I stuffed pillows around me in bed, read the first few pages of the timber-sale Environmental Assessment Report and sighed. "This looks very official, wookie; seems like we chose the wrong place to build a house. What say we sell and move farther north. Idaho, maybe? Montana?"
"Isn't Idaho where they do the strip-mining?" she said, barely looking up from the document in her hand. "Isn't Montana where they have the uranium mines and the radioactive wildflowers?"
"I sense that you are trying to tell me something," I said.
"Why don't we put our cards right here on the bed and say what's on our mind?"
She set down the page of government microprint. "Let's not run away, unless you absolutely have to, before we find out what's going on. Have you never considered fighting injustice?"
"Never! You know that. I don't believe in injustice. We bring to ourselves every event, every . . . don't you agree?"
"Maybe," she said. "Why did you bring this one to you, do you suppose, the government cutting down the forest the day after we move in? To have something to run away from? Or something to learn from?"
A lover who is very smart, I thought, is a joy and sometimes she is a burr.
"What's to be learned?"
"If we want to, we can change things," she said, "how powerful we might be, how much good we might do, together."
My mind sank. She had been willing to die in order to change things, to end a war, right the wrongs she had seen around her. And that which she had set out to change, had changed.
"Aren't you burned out with Social Activism? Haven't you said Nevermore?"
"I have," she said. "I think I've paid my dues to society for the next ten lifetimes, and after the KVST takeover I swore to stay out of causes for the rest of this one. But there are moments . . ."
I sensed she didn't want to say what she was saying, that she was looking for words to suggest the once-unsuggestible.
"I can share with you what I've learned," she said, "but
not what I know. If you'd like to find out about your power for good, instead of retreating, I might come out of retirement. I don't have the smallest doubt: if we want to stop the government from cutting timber that won't grow back, we can stop it. If it's illegal, we can stop it. If it isn't illegal, we can always move to Idaho."
Nothing was less interesting to me than convincing a government to change. People squander lives, trying. At the end, if we win, what we win is the bureaucracy doesn't do what it shouldn't have tried to do in the first place. Aren't there more positive things to be done than keeping officials inside the law?
"Before we move," I said, "it might be worth a quick check to see that they're doing things right. Turn the computers loose on it. But, my little deer, I'm sure we won't find the United States Government breaking its own laws!"
Was her smile sweet or bitter? "I'm sure," she said.
That afternoon our computers in the woods flickered questions, fast as light, to a computer in Ohio, which flashed them to a computer in San Francisco, which fired answers into our screens: Federal law prohibits the sale and logging of nonregenerable timber from public lands. Summaries of eighty-two related cases followed.
Moving to the frail forest of southern Oregon, were we chancing into an alley last-minute before an attack of rape and murder?
I looked at Leslie, agreed with her unspoken conclusion. There was no ignoring the crime about to happen.
"When you have a minute," I said the next day as we watched our glowing screens. It was our computer-opera-
tor's code; asking for attention and in the same breath saying please don't answer if a wrong key-stroke is going to scramble your whole morning's work.
A moment later she looked up from her screen. "OK."
"Do you think the forest itself called us here?" I said. "Do you think it was psychically crying for help, tree-devas and plant-spirits and wild-animal guides changing a hundred coincidences to bring us here to fight for them?"
"That's very poetic," she said. "It's probably true." She turned back to work.
An hour later, I couldn't stay quiet. "When you have a minute . . ."
In a few seconds her computer's disk-drive whirred, saving data.
"OK."