It could be meant to create a pretext for the fire truck having to be there. You had to wonder why Jesse was there in the first place.

Jesse had started a bonfire with wood that could have otherwise lasted the camp for maybe even a week, that had a fallen tree stuck in the middle of it artfully leading to a potential forest fire. On the bridge there was a five gallon bucket with a length of rope designed for drawing water from the river, about 35 ft. down. She wryly thought to herself about how easily men were made impotent or out of it as she grumbled and hauled bucket after five gallon bucket from the river until she had put the fire out. Zeb was with her and they amicably talked to the security guard while they hauled and he just watched and did nothing. After she finished she suggested to Jon it was time they just went for a walk and he agreed. She mulled in her mind that she could not head far given she was responsible for the family camp sitting on the road, that they were all exhausted, that Jon knew the woods so well it wasn’t like you could find anything new with him, nothing that would increase his awe beyond his own discovery, and that all they really needed was a moment of peace. All she cared about was how to best restore Jon’s spirit.

She led them off trail just out of sight of the bridge where no one bothered to look if they had a purpose. Just out of sight of the main concourse, but none of them had been there before. Step off the trail, and you were where no one had ever been. Her aim was where the river was confined into a small canyon of the blue tinged smoky intrusion formed granite so rugged and so common to the west BC coast. The cleft was so deep they could not see the bottom, the water emerald green that went opaque from the depth, which is saying something; the water is so pure the green is clear to perhaps 20 meters depth during the non turgid summer months.

They sat on the ridge of the cleft and smoked a pipe together in the quiet where the river eddied to stillness smooth as glass through the chasm, listening to the breeze that wafted through the trees, and listening they found that the wind was at a perfect quietude where they could hear each tree across the river individually, each with its own sonic fingerprint that was the way the breeze caressed the individual branches, and how it was a chorus…the trees were singing…she knew what the text in Isaiah meant, ‘all trees shall clap their hands’; one their father had mentioned over and over since he was convinced it was a reference to the altered state induced by drugs. Below them the eddy in the river was funnelled through the canyon in a single winding, spiralling thread, which they could see clearly because of the fallen leaves from the alder upstream. They were a yellow sunny gold in contrast to the surrounding emerald and evergreens. The leaves were crowded into an undulating cone at the mouth of the canyon, and guided by the eddy, they passed though the canyon one by one in a winding and serpentine yet single file. And once they passed through the subtle current opened up and the leaves spread out again in the emerald pool beyond, spare and dispersed.

They were back in the sublime woods, just steps beyond the day’s destruction, restored by the peace. It was like it had never even existed though the time could be measured in moments until the place was within its grasp, given the longevity this climax ecosystem had taken to attain itself. But it drove in the sense that what they’d lost was mere footsteps away. Zeb and Rahab both stripped and took a swim, redressed, and the trio returned to the new front line. When they came out of the woods and crossed the bridge they sighted the green Torino wending its way down the road, a timely surprise since they had managed to arrive back just before Rahab and Zeb had absconded to the woods for good. (Both were a little disappointed.) Their parents had been apprised of events on the way in, and the first thing Randy said when he rolled down the window was to unpack the camp. In light of the day’s events, Rahab and Zeb couldn’t believe their ears. In fact he’d negotiated with the RCMP to set up camp basically not far past the boundary the RCMP had erected that morning. As it was with the whole family back, they had to re-establish the whole camp before nightfall. Rahab and Zeb helped put up the camp it had taken them the whole day to take down. The only thing remiss was that the mirror to the little bathroom sink unit had gotten cracked.

The protest camp re-established itself downstream. Rahab went to visit them there in the rain and was shocked out her mind returning at dusk to find the trail disappeared under the trees killed for the road swath, and that trying to navigate through the fallen trees produced a state where she became utterly disoriented. The waste of where she’d walked made her cry and so did becoming lost so easily. She knew she could break a leg in a split second just by slipping off one of the felled trees, because you didn’t know the depth below between you and the ground, where it actually was, nor what there might be in between. It was a hopeless criss-cross jumble of layer upon layer of fallen trees that still had their limbs, including broken ones, and it was getting too dark to see. Trying to go underneath would be impassable, dark or not. It was the same for the whole road swath at that stage, including under the new platforms that had been established as soon as the cutting across the bridge had begun that Thursday and Friday.

Right away the new front line was where the camp had just been and there was a desperate battle with higher stakes to keep the company from logging and road-building any further. The next tree platform was in effect ground zero, past where the road’s end had been. The battle was a real one for by pushing the road in the company was defining what areas were not pristine any longer and wouldn’t be considered for preservation in the future. It was the year of a provincial election run and absolutely critical. The public attention the Walbran was getting had forced the NDP leader running for premier (Mike Harcourt) to promise that if elected he’d end ‘the war in the woods’ and he had promised to dramatically increase the percentage of provincial parkland throughout BC, create a new forestry act and basically refurbish forestry policy with a round table consultancy process they established called CORE. It was the NDP who won. It went without saying that ground zero for this change and the first park that needed to be made was the one where a confrontation was taking place, the upper Carmanah Valley and the Walbran Valley, which were adjacent to each other.

In an effort to up the difficulty rating, the ‘ground zero’ platform was erected 92 feet in the air, as per Jon’s proposal that it be the highest yet. The protesters were determined to man this platform so it wouldn’t fall into company hands, and the confrontation this produced went to a whole new level. As it was, they managed to rotate the platform through five different sitters before it got torn down and the trees destroyed. It outlasted the second platform that was erected behind it. Rolly was one of the sitters to man this platform, and he managed his sit without getting arrested. Steve was another and he didn’t get arrested either, though he certainly got levitated. He was up for five days. It was for these two platforms that the helicopter was brought into play as an intimidation tactic.

Quite accidentally Jon ended up being the last sitter to man this platform that was his own idea. And it turned out Jon was the one where the Mounties decided as per their ‘always’ motto, that they were going to get their man. The next planned sitter, the one who had volunteered was a woman and she was about to go up late on a weekend afternoon when the RCMP/logger contingent appeared driving down the road, which was unheard of. She was standing at the base of the tree with all her gear at the ready when this happened. It was the moment when the opposition had decided to try and dismantle the platform during off-time so no one could man it the following week. With the RCMP driving down the road, there literally was not enough time for her to stirrup her way up sufficiently out of reach before the police and company were upon them. Jon also thought the confrontation that was in the offing maybe shouldn’t be manned by a woman who was relatively new to the protest and to climbing. Without hesitation Jon got the harness and climbing gear from her, but not the stirrups. He climbed an old rotten snag manually, and managed to use this to leap onto a second tree that brought him high enough to grasp the limbs of the third that the platform was tied to. In this way he managed to man the platform before the RCMP and loggers managed to take it down by being what he was, the best natural tree climber anyone had ever seen, Mother Nature’s son. He managed to get this shot while he was up there.

There was a policy shift to monitoring the platform 24/7 so no one would get back down without arrest, and no one would have a chance to get back up on it. I may not remember rightly but he was up there for maybe three very suspenseful days. No one wanted Jon to be arrested and forced to leave the country. And no one knew how to get him down. On Monday after the working day had ended (and the loggers chain sawed the road swath deep into the woods) Rahab was high up on the ridge looking over the river and the new logging site. She was there because that was where Randy had built their outhouse for the long term, a nice one relatively speaking with a seat proper that was concealed but had a spectacular view. The trail was deliberately innocuous at the roadside and never discovered, but it involved climbing up three successive logs that steps were hewn into like a staircase, if your staircase was a log. From up there Rahab could see that the RCMP cameraman had concealed himself at the edge of the forest; he hadn’t left. And he had waited for Jon to take his mask off. She wanted to scream a warning but knew even if she managed to yell loud enough, no one would know what it was about. Screaming Jon’s name to alert him would be just as damning in identifying him, and she was so far away she didn’t think she could yell loud enough. She watched with a sinking feeling as the RCMP cameraman managed to captured his first successful footage to identify the sitter. They had plenty of previous footage to cross-reference.

The next afternoon the RCMP erected yellow ticker tape around the parameter of the trees the platform was suspended from. They said that anyone who crossed the ticker tape would be charged with aiding and abetting and under arrest. The potential to be arrested now had nothing to do with the injunction or whether there was active logging occurring or not. Then the RCMP manned a white van at the end of the bridge 24/7 to insure no one crossed the line, so that no one could give Jon supplies or replace him. They rotated a pair of officers in this van every 12 hours. Soon enough they equipped it with a spotlight, and they began shining it around the area and on the sitter periodically to check and prevent him from sleeping. In support of Jon the protesters made a point of setting up a campfire circle that night right in front of the van and singing songs. They were reasserting their right to the space where their fire circle had ‘always’ been at the end of the bridge and was no more. That night was a full moon and everyone was waiting in suspense for its rise; Rahab watched it with a sinking heart, for it cast enough light they all felt that if John waited that long to escape, he’d be seen too easily. The moon rose and with it the sense that the game was already up. There were combined teams of loggers and RCMP together combing the newly hewn perimeter of the woods with major flashlights, all in the interest of either catching him or making sure no one got to the platform trees to replace him.

All the family could do was pray, and for Jon to escape was something Rahab prayed in earnest about continuously. It was late into the night when Jesse walked up to her and said in a low voice, ‘I have something for you’, and unmasked Jon from under his massive wool poncho. When they hugged she had scarcely been more elated in her life.

Jesse had been hanging out at the fire circle and had hovered diligently until he saw the chance to make a move, and had slipped unseen right through the clearcut. When he got to the base of Jon’s tree he ordered in a whisper (that had to reach 90 feet) for Jon to come down, ‘Now’. Jon hesitated when he dropped his rappel line, asking for confirmation that the lines had indeed reached the ground. Jesse responded ‘Yes’ and rappel Jon did, as fast as he could, only to discover the lines were at least eight feet short of the ground. He crashed through the criss-crossing limbs to the ground underneath and could have easily broken a limb himself, or been gored or bruised by a broken limb, but was unhurt. Jesse put his hooded poncho on Jon, which was big enough to reach Jon’s knees. They managed to slip back into the camper’s fire circle, and then slipped past the RCMP white van. Then Jesse went to find Rahab; she was the first person to learn that Jon had escaped.

The family reacted without hesitation and set to smuggling Jon out of the Walbran Valley immediately. They filled the Ford Grand Torino with a few family members, put Jon in the back seat and drove out that night. They made it past the manned gate where there were now both company security as well as the RCMP maintained full time. It was now the RCMP who questioned the driver going out as well as going in. They used flashlights at night and would check the passengers. The RCMP was responsible for utilizing a gate on Public Crown Land that was being operated illegally against the public. Randy made it through the questioning with Jon as a passenger without incident (probably because they were familiar with the car carrying the family and it was full); he stayed at their home in Victoria for a few days. As a result Jon was never arrested in the Walbran Valley. Even though they figured out that he’d been the one, he hadn’t been caught. Unless the protesters had done their fire circle in support, Jon would have never gotten out. It took a maverick like Jesse. It took the active support of the entire camp. And it took having a secondary support, a family with more neutrality who were less subject to inspection, to successfully drive him out. They did not realize Jon was gone until the following morning. Two RCMP officers were blamed for Jon’s escape and were fired from the force. It was a major embarrassment. Jon’s major regret was that no one had the coordination and wherewithal to put someone up in the platform after he came down; the platform was lost.

During this interval Randy made himself quite friendly with the security guards monitoring everyone, and it wasn’t quite so conniving as ‘know your enemy’. He genuinely reached out to everyone. With him it was ‘convert your enemy’ and in the long term he did. The security when it dwindled to two men on shifts eventually began to help the family, which eventually led to their being fired. He visited the new arrivals in their trailer regularly. By this time Rahab had taken to wearing black all the time though she didn’t quite know why, whether it was to convey how black she felt or how black she was, or a readily recognized surface value, perhaps it was in mourning for the woods. The morbidity that prompted her to do so was too deep for words and if asked, she responded that it had to do with the woods. The company security speculated that she was a witch, but her father had set them straight. His amiability got her into the trailer to casually ask the one question she cared about, the nagging fact that one of these security guards had addressed Jon by his last name when not even she had known it. So after a mild flirt and a jocular introduction (“I wear white underwear though” –accompanied by a flash) she asked how come they knew who everyone was? Oh, responded one, we take down all of your license plates. Then we go to the Canadian Police Information Centre in Vancouver and run all of the plates to attach them to names through the vehicle registration. "Oh" was all she said back. She didn’t even know if that was a real institution, a real building; she’d never heard of it before. She did not attack what blew her mind about it, that a foreign multinational corporation’s paid security was being given card carrying access to data on Canadian citizens, citizens in general, from the police force that was supposed to serve and protect. The police had given the security guards carte blanche access to their central database in Vancouver. They could walk in there and do a search any time they wanted. Within a few years the RCMP was caught in a scandal because they had allowed two anti-abortion groups access to files on people and groups that were pro-abortion through the exact same centre. But the fact that they had also done this for a foreign logging corporation never came to light, though similar data sharing and exchange on people was documented for the protest in Clayoquot Sound.

postscript: there are more photos of the Walbran Valley here.

The Walbran - CHAPTER 7 - Part 4

The family learned of intricacies, such as that Yellow Cedar has never been artificially reproduced. It cannot be made to reproduce in a nursery. No one knows why this is, but any Yellow Cedar reproduced by humans is done by cuttings, not by seed. In a clearcut only three species tend to be replanted (Red Cedar, Douglas Fir and Western Hemlock), superseding the abundance there was before and the variation that comes with different elevations. It used to be pure monoculture, and Red Alder groves would be clearcut just for the sake of replacing them with Douglas Fir. Red Alder (Alnus rubra) was considered a waste tree. (Being known for its vigorous growth means it would produce wider grained lumber.) No one knew that in succession Alder is an establishing (pioneer) species that harnesses nitrogen in its root nodules, allowing other trees to become established after because they literally enrich the soil. On the drive to the valley many old alder and maple groves were passed. After all the other trees were running out, they began to see these groves being clearcut as well.

She remembers visiting the clearcut when it began on Glad Lake Main with a woman who could only make her think of Puck because of her round elven face and unibrow, and how she cried. She remembers her conversation with Simon at the waterfall, a Welshman who went into politics there years later, because there were moments it took a wee bit of concentration not to be distracted by the fact that he was nude (and she wasn’t); she first met him sunning himself on the rock by the waterfall cascades. She remembers the night she and Judah smoked up with Paul the Australian and a little of what they spoke about, being the only time they addressed God and spirituality, which was a bit of an anathema. She remembers a night sitting in the circle around the fire where the light made his face look angelic and he smiled. She remembers her burgeoning friendship with English Jon and when he first saw Marianne walking across the bridge, a beautiful spirited small proportioned pixie with flaming red hair dyed red down to her waist and pale blue eyes, and that she sensed exactly what the fates had in store. She remembers when Frank the Dutchman, who would ride a motorcycle there and back (hardly any other people did this but she ended up doing it as well, and so did her parents). She remembers when Frank made spicy Thai peanut sauce for the rice because there was so much peanut butter in camp and not much else. And then there was Rolly, who had been a former Green Beret in Vietnam and who had protested at Nevada nuclear testing sites. She remembers Velcrow and Heather, and how Velcrow and his partner filmed it all and made ‘The Road Stops Here’. Then there was the Toronto group of Mack and Corrine and Bea (who were inseparable), Maggie, Lynne, and the mild mannered jovial Kathy who ended up being The Walbran Martyr. The Toronto group was a constant unflagging presence with Mack being a sitter more than once. And there was Dana from Singapore, who would be forced to change his name. Dana and Jon in particular had to avoid being arrested or being sitters because they were past the length of time they were allowed to visit Canada and would be deported if arrested. Aussie Paul was probably in the same boat; he was one of the first people they met hiding out in the woods on that first day hike.

And she remembers when things began to turn. It was the weekend and the camp was drawing a considerable amount of people; over the weekend Sylvia had estimated 60, and this build-up was recurring. It was starting to attract the odd rowdy type and some drinkers, people whose mentality was party. It also had attracted an unusual Native man named Jesse. He walked straight into camp one day and stopped at Randy’s sign listing God’s attributes, identifying Them as YHWH. He noted that with interest. The camp was developed enough now that it had a good first aid tent and Sylvia had volunteered to be a nurse there. When the family left over the weekend, Rahab and Zeb took the liberty to get more involved with the protest, attending the strategy meeting. Zeb helped with the blockade set-up, which took during place during the night. They were still deliberately peripheral and only acted as witnesses, but they were there before 6 am Monday morning for the purpose. It was an idea Aussie Paul put forward that was taken, and it was a truly daring exercise that had never been attempted in blockade history before.

The last leg of the drive into the valley befit the territory; the road was high up on a very steep slope that descended nearly straight down to the east Walbran river perhaps 500 meters. There was a 90-degree turn where this went back into a crevasse with a small creek tumbling down the centre and the road was actually V-shaped. The slope after the turn was a not quite perfect drop cliff that gradually descended over 100 feet. On that side the logging company had put large logs to prevent anyone from driving off the cliff. There was an abandoned green van in the valley that had basically been donated. Paul suggested they use the cliff strategically for a blockade by cutting a notch into the barrier log. They would get a large enough downed tree to straddle across the road so that its length reached out over the cliff edge and rest it in the notch. Paul had already noted where there were tree falls close by suitable for the purpose. On the tip of the tree they would suspend a platform. This was where English Jon would be in play. The abandoned green van would provide the counterweight for the log blocking the road with the sitter on the other end hanging over the cliff edge. The van was to be filled with rocks. So long as the sitter was on the platform, the logging company could not remove the van and its contents. Nor could they cut through the log to get through, for that would send the sitter to their death. A man named Colin (whose nickname was ‘Wolf’) volunteered to be the sitter over the cliff.

The weekend was utilized for the set-up; on Sunday they worked through the night. There were two members of Greenpeace present. They participated in the blockade set up, leaving before dawn and basically told the participants ‘we were never here’. However by the time of the Tuesday morning paper curiously the word was out. It was not long before it was conclusive that there were plants, moles within the protest camp, infiltrators placed by either the logging company or the RCMP. It made no difference which party had hired and placed them; the RCMP were using company hirelings as their own investigative resource. It didn’t appear Jesse was one of them. During the previous week he had threatened Sylvia with a knife, demanding painkillers from the first aid tent. Then again, he was creating that element of instability; the camp was becoming wary of him. He was a big man.

Rahab and Zeb were present as witness support Monday morning. Still acting under the precautions of their parents’ policy to avoid risking arrest and acting only as a support base for the protest movement, they dutifully kept their distance and sat on a log on the other side of the ‘V’ with Colin and the blockade in full view. They did not arrive early enough to see the logger’s arrival, but were told it had been an unusually large procession of six vehicles that morning that had come just at the break of dawn. At their usual accustomed speed they had turned that 90-degree corner around the sheer rock with no sense of what lay in store and narrowly avoided a six-vehicle bumper-to-bumper collision. The bulk of the vehicles left and the RCMP were notified. When asked what difficulty rating they would give this blockade on a scale of out of ten, the RCMP and loggers rated it an ‘8’. It suffered from a design flaw, which unfortunately ended its run shortly. A ‘cherry-picker’ was notified and brought into the valley, basically a knuckleboom loader truck with a long jointed swivel arm and platform on the end. It was long enough to reach the platform. English Jon was roving the road between the blockade and where Rahab and Zeb were sitting on the other side. He was taking notes of what happened in his notebook as part of his effort to work for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, who were willing to hire him in order to help keep him in the country. There was a woman going into hysteria wailing about Colin’s life being put in danger and other protesters trying to settle her.

The RCMP on the cherry picker platform went out repeatedly to confront Colin. Colin voluntarily ended his sit based on the negotiation and threats he received for non-compliance, that if he did not accept being arrested at this time, then the charges would be further stacked against him. Faced with the threat of continually escalating charges as non-compliance was judged as an increase in contempt, Colin stepped down and joined the the RCMP corporal on the cherry picker. The fact that they had a cherry picker that could reach the platform put the onus on Colin and made him vulnerable to increasing the threat of the contempt charges that would be laid, since sitting there was simply based on his refusal. Each time he refused to leave the platform was going to be counted against him as another instance of contempt against the court. Rahab looked at Jon’s notes where he transcribed the time that Colin came down; the blockade concluded at around high noon, and around 1 pm for the first time, massive machinery was rolled into the Walbran including an excavator. It so happened that this morning they had actually been blocking a new arrival of the machines. Or as it turned out, maybe it was the other way around.

There was a deep sense of disappointment in losing the cliff platform so quickly; it had been the first of its kind anywhere in the world; Paul said so and Paul was one to know. He had first been a rainforest protester in Australia, then the Amazon. Now he was in BC. His next intended destination was the Sarawak in Malaysia. In that sense Aussie Paul was the one individual Rahab happened to speak to who had come specifically with the intent of protesting in BC the ‘Brazil of the North’ if not specifically the Walbran Valley; not even the Toronto group had arrived with that intent even though they had a history of protesting the Gulf War and on other subjects. They simply had come out to hike the West Coast Trail, hadn’t known about the new waiting list system, and someone had re-directed them to the Walbran Valley so they could make use of their holiday. There was a second individual who was a professional protester of sorts who’d arrived for the sake of protesting in the Walbran Valley; that was Rolly. Rolly and Jesse were like senior statesmen in the group purely due to their relative age; Jesse was not around for any duration nor was there leadership by definition. Paul W. was in camp during this interim and with Ian M. had proposed another strategy, in fact he’d nearly killed himself coming up with a way to climb into the giant cedar at the end of the road, something stirrups could never encompass. It had taken going up three different trees in succession to do it. 'The Road Stops here’ was the key, this tree was the key, and someone should be stationed in it. This idea was not attended to when he left; he was not present for the precipice blockade.

When a piece of the equipment roared past on a quad axle lowbed towed by a semi Rahab had never seen any machinery of that sort that large that close. It felt especially defeating. The protesters were undaunted and continued as usual; at the end of the working day Marianne and a few others drove out to the clearcut at Glad Lake Main which is where the machinery had been parked, to scope out where to tree-sit next. At the close of the day there was already a security guard by the machinery. He was alleging that the protesters had sabotaged the equipment, which mystified the group. First off, the only blockade prepared had been the cliff blockade; based on how effective they expected it to be there had been no tree sitters or protesters sent to the Glad Lake Main site. No protesters had gone there that day until the end of the working day. The equipment would have been under watch all day with the company working at that site in the valley for the day, so if it had been a maverick action against protest camp policy, how could it have been pulled off?

The Tuesday edition of The Times Colonist (the local city paper) ran two headlines the next morning. They ran a headline about the first ever cliff blockade platform sit. Above it however they ran a headline alleging that company machinery had been vandalized. It was a while before Rahab was in town again and was able to see this paper. Based on Jon and her notes from that day Rahab was aware of a serious discrepancy; the story the newspaper had been given by the logging company for when the vandalism occurred, when the company alleged it had happened, the machinery had not even been in the valley yet! And indeed by the time it arrived, there had only been a three to four hour window before Marianne and her crew drove up and were informed of the vandalism for it to have possible occurred. With the company workers present during this interval and working around the machinery this was tantamount to impossible, nor was the type of vandalism that had happened to the machines ever identified. It was a precisely coordinated smear campaign to discredit and dismantle the protest, specifically timed to divert from the cliff blockade itself.

Rahab never felt an impetus to write a letter to the editor and correct this discrepancy; she had been subject to her letter to the editor being edited once before on another subject entirely specifically to neuter its sense of relevance. Based on her impression of the censorious nature of the paper, and the fact that they’d swallowed the company line uncontested like pablum and not fact checked it at all, she felt that anything she wrote asserting the falsity of the story would never see the light of day. It was far too calculated a piece of propaganda to be anything else. If that was its intent, contesting it would not be permitted. After all the 13 largest logging companies in BC were already in full gear in the province, having hired Burson-Marsteller to concoct the BC Forest Alliance as a lobbying corporate front group supported by their workers. They had the funding, and one of the largest, most effective, most morally bereft New York PR firms available had been unleashed to reverse public sentiment in the province. And the key to reversing public sentiment was to label the environmental protesters vandals. It was impeccably timed in another way for that week.

On Tuesday night Rahab and Zeb slept on the bridge so they could watch the shooting stars in August as they went to sleep, right above the trickling sound of the river. They were woken on the bridge at 6:00 am by the loggers, who had driven straight up ‘their’ line to the ‘The Road Stops Here’ bridge and the protest camp rather than to the usual working sites. 6:00 am was much earlier than usual to end up being served an injunction while you are asleep especially at the end of the road. Normally they were coming up on a blockade between 7:00 or 8:00 am. It turned out to be notice for what came next, for the following morning, they arrived just as early with the RCMP. The camp was drawing too many people and it had to be smashed. Wednesday night was the ‘party’ night though Rahab does not remember this, because neither she nor Zeb drank significantly that evening, though they hung out with the protesters for a while. A huge delivery of anonymously donated beer arrived at the protester camp that afternoon, and the protesters partied. Many were hung over the following morning. Who under those stressful circumstances is going to turn down a free beer delivery when you haven’t drank significantly in months? Always look a gift horse in the mouth. A liquor donation had never occurred before, nor after.