The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

RICHARD: Have you ever changed a timber sale because of a protest by the people? DIRECTOR: No. Never.

She scarcely blinked, watching her computer-screen. "Good. Load that under Lack of Good Faith. It's disk Twenty-two, after Sale Violates National Environmental Protection Act."

Rarely did she show anger at our adversary. She documented evidence, entered it into the files, built her case for court.

"What if we were psychics," I said to her once, "and we knew how and when the director is going to die? If we knew he's got two days to live-day after tomorrow, a ton of logs is going to roll from a truck and smash him? Does that make any difference, how we think about him now?"

"No," she said.

The money that IRS refused to accept turned into commissioned studies: A Preliminary Water Quality Survey of the Grouse Creek, Waters Gulch, Mule Creek and Hanley Gulch Drainages of the Little Applegate River and Beaver Creek Watersheds of Jackson County, Oregon; A Report on the Anticipated Effects of the Scheduled Timber Harvest Activities Within the Proposed Grouse Creek Timber Sale Area on Anadromous Fish and Habitat; Economic Review of the Grouse Creek Timber Sale. Eight others, with equally catchy titles.

Once in a while we'd stand on our little hilltop and look at the forest. Unkillable as the mountains, we used to think. Now we saw it as a fragile family of plants and animals

living together in blended harmony, balanced on a chain-saw-blade, tilting toward extinction from foolish logging.

"Hang on, trees," we'd shout to the forest. "Hang on! Don't worry! We're going to stop them, we promise!"

Other times, when the going was hard, we'd just glance out the window from our computers. "We're doing our best, trees," we'd mumble.

The Apples were to us as Colts to gunfighters. The BLM allows the public thirty days to prepare a timber-sale protest before the wheels turn and a forest is destroyed. It expects to receive between two and ten impassioned pages from citizens pleading for environmental mercy. From us, from our organization and its home computers it got six hundred pages of fact documented up one side down the other, incidents and examples for proof, bound in three volumes. Copies to senators and representatives and the press.

It was constant, full-time battle for twenty months, fighting the Bureau of Land Management.

All my airplanes were sold. For the first time in my adult life, weeks passed, then months without a single airplane flight, without once being off the ground. Instead of looking down from the lovely free machines, I was looking up at them, remembering how much it had meant to me, to fly. So this is what it feels like to be a groundling, I thought. Grf!

Then one Wednesday, to Leslie's grim certainty and to my utter astonishment, the government withdrew the timber sale.

"The sale involves enough improprieties in BLM rules and procedures that it can't be legally awarded," the assistant state director of the Oregon BLM told the press. "In

order to comply with our own procedures we had no choice but to withdraw the sale and reject all bids."

The local BLM director was not crushed to death under logs. He and his area manager were transferred out of state, to other parts of the bureaucracy.

Our victory celebration was two sentences long.

"Please don't forget this," Leslie told me, her computer cooling for the first time since the struggle began. "You can't fight City Hall is government propaganda. When the people decide to fight City Hall, just a few little people against something huge that's wrong, there's nothing-nothing!- can stop them from winning!"

Then she fell on the bed and slept three days.

forty-one

OOMEWHERE IN the midst of the BLM fight, the IRS clock struck midnight unheard. Internal Revenue had languished nearly four years without a decision, a year past the time I'd had the option to dissolve the million-dollar debt in bankruptcy.

While the BLM battle raged, we couldn't spare a moment to consider bankruptcy; when it was done, we could think of little else.

"It wouldn't be fun, little wook," I said, plowing manfully into my fourth attempt to bake a lemon pie the way her mother did. "Everything would be gone. I'd be starting over from nothing."

She set the table for dinner. "No you wouldn't," she said. "The bankruptcy book says they let you have 'tools required for your trade.' And there's a bare minimum you can keep, so you don't starve too fast."

"Really? Keep the house? A place to live?" I rolled the piedough thin, draped it over the pan, calling on the pie-crust-deva for help.

"Not the house. Not even the trailer."

"We could go live in the trees."

"It wouldn't be that bad. Mary Moviestar has her savings, don't forget; she wouldn't go broke. But how would you feel -the rights to your books/-you'd lose them! How would you feel, somebody buying the rights and not caring, somebody making junk-films out of your beautiful books?"

I slipped the crust into the oven. "I'd survive."