Greenpeace Invades
Rachel Weaver
Greenpeace had arrived in Alaska. And they were after us. We had to be prepared and on alert. The Forest Supervisor paced slowly at the front of the meeting room in her heavy heels and heavier green pants. In my time in small town Alaska, I’d learned that The Sierra Club and Greenpeace were not universally accepted as good. There were some other people in that room who, like me, thought maybe the trees should be left standing, but they didn’t speak up either.
I sat on my hard plastic chair with the rest of the seasonal field workers anxious to catch our flights or gas up the boat for a day hiking streams, tagging trees, or in my case, looking for a goshawk who didn’t want to be found.
The Rainbow Warrior, the Forest Supervisor went on to explain, was the Greenpeace battleship headed our way. They’d been shunned in ports to the south of us, refused fuel and water. Their response: Free beer to anyone who would come aboard.
Thirty minutes later, Natalie, my field partner that summer, and I were loading up in the Cessna. Jake, one of two pilots in town the Forest Service contracted with, was thirty something and a fan of aviator glasses even though it was cloudy three hundred days a year. He’d heard I was writing a novel based in Southeast Alaska, which was true, and had decided it was a romance, which was not true.
“Come clean,” Jake was saying through the headset as I clipped the seat belt across my waist in the back seat of the Cessna. “Just
tell me who the main character is based on. Jamie D, we cleared for takeoff?” He looked up the single runway strip and down it. Scanned the skies above us.
Natalie, already in her seatbelt and headset, sitting two inches to Jake’s right, glanced back to see if I might spill the beans.
“Yeah, go ahead Jake. Cleared for takeoff,” the dispatcher said through our headsets. It was too loud to talk while Jake rattled us down the runway and up into the air.
Once we were up and banking hard right to swing around in front of the fast approaching mountains, I said, “Love is a dead end road.”
Jake was sitting right in front of me, his back pushing the front seat less than an inch from my knees. He looked over at Natalie and shook his head and dove us into a thick cloud bank. Before everything turned white, I took note of how we were over the middle of the channel, the mountains on either side a favorable distance away.
“You know, people like to read romance novels,” Jake said. “You could probably make a lot more money if you just take whatever you’ve got and turn it into a romance. One starring a pilot.” The inlets and bays below us snapped by in sharp flashes as we punched through billowing clouds.
“Finn McPherson thinks it should feature a lawn mower man,” I said. Finn ran the one landscaping business in town.
“The fuck?” Jake said. “A lawn mower man romance is going nowhere.”
We dropped through the cloud bank and there it was, directly below us. Anchored up in a secluded bay about twenty miles from town: the Rainbow Warrior
All three of us sat up straight, straining to see as we flew right over the top of the dreaded pirate ship. It had a steel hull, clean lines, and a fresh coat of white paint. It sat big and powerful in the flat gray water of the bay. Not a soul on deck.
Jake lifted us over a small hill and descended quickly toward the water of the neighboring bay that was slated for a timber sale. Natalie and I had been spending considerable time scouring the area. We’d found a goshawk that refused to lead us to his nest so we could protect it in the upcoming timber sale. As Jake lined up to touch down he said, “I hear there’s free beer on board.”
“No one would know, way out here,” Natalie said. She was born and raised in Southeast Alaska but had lived in other parts of the world. I didn’t know where Jake was from, only that he’d been in town a long time. It was impossible to guess how each of them felt about Greenpeace. If they preferred trees standing or milled up. I watched and waited. One thing I knew for sure: while politics were derisive on the small island, free beer was not.
“What time am I picking you two up?” Jake asked.
“4:30,” I answered.
“Perfect.” Jake cut the engine and we glided on the small wake toward the soft shore. He hopped out his door, onto the float, pulled the oar from its latches and steered until we were within a few feet of the beach. By the time I’d climbed over his seat and out his door, he had pulled our daypacks from the small hatch and Natalie was wading to shore. He handed my pack over and smiled like the main character in a romance novel. “See you at happy hour.”
I smiled at my reflection in his aviator glasses and stepped off the float into six inches of water. Not too high to top the boots. On the beach, Natalie and I strapped our packs on, watched Jake take off for town and cut into the woods staying on high olfactory alert for wet dog and/or patchouli.
At 4:15 P.M., we were back on the beach. We dropped our heavy packs made heavier by how soaked through they both were. It had started raining mid-morning and was still at it. We’d run into one
bear, no goshawks and no warriors. My thick rubber rain gear was wet from the inside out with sweat and from the outside in with rain from the wet whipping branches of the blueberry shrub we’d spent much of the day bushwacking through. My fingers were pruned like I’d been in the bathtub all day and I was shivering hard enough that my shoulder blades seemed to be knocking together.
Natalie pulled out a Vogue magazine in a ziplock bag and settled with her back against a big dark rock.
“You brought the heaviest magazine you could find?”
“Shut up. Vogue’s awesome.” She crossed her feet and settled the seven-pound magazine in her lap. “It just came in the mail this morning.” She began to flip through the bright glossy pages as if she were waiting for a flight in an airport.
I walked down the beach, lay on the smooth gray rocks and rested in the big silence of the bay. My mind gave up its rusty circular patterns and stretched out between the smooth gray water and low cloud ceiling. The sound of the water and the feel of the misty rain on my face untied the knots life tied me in. I had grown up in a volatile home, had grown used to volatile men, never seemed able to do much other than take what was dished out, walk away silently only to find myself in another similar situation elsewhere. I began to hope the beer was cold and had a blue ribbon on it.
“Hey!” Natalie looked up from a page in the magazine. “It says here you burn 100 calories every fifteen minutes you shiver!”
“Fantastic news,” I called out from where I lay on the small rocks, the rain making a comforting sound against my rain gear.
Ten minutes later Jake touched down just offshore, jumped out onto the float and used the oar to swing the plane sideways up to the beach. “They’re gone!” he said as we waded out into the water.
I climbed into the plane behind Natalie and said, “Well then, I hope you brought me a PBR.”
“We’ll take the long way home. Do some searching,” Jake said as he settled into the pilot’s seat.
We wound and banked and twisty turned until I started to think maybe a beer didn’t sound too good after all.
“There!” Natalie was pointing out her side window. I unbuckled and slid across the backseat to look out Natalie’s side and spotted the white mammoth of a ship tied up at a timber loading dock at the terminus of a road that led to an active timber sale on an uninhabited island. Natalie and I had worked off that road most of the month of June documenting goshawk nests. Jake dipped the wing so he could see too.
“That’s not good,” Jake said. He swooped us inland and dolphined over the top of the canopy, following the one and a half lane logging road. In the narrow strip the canopy allowed, several miles up, I spotted the lime green of two Forest Service vehicles parked haphazardly, a logging truck at a standstill, and several men yelling at each other.
Perched high above them on a rickety three-legged contraption that stretched across the entirety of the road, with a seat forty feet up, sat a warrior in a bike helmet. As we passed overhead, he looked up with that same beady eyed look goshawks get right before they aim their twenty-two inch bodies straight for the head of anything they perceive as a threat.
“What the hell,” I said as the whole scene whipped under us. Jake pinned me to my seat as he pulled us straight up and over the tallest trees and glanced back over his shoulder at me. “They set those chair things up over the road so the log trucks can’t get to the trees slated for extraction.”
“Good way to get sent to the hospital,” Natalie said through the headset as Jake banked hard left and then leveled us out, the ocean moving gray and cold underneath us. “Or the morgue.”
Ballsy, I thought as I watched the landscape below map its way toward home. And here I am too chicken shit to say I love trees and prefer them standing. I hated that goshawks got only
a hundred foot circle of protection when we found their nests, while the rest of the valley that held their food was clearcut. But did I ever say anything? No. The pattern of this swallowing-what-I -thought behavior lit up iridescent as I scrolled back through my life. My hands got fidgety. I wondered what it looked like perched up there, held aloft by nothing more than spindly poles and the thrill of wrestling power away from powerful forces with nothing more than your own solid will.