Hella Nation - Evan Wright [45]
The platforms are about ten or fifteen feet square, but looking up at them from the ground, they seem to be the size of postage stamps. White plastic buckets—for food, water, excrement—hang from the edges. “Tree villagers” on the ground run supplies up to the sitters using ropes.
Fewer than a dozen trees are being defended at Fall Creek. They have names like “Igdrazzle,” “Happy” and “Grandma,” and are clustered on a spot of land not much bigger than a baseball field. What I hadn’t anticipated before walking into Fall Creek was that the battle was being waged over so few trees, fewer than a dozen according to Wingnut. Outside this small old-growth stand, thousands of acres have already been clear-cut.
Wingnut’s purpose in coming here is not just to say good-bye. Several weeks ago he stowed his extra pair of long johns in a plastic bucket that he stashed near the village. While he sets off in search of his long johns, I chat with an activist named “Fin.” Fin drove up with us, and after spending a few days’ vacation in town, he will be occupying one of the tree sits.
About twenty years old, Fin looks like he crawled out from an alley behind a punk bar. Studded black leather bracelets adorn his wrists. Dyed-blond hair grows up from the top of his head in a six-inch-long pressed wedge that resembles the blade of an ax. Fin says he gets by when he is in the city by living out of dumpsters and stealing money from girlfriends. He tells Wingnut he has been staying with a stripper he met in town. “I’m fucking raw,” he says. “We fucked all night, but she was too cute to rip off.”
Fin prepares for the climb up to his tree sit by getting stoned. The climb will take forty-five minutes. Fin attaches himself to a climbing harness with a Swiss seat, then to the single rope hanging 170 feet down from the tree. Fin looks up at the tree and mumbles, “Beautiful.” Half an hour later, he hangs one hundred feet in the air, motionless, staring at the bark, enjoying the buzz.
Wingnut returns with his long johns, crusty with mud and twigs and pine needles. He shouts up to a tree in response to a female voice calling to him. The canopy above and the bed of pine needles and humus at our feet create a perpetual hush. The voices on the platforms high above are crystal clear. Two girls sharing a platform invite us up to smoke a bowl. Intriguing as their offer is, I have my doubts about the rope-tying skills of stoned activists. I am relieved when Wingnut declines their offer.
Before we leave, Wingnut sits on the ground and takes in the “village.” He tells me one of the advantages of living in a tree is the simplification of time. “When I’m in the forest, there are three times of day: dark, purple and light. I wake up at purple and go to bed at dark.
“I can’t stand to hear a radio in the forest,” Wingnut adds. “I love the sound of the forest. My first audio hallucination was in the forest. I heard every single needle moving on the fir trees, every single pebble in the creek as the water was going through it. It was incredible.”
Wingnut admits that living in a tree has its downside. When he stayed up in it for weeks at a stretch during particularly confrontational periods with the Freds, it felt like a jail cell. In the winter, when it rains for days, sometimes weeks on end,