Endgame Volume I_ The Problem of Civilization - Derrick Jensen [137]
There are two towers I know of in Crescent City. There’s the one behind Safeway, and another off in the woods a quarter mile north. The one closest to the grocery store is in the open, which would obviously make taking it down more problematic. The tower is enclosed in a chain-link fence topped by barbed wire. The two sides of this fence farthest from Safeway face thick woods, which would provide cover. I’m certain the fence could be cut easily and quickly.
The problem is that I wouldn’t know what to do next. There are a couple of sheds inside, and I’d imagine that some gasoline and matches could render the whole thing inoperable. That may be great for (temporarily) stopping the guy at the restaurant from bothering his neighbors, and would slow the destructive march of the economic system, if only ever so slightly, but it wouldn’t do a damn thing for the birds. Unfortunately, the tower itself is probably three feet in diameter, hollow with a two-inch shell of some sort of metal.
I sit in my car and look at it. I’m nervous, as though even thinking about how I would do this is enough to draw cops to me. (The same is true now as I write this.) Of course if I were going to bring this down I would never have driven here for reconnaissance. At least not during the middle of the afternoon. I would have parked far away and walked. And there’s no way I would have done it in this town, either. Crescent City is too small and I’m too well known. For crying out loud, at the (excellent) Thai restaurant two blocks south of this tower they know me well enough to always bring me a huge glass of water without me asking, and they like me well enough to pack my salad rolls full to bursting (of course after they read this book my future salad rolls may be limp and wrinkly). I’m almost surprised no one has stopped by while I’m sitting in this car, just to say hi and pass the time of day.
I don’t know what to do. I’m a writer. I wouldn’t know how to take down this tower any better than I would know how to write a computer virus, or how to perform brain or heart surgery. Worse, I’m spatially and mechanically inept—probably a couple of standard deviations below the norm—with a heavy dose of absent mindedness thrown in for good measure (and it seems that absent mindedness would be a tremendous curse to anyone contemplating anything deemed illegal by those in power).
An example of the spatial ineptitude: whenever I pack for a road trip, my mom always takes a look at my suitcase, sighs, and repacks everything in about half the space.
An unfortunate experience in eighth-grade woodshop class highlights the mechanical problems. For our final project, we got to build whatever we wanted. I chose a birdhouse. I was excited. From close observation I knew the birds in our area (though I no longer live in a region with meadowlarks, recorded versions of their songs still make me smile), and from reading books I knew their habits and preferences. In some cases I knew their Latin names. I cut each piece of wood as meticulously as I could, nailed them together as tightly as they would go (admittedly there were a fair number of gaps where my cuts hadn’t quite been straight), then put putty in the nail holes. I stained it all (an irregular) dark brown. On the final day of class we each brought our projects to the front, one at a time. The other pieces looked pretty good and I got increasingly nervous as my turn approached. For good reason. When I held up my birdhouse, the entire class burst into laughter. One of them—I still remember your name, David Flagg, and you’re still not on my short list of people to invite over to dinner—pointed at the lumps of still-white putty and shouted, “It looks like the birds have already been on it.” Even the teacher laughed so hard he had to remove his shop glasses and wipe his eyes.
The infamous shower curtain episode makes clear my absent-mindedness. My shower curtain was hanging too far into the tub. It floated