Libertall the beautiful

    Libertall means the world to me.  She is, just barely, an old-growth Redwood (around 500 years old); one of the last of her kind, sequoia semperviren.  If Libertall were a human she would be sweet yet strong women in her thirties.  She would be the person cooking healthy organic food to feed to the homeless or the one who would take a stranger into her arms and make them feel loved.  She is beautiful, majestic; a treasure.  She is a gift to the world and humanity,  a precious being that must be protected and respected.  Mankind could learn a lot from Libertall and all the other trees of the forest, for that matter.  She is... well, TALL and very red; more red then most Redwood trees.  Her soul glows from her inner heartwood and I like to think that all the hugs I give her might make some kind of difference in her color.  After all, how many times does a tree have a human come up, talk to it and acknowledge her superiority to his own self?  I can feel her spirit when I hold my breath and place my hand against her soft, shaggy bark.  I can feel her pleased happiness as the Great Spirit providers her with strong sunshine and a fresh drink of water through a heavy rain.  She is my friend, my teacher and companion.  She has helped me to find the truth that would lead me to actually love myself for once in my life.  For once, someone needed me and my willingness to help was gladly accepted with gratitude.  I am sure this is hard for your to pick up on.  It likely sounds like "hippy: bullshit.  Let me explain how I came to love this tree.

True story; back in the day, I was working as a beer deliverer person providing my fellow man with fire water to drown their worries and responsibilities.  I had heard a rumor that they were going to let me go so I decided, if such a thing happened, I would go out into the forest and sit in a tree for a week.  This was back in Oct '05 and I was at a very strange time in my life... I wasn't living, just killing time (as Thom says).  Well sir, I got fired and out to the forest I went.  I had been in California for over a year but never saw a Redwood because, well, they're hard to find, quite frankly.  So, when I saw Libertall, I was blown away at her beauty.  She may not be the biggest tree but she is absolutely lovely... A work of art.  I remember looking up her trunk for the first time and thinking that it was quite imposable for a person like me to do what I was about to do (I know low self esteem is frowned upon in America).  Anyways, I was given a VERY basic training and as soon as I was on the line, my trainer said "well, you look like you got it... have fun!!"  He left me... I was on my own...  so I climbed up to the first dreamcatcher that's about 80 feet off the ground (not very high in the tree sitter world).  I spent the whole day just soaking up the glory of being in a Redwood, I was doing something I was told I would never have the strength to do but Yahweh had seen me through it all and here I was!!  Eventually, I got hungry and decided to repel down to get some grub but to my worried surprise I COULD NOT REMEMBER HOW TO GET DOWN!!  Repelling means taking a device (that looks like an 8), attaching the climb line to it and then simply leaning into it; you hold on to the rope, below the device and the more you loosen your grip, the faster you slide down the line (IT IS SOOOOOOOOOO MUCH FUN).  So I attached my device, got on the line but went nowhere so I was stuck where I was.  I calmly climbed back into the dream catcher and decided to just go to sleep for the night and figure it out in the morning.  I fell asleep and was dreaming in the exact spot I layed in reality.  I heard someone coming up my tree; it was a climber!!!!  I freaked out; "what do I do, what do I do" but, when the climber got to my dream catcher, he kindly said "are you the kid who's having trouble repelling".  I was confused "uhhh... yeah" I said "well, get your shit on and I'll show you how its done"; I complied.  The same thing happened, I could not move down the line.  I explained what was wrong and he studied my problem and said "You need to feed the rope through your device".  This only confused me but when I asked what he meant, I woke up, got on the line and had the same problem.  I yelled out for some help and the other people in the village told me to feed the line through my device.  I asked "what the hell does that mean"; they said "touch your line", I did and moved down.  You see the problem is that the lines are always stiff and, unless you have weight on your back, you need to help the line move through the device at first.  Once you do that it is smooth sailing all the way down.  So, I see now that Libertall was trying to help me but I was not listening well enough to what she was trying to say. 

     I was still not convinced that Libertall sacred enough to communicate with a human being.  I was raised in the Baptist church and had it beat into my head that trees and animals are soul-less beings who are here for our own uses.  I was about to find out that they, and I, were wrong wrong WRONG!!!  After that dream, I spent a week in the forest and decided to leave.  I was feeling strong discontent for the village, when I left, because it was over ran by pirates who had trashed the forest and desecrated the trees in it.  My last words, as I left Ferngully for the first time, were "FUCK THIS".  I walked out of the forest and made my way back home and during the long 6 mile hike home I saw a vision.  It was a full moon and I was walking really hard up this very steep slope.  The moonlight was shining in the road and I clearly saw a redwood in the road that was created by the moonlight hitting the road.  I was stunned because I did not believe in this sort of thing; was the forest speaking to me???  I stared at the image in the road for a good long while and it maintained its form.  I moved to the left, it was still there; I moved to the right and it was still there.  I was not seeing things.  I realized that Libertall was calling me back... pleading for me to come back.  I never take things lightly or shove things away as mere coincidence, so I moved out of my place, gave up playing music (for a while) and moved out into the forest to live in the tree that I love.  Later

The Mattole

The Mattole watershed is a wild place, one of the last true sanctuaries for the animals of the forest.  It is deep into the remote wilderness.  To get there, you have to drive through a sacred grove of Redwoods (with 2000 year old trees dangerously hugging the road) then make your way 10 miles up into the mountains.  When you reach the main gate, that leads into the treesit, you have to hike a mile into the woods (there also used to be another sit that was 12 miles deep into the forest).  The place is packed with every wild animal from; deer to bear to raccoon and boarders on "Panther Gap", which has the highest concentration of mountain lions then any other place in the world.  I remember sitting in the trees, watching all kinds of animals run through the forest, looking for food.  The tree-sit ,nearest to the road, had only three trees that were in danger and they were not even over 100 years old but they were on an extremely steep hillside, so the sit was very necessary.  Most of the Mattole was cut back in the 1950's and since MAXXAM came to town, it has been their desire to cut every last valuable tree in that important watershed.  Walking on the ground, in places, is a real chore because the erosion is so bad that your feet sink into the dirt.  Being that the Mattole gets more rain then any other place in California, it is in very real danger.

     I had spent some time twice in that place.  Once was to go out and train some "newbie's" in defense protocols and safety; the other time was to help the current treesitters wait out some loggers that wanted to cut down the trees.  Both times I had memorable experiences.  The first was in December of '04;  me and a brother had left the trees to hike down to a water tower and fetch the source of life.  We hiked 3 miles down to the tower and, on the way back up to the woods, we were hiking so hard that we walked clear past the gate.  We hiked and hiked until I became suspicious that we had messed the entrance but my partner swore that if we keep walking we would find the gate; "just over the next hill" he would say, over and over again.  I started to notice things that I had not seen before but it was not until I saw a large cross, on the side of the road, that I realized we had, in fact, passed the gate... how the hell could I not notice something like that.  So we turned around and hiked the three miles back down to the gate, that we had passed... in the end we had hiked over 15 miles just to get some water.  We were exhausted when we reached the tree-sit and the 80 foot climb was painstakingly hard to finish.

     The second time I went out into the Mattole, me and the kids I was with were stalked by a mountain lion.  It wasn't scary though because people lived around these very large kittens for a long time, since they passed through their territory on a daily basis.  They had even named them... Simon and Isaiah.  Simon's territory was within the mile hike into the woods and he liked to walk along us.  I saw him one night, walking no more the five feet from us... it was a real trip, for sure.  Isaiah was much larger then Simon and his territory was within the tree-sit, so everyone knew and loved him.  That night we walked in we were all sitting around and he approached us because we had a female in our group and he was curious.  We were just chilling and he came real close to us and circled around, sniffing us.  How they dealt with mountain lions in the Mattole was to just turn off there bright headlamps (to show respect) and simply talk to it, so that's what we did.  Mountain Lions are intense because they could rip you to shreds and the only time you hear one is when it wants you to here it.  Bears are clumsy and loud, they rustle leafs and break twigs, but all you hear from a mountain lion is the ever so slight crunch of the leaf that it chooses to step on.  They had told me many crazy stories about Isaiah but the one that sticks out most in my mind was how he liked to kick assholes out of the woods.  I had heard how they had some jerk come up from L.A and how this kid was stealing from people and just being an arise.  I guess, one night he started yelling at the tree-sitter and stormed off into the woods (not a smart thing to do in the Mattole).  It was at that time when Isaiah approached this kid and swatted his arm with his paw.  If Isaiah's claws were retracted he could have taken off some of his thin fingers but that was never his intention, I suppose; he was just teaching him a lesson.  I guess the kid just screamed like a maniac and Isaiah ran off.  When the kid came back to the village, he calmly said that he had learned his lesson and he should not be in the forest, so he left and was never heard from again.  That's just how the forest works.  It amazes me because, when you think about it, the forest has the power to send some of her children to protect her from loggers but she doesn't do that.  They just sit and let the assholes cut them down.  That is only one reason why I choose Non-Violence; because the trees have chosen it as well.

     The mattole's story actually has a sad ending.  What happened is a few bad apples got into the tree sit and completely turned the forest into there own personal garbage dump.  It was horrible and eventually everyone left and the trees were all cut down.  At the moment there is not enough people for anyone to really be there so MAXXAM no longer has any opposition to the corporate logging of this fragile and rare ecosystem. 

Pacific Lumber Raids Ferngully, August 2005

   In the late summer of 2005, Pacific Lumber/MAXXAM paid professional climbers, over 100,000$, to raid our village.  Ferngully is located deep in the forests of Freshwater and the only way to get in is to trek through a small deer trail.  The whole time you move through the trail, you have thick berry bushes slashing you in the face and the best was to make it through is to either hold your arms over your face or ride up close to the person in front of you.  Anyways, the first thing they did was plow a 15-foot road right through the "thickets" and into the heart of Ferngully.  Me and a couple friends were in town, getting more food and water, when we heard about what was going on.  So, we snuck into the forest in the middle of the night and sure enough, there was the road; horrible and nasty.  I have never felt how bad a road impacts the earth but after living in the forest for a little under a year, feeling that road made me understand that it is like sticking a blade into our mother and savagely dragging it across her soft flesh.  We made it into Ferngully and I climbed our mother tree "Wattsi" and traversed over to Libertall, who was five trees across the village.  I got to my tree at around 4 am and went to sleep.

     I was awoken, less then 4 hours later, to the sound of security guards chasing some people out of the village.  I calmly watched them chase the kids for a second, get tired out and give up.  "Good Morning" I called down to the chunky guard "want some coffee?"  He declined and we had a nice conversation and it turns out that he was Richard Bettes, Head of MAXXAM security... this was no small fry at all !  We talked for about twenty minutes and during our conversation he indirectly threatened to call in the federal marshals to "take care" of us.  It was hard for me not to laugh and I thought to myself "if I am willing to risk my life for a tree why would a federal marshal scare me?"  Well, he eventually left, to oversee the climbers on the other end of the village. 

            They had a team of 10 men and they started climbing the trees at the butt crack of dawn.  They spent most of their time climbing the trees in the first unit, far from where I was, and they took their time in cutting down all of our homes, throwing our belongings out of the trees and stealing anything that was of any value to us.  It was pretty heartbreaking to hear our whole village, which we had poured our hearts and souls into, go down in less then 10 hours.  I had it easy for the first 5 hours because everyone was busy in the first unit.  I sat around, drifted off to sleep hear and there and even smoked a nice bowl to calm my nerves.  Eventually, the time came when I realized that I needed to start preparing myself because they were going to be coming for me.  I climbed to the top of my tree with my climb line, a bucket of food, a gallon of water, my sleeping bag, my bible and a hammock.  We used to have a large platform, that was our kitchen, and as I heard it crash to the ground I knew that it would only be a short time before they would be in my tree.  So, I got on the high traverse line (set between two trees) set up my hammock, got in and took off my safety. 

            I was hanging 150+ feet off the ground, not safetyed in, when I first saw the climber.  He was a nice enough guy,  he asked if there was any chance I would come down (half joking) and I simply said "nope".  He climbed to the top of the tree he was in and then worked his way down cutting and throwing everything out of the tree, including glass that is now forever lost in the forest somewhere.  Eventually, another climber came and started climbing Libertall.  He cut down the lower dreamcatcher (my guest home) and, by some miracle, was ordered to stop about 10 feet before he reached the top catcher (which is my home).  I was amazed and thankful when they left and my home was still intact because everyone else had there homes slashed up and thrown down to the ground.  "well, I guess I'm staying here alone then" I thought, and that is how it all happened.  It took us weeks to clean up after the climbers and some MAXXAM employees came by a couple weeks later and decommissioned the road by tearing it up so it is almost imposable to even walk into gully.  Now, your feet sink deep into the mud when ever you walk.  I no longer where shoes at all in the forest because they would just be needlessly destroyed... plus, why would you not want to walk barefoot through a Redwood forest?

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A Bear Story

One night, I was a sleeping peacefully in Libertall and I was awoken to a strange groaning noise at the base of my tree.  It was very late and the noise was worrying me.  I finally realized that I had left a full food bucket on the ground (which is against the treesitter law) and a mama bear and her cub were breaking into it.  It was so funny, they were just moaning, groaning and carrying on for a while.  I heard one slide down the hill and moan in annoyance.  I was listening to them for quite some time and I shouted down at them to "behave down there" but of course they didn't listen.  Eventually, I heard a loud crack then a cry of victory from the very happy bears.  The bucket was full of oats, brown rice, energy bars, powdered milk and granola… so they had a little bear party/feast.  I was a little worried because bears can climb trees but I was ready to non-violently counter them.  If they came up, I would thwart them by dripping water on there faces (they hate that).

Let this be a lesson to always be very aware of what you leave on the forest floor.  The worst part about that cituation was not that the bears had stolen my food but that they had gotten a taste of human's food.  This is a very bad thing and we need to be careful to avoid these circumstances

The next day I repelled down to look at the damage they did.  They had thrown my backpack down the hill, trashed the hillside and carried their little feast all the way to the other end of the village.  I laughed at the silly bears and took safety precautions by calling out to "Mama" and "Bandit", so I don't accidentally sneak up on them.  I felt really bad for letting them get into human's food and I hoped they didn't pig out too badly and upset there stomachs.  I love those guys and I do not worry about them because I make it known that I am only in there home for a short time to help them.  After the trees are safe, I will leave and let them have there homes back.  So far we live in harmony as chums.