April 18, 2004
Arcata, Portland & Bellingham
The O2 Fire and Forests Road Show rolls on! Our schedule is intense, but the response we are receiving continues to propel us happily along! Humboldt County delighted us with our largest and most high-energy audience yet! A day of costumed stilting around Arcata initiated hundreds of great connections at Muddy Waters Coffee House and on campus at HSU. Over a hundred people filled a stadium-style room, exploding more than once into cheers for the Wild Siskiyou and leaving the evening with arms full of literature and words of "see you up north this summer!" We collected over a hundred hand-written letters to congress people in one day!
Our collective left jazzed with the knowledge that we infused Humboldt with the infectious buzz of a victory in the making this summer! It is heartening to know so many motivated and experienced forest defenders are fired up to keep the forests vertical in Southern Oregon. After the show, our outstanding hosts treated us to a late night music circle around a bonfire at their classic old farm house on the edge of town. We woke up to barn swallows swooping over the bus.
We spent our second day in Arcata teaching workshops at the Redwood Peace and Justice Center. The folks at the RPJC are helpful allies who operate an inspiring community resource center that supports all manner of social justice projects and eco-activist endeavors. After mailing off hundreds of letters at the post office, we turned our steel chariot north and slogged through the fog and splash of a spring downpour on the north coast. Belted kingfishers dotted our wet drive north. We stopped for a fresh salmon dinner at sunset at an ancient Yurok village site on the side of Hwy 101. Our resident Norwegian took the opportunity for a picturesque swim in the frigid, crashing surf!
We opted to negotiate a rainy late-night passage up Hwy 199, through the winding Smith River Gorge, to sleep a comical night at the Moon Mountain RV Resort in Grant's Pass! An early morning sent us traveling towards three back to back shows, two in Portland and one in Bellingham. We hopped a curb and removed some barriers to pull the big biofuel bus into the middle of campus at PSU. Students there got quite a kick out of us on our stilts, and arrived in good numbers for our show that night. Hundreds of enviro types were gathered nearby to comment on Senator Ron Wyden's imminent Wilderness bill, so we took the opportunity to outreach to allies by distributing handbills on stilts to the slightly bewildered crowds.
The PSU venue was cavernous and challenging, but the show went smoothly and the reception was awesome. The next day we drove our biodiesel bill board up another curb and around another set of barriers to park in the center of the historic campus of Reed College. Reed's student union is a laid back venue lined with wood and a cozy fireplace offering warmth on a cold, drizzly day. We packed our second Portland room in two days, for a show that felt polished and tight.
After-hours networking provided great conversations (and bad karaoke) with our allies from the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, OSPIRG, American Lands Alliance, Forest Ethics and the Oregon Natural Resources Council. The good folks at Portland Indymedia featured a raving story about our event, and attended both stumptown shows.
This communique comes from Interstate 5 as we turn our back on the Canadian border and head south to our show tonight in Olympia. Bellingham was fantastic! Our local organizers were as solid as they come and did a thorough job setting us up for a full two days of presentations and workshops. Well over a hundred people filled a large lecture hall with cacophonous applause and even a standing ovation at the end of the show! Dana Lyons opened with a song about trees, and our event was scheduled to dovetail with a concert by Joules Graves next door. It is hard to imagine a crowd being more receptive or enthusiastic than this one was. Multiple people were touched to tears and told members of our crew they were "deeply inspired" and had felt a "life changing experience"! We collected over 80 more letters and heard many rumblings of plans being made for travel to the Siskiyou this summer!
We were thrilled and mutually inspired by the uniquely holistic result of this truly collective creation. The whole is clearly greater than the sum of its parts with this road show, and each day is full of lessons for us all about how powerful we are together when we each do our small part well towards a common goal.
For our second day at Western Washington University we took over the Viking Union for a full day of well attended workshops. Topics ranged from feminism and ecodefense to fire ecology and forest policy to the strategic use of civil disobedience. One of the more exciting results of the day was a dedicated group of people energized to start a Bellingham Independent Media Center after a four-hour training with Kerul and Forrest! Everything about our Bellingham stop felt tightly planned and well orchestrated, and we even had time for late night dancing on the town Friday night!
Last night, a fun crew of locals joined us at an outrageously beautiful state park on the coast for a night of sunset birding, music, drumming and fire dancing with poi chains and staffs. It was a cheerful and animated evening in an other-worldly paradise. The islands of the Lummi Nation and the San Juans provided a mystical backdrop for Red Necked Grebes, Black Oystercatchers, Common Loons, Harlequin Ducks, and a young Bald Eagle.
