Hella Nation - Evan Wright [44]
In 1998, one of the last remaining stands of old-growth trees in the Fall Creek area of the Willamette Forest was sold off to a logging company. As U.S. government policy plays out in many national parks, the logging companies own the trees; the public ends up with the stumps. In April 1998, a ragtag group of tree-climbers took direct action to prevent several of the oldest trees in Fall Creek from being felled. They moved into the trees.
Wingnut arrived in Eugene in the spring of 1998. He had just been paroled from a California jail after serving six months for dealing marijuana. (At one time, he says, he made $200 a day dealing acid and pot in San Diego.)
His activism began in a haphazard manner. Bumming around in the South a few years earlier—dealing a little, taking in the sights, riding the occasional freight train—Wingnut says he came across some church signs that bore antihomosexual messages. He was moved to vandalize them. He claims that on another occasion, he sabotaged a Pepsi bottling plant by dumping several trash bags of burning weeds into the building’s air intakes.
Wingnut drifted into Eugene merely to visit a friend. But around the time of his arrival in Eugene, the (incredibly named) Zip-O-Lumber company had begun preparations to clear-cut the last remaining old-growth firs in the Fall Creek area of the Willamette National Forest. A small group of local activists formed a collective to protect the trees. They called their group Red Cloud Thunder (RCT). “We were just a bunch of fuck-ups—gutter punks and anarchists,” says “Pacific,” a founding member. Wingnut heard about RCT while smoking a bowl on a back porch in Eugene. The next day he caught a ride to Fall Creek and joined a road blockade.
To prevent the company from accessing the stand of trees, activists employed an extreme form of confrontation. They blocked the main logging road with monopods, twenty-foot poles held aloft by ropes and occupied at the top by a lone activist. The premise behind a monopod is that authorities cannot remove its occupant without possibly killing him.
Wingnut spent days at a time atop a monopod. He and other protesters upped the risk of being removed by tying nooses around their necks. In their attempts to flush them out, Forestry Service agents harassed the tree-sitters with low-flying helicopters. At night they saturated the forest with floodlights, and patrolled the woods in order to capture RCT’s support-activists bringing food and supplies. During the day they blared country music from loudspeakers. The tactics failed.
“The kids out there stick up for each other,” says Terry Bertsch, a federal law enforcement officer with the Forestry Service who has fought the activists at Fall Creek since the beginning. “What they do is insane, but I guess that’s part of the anarchist belief.”
After several weeks, the Forestry Service brought in cherry pickers, and climbers of their own who wrestled Wingnut down from the monopod. Wingnut has scars on his chin to commemorate the day of his removal. The Forestry Service agents dropped him face-first onto the road before hand-cuffing and arresting him.
Wingnut claims that Forestry Service agents beat him after putting him under arrest, and brags that he provoked it by taunting the agents, whom he refers to as “Freds.” He says, “I’d heard one of the Freds who’d arrested me had a daughter who’d run off with a hippie. With my dreads, I figured the guy she’d run off with might have looked like me. I told him, ‘You’re just pissed because I look like the kind of guy your daughter likes to fuck.’”
When Wingnut got out of jail a few days later, he returned to Fall Creek and moved into a tree sit, where he remained for the next eighteen months, until the Seattle protests.
BEFORE LEAVING EUGENE, I accompany Wingnut on a visit to RCT’s protest “village” among the trees in Fall Creek. As I enter the forest, the scent of living