That Tree Stood for So Much

Jason Wilson was just 21 when a Lakota elder gave him a spirit name.

Wilson, she said, was destined to carry a heavy weight. He would need the medicine of the name she offered, she told him, “to carry that weight in a good way, a strong way and as far as it needs to be carried.”

Three years later, on a September day in 1998, the bearded redhead from Missouri lay in a fetal curl on the floor of a Humboldt County forest, rocking and sobbing in the duff. Next to him was 24-year-old David Nathan “Gypsy” Chain, his head cracked open by the blow of a tree felled by an enraged logger.

Chain had inspired Wilson to disrupt old-growth logging on private land. It was Wilson’s first act of civil disobedience. Now, Chain was dead.

The legacy of that death, Wilson soon decided, was the weight the Lakota elder had warned of. He vowed to carry it with honor. From that day on, “Shunka” would be his forest name, joining the list of adopted monikers that give Humboldt’s logging protesters a blend of anonymity and fairy tale folly.

Shunka’s long struggle to redress Chain’s death would depend, more than anything, on a 700-year-old tree the protesters had named Aradia.

Aradia towered on a ridge up the hill from where Chain fell, its crown jutting above the other treetops. Activists had named the tree for the daughter of the Greek goddess Diana, dispatched to the physical plane to teach long-forgotten spiritual magic.

The fight to save the tree would become inextricably linked with the one to build meaning from loss. Scarred by bear scratches and burn marks, Aradia also would serve as a symbol of the broader battle waged against Pacific Lumber Co., owner of the world’s largest private stands of old-growth redwoods.

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At the time Chain was killed, hostilities here ran high. Protests had grown steadily since Houston-based Maxxam Inc.’s 1985 takeover of Pacific Lumber, a family-owned firm once lauded for responsible logging. To help pay off $900 million in junk bonds, Maxxam chief Charles Hurwitz had abruptly doubled the pace of logging.

In the years that followed, protesters poured in from around the country, determined to trespass if it meant saving a tree. Tensions built after Pacific Lumber hid evidence of endangered species from regulators and logged sensitive habitat in violation of a court order, a judge found.

By the fall of 1998 -- when the logger felled the tree that killed Chain -- Pacific Lumber had racked up so many logging violations that the state temporarily suspended its operating license.

The next year, the company sold the 7,500-acre Headwaters Forest to the state and federal governments for $480 million and agreed to a strict plan to protect habitat while cutting trees on its remaining 211,000 acres.

The pact ushered in what many hoped would be a period of detente. Authorities had declined to file charges in Chain’s death. But in 2001, Pacific Lumber settled a wrongful death suit brought by Chain’s mother, Cindy Allsbrooks of Coldspring, Texas. The company agreed to erect a roadside monument to Chain near the hill -- activists called it “Gypsy Mountain” -- where he died.

At Allsbrooks’ urging, the settlement also called for creation of a Forest Peace Alliance, a forum where activists like her son and industry professionals who viewed them as interlopers would gather to get to know one other.

At the first alliance social mixer, in Fortuna, Calif., in January 2002, Allsbrooks introduced Shunka to Joli Pecht, a warm and open-minded Maxxam attorney in a dark business suit. When Shunka heard the slender woman’s Texas twang, he assumed that she was a friend of Chain’s family, despite her corporate look. He clasped her in a lingering bear hug. Pecht hugged back.

Pecht, then 40, had grown close to Allsbrooks during settlement talks and wanted to help mend the bitter divisions that contributed to Chain’s death.

But one more battle had to play out. Shortly before the mixer, Aradia was marked for harvest.

Shunka believed protecting the tree would “close the Gypsy circle” and release him from the burden of Chain’s death.

“I wanted to move on and do other things with my life,” recalled Shunka, “if we could save Aradia.”

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Aradia was a steep hour-and-a-half trespass from Highway 36, east of Fortuna.

Protesters had been living in the tree when Chain was killed but climbed down later out of deference to Allsbrooks. Now that it was marked for harvest, they climbed back up.

As many as half a dozen of them would crowd onto a wooden platform 150 feet up. They played guitar, listened to the buzz of nearby saws, then crawled into “dream catchers” woven from parachute cord to sleep.

They strung traverse lines to nearby trees they named Manna, Lichen and Garden. Sitters nesting there could clip their carabiners to the lines and swing into Aradia’s boughs if loggers threatened her.

Shunka raised money for the sit, manning an Earth First! donation table in Arcata. By December 2002 he had climbed up for a stint of his own. Younger trees whipped wildly in typhoon-like winds, but Aradia swayed like an old ship at sea. One morning, Shunka awoke to see a mountain lion below. Days later, a bald eagle flew up from under Aradia’s platform and perched 40 feet away.

Pecht had given Shunka her home number, and he called often. He listed his ideas to save Aradia. He described the storm conditions, and at times, the logging nearby.

“I’d say, ‘I’m up in the tree now,’ ” Shunka, a philosophy graduate, recalled. “ ‘Trees are falling all around me.’ ”

Pecht told him that she was a vegan. He liked that. She said she’d try to encourage communication with Pacific Lumber’s land manager. She promised to pass his proposals on to officials there.

She kept her promise, and Shunka was hopeful.

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Many locals viewed the tree sitters as marginalized ideologues. But community views of Pacific Lumber were changing.

Lawsuits mounted from residents in the nearby Freshwater Creek and Eel River watersheds, alleging that excessive sediment from logged hillsides fouled their water and triggered flooding.

Pacific Lumber denied that the problems were caused by current harvests and maintained that logging, if done properly, was better for water quality than no logging at all. But in late 2002, a scientific panel assembled by regional water regulators called that theory unsubstantiated.

Then a new district attorney took office and filed a civil suit alleging that Pacific Lumber had submitted fraudulent data to state forestry officials that downplayed the prevalence of landslides in one watershed.

With legal and regulatory pressures mounting, Pacific Lumber created ads that cast the protesters as eco-terrorists. Then, citing the loss of revenue from lumber held hostage, the company moved to extract them. Aradia was spared, but in Freshwater Canyon, with sitters visible from the road, it was a different story.

On March 17, 2003, private arborists hired by Pacific Lumber shimmied into the trees in an area dubbed “Lower Village” carrying harnesses and handcuffs.

When the sitters were lowered to the ground, trespassing charges were filed against them. Pacific Lumber also sued them.

By now, relations had so deteriorated that the Forest Peace Alliance -- designed to last through October 2006 -- was for all practical purposes dead. (Pecht had become ill and could no longer travel to the meetings.)

Pacific Lumber then suffered a key legal defeat: A Superior Court judge invalidated the long-term logging plan obtained under the Headwaters Deal.

State regulators, the judge ruled, had granted the plan, as well as permits allowing the destruction of endangered species and streambeds, without required protections, or in some cases without public comment.

Although harvest approvals could be sought through a different regulatory channel, the ruling jeopardized Pacific Lumber’s pending requests. The state and company appealed.

Aradia was still threatened because it was part of a harvest plan that had already been approved. But sentiments seemed to be turning against the company. Maybe, Shunka thought, he could go legit and save the tree that way.

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Shunka pieced together an 11-page proposal filled with color photographs of Aradia and Chain.

His short-term plan called for the purchase of the tree. (Julia “Butterfly” Hill had ended her famous two-year tree sit in a redwood named Luna when her supporters bought it in late 1999 for $50,000.) The more ambitious option: that the state annex the entire watershed with money from private sources.

“Everyone should have the right to visit Gypsy Mountain, to pray and pay their respects, without risking arrest,” he wrote.

He placed the reports in plastic binders and mailed them to state and federal lawmakers. There was no response.

Then, in May 2004, he shared his frustrations with veteran Earth First! activist Darryl Cherney. Cherney, who owns five Maxxam shares, suggested that Shunka travel to the upcoming shareholder meeting in Houston as his proxy.

Pecht was there to meet him. When the meeting was opened to shareholder questions, Shunka stepped to the microphone.

Blue-eyed and compact, with a woolly red beard and a pile of amulets around his neck, Shunka was nervous. But he looked straight at Hurwitz. He was an eyewitness to Chain’s death, which activists considered murder, he told board members.

He flashed a picture of Aradia, noting that it was one of the first trees Chain climbed. He talked about the “Gypsy circle” and how preserving Aradia would complete it.

Then he reminded them of the deal struck with Hill and promised to do what Hill did after she saved Luna: leave. Hurwitz was nodding.

But Maxxam’s media spokesman later told Shunka that Hurwitz was unlikely to weigh in. The decision would fall to Pacific Lumber CEO Robert Manne. Pecht told him the same thing. She was impressed by his heartfelt proposal, but Pacific Lumber made its own operational decisions. Maxxam was hands-off.

By late August, Allsbrooks, Chain’s mother, was in Manne’s Scotia, Calif., office and got the news: Illegally occupied trees on company land were not for sale.

The following month, on Sept. 17, 2004, Allsbrooks gathered at the roadside memorial with more than three dozen others to mark the sixth anniversary of her son’s death.

His impish face is sculpted in relief on a granite block beneath a cluster of redwood trees off Highway 36. Someone had poured tar over it. Shunka gently peeled it off. “Hippy” was scratched in the stone.

The raid came eight days later. On Gypsy Mountain, the activists had dug a tunnel under the dirt road Pacific Lumber would have to take to get to Aradia.

When arborists, loggers and sheriff’s deputies arrived, two activists slept in the tunnel and three dozed nearby. The tunnel wasn’t shored up, they warned. The trucks and backhoe detoured around them.

A protester with the forest name of “Muddy” tore toward Aradia, a mile away. Arborist Eric Schatz had beaten him there and was putting on his harness.

Muddy scrambled up Manna, traversed to Garden, then to Aradia. There, he joined two tree sitters, “Cosmo” and “Heady Boots.” (The men declined to disclose their legal names, but their depiction of events was corroborated through Schatz.)

“If you come up here, you’re endangering our lives,” Muddy yelled to Schatz. “I’m taking my harness off; the others are taking theirs off.”

Schatz called back: “Well I’m coming up, so you’d better leave ‘em on.”

Shunka was miles away in Blue Lake, Calif., where a theater company was performing “Shadow of Giants,” a play about the struggle to save a redwood. He passed the news of the raid to other theatergoers.

Back at Aradia, the three men climbed to the top, where the trunk narrowed to a foot in diameter. They stripped off their harnesses and clung together. They felt vibrations as saws felled three “sucker trees” that shared Aradia’s root ball.

Five arborists came for them, and for nearly five hours the men did battle in the fog and drizzle.

When a hand or foot broke loose from the mass of limbs, an arborist would grab it, wrap it in soft webbing and tie it to the tree.

Two of the men were mistakenly placed in the same harness. Then the arborists undid their mistake. After the first sitter was handcuffed and lowered, Muddy was prepped. He told Schatz that all he wanted were a few moments of reflection before he was lowered to the ground.

“I totally got to sit there and say goodbye to Aradia,” he recalled, “and tell her I was sorry.”

When Schatz bound the last of the sitters, he noticed the ankles -- dotted with infected sores from so many soggy days and nights.

From a nearby tree, a protester called “Lodgepole” trained his camera on the top of Aradia. As she toppled, he wept.

For two years and eight months, the tree had been peopled by as many as 200 self-proclaimed “forest defenders.”

Up in Blue Lake, Shunka sat in a hushed theater. In the play, the sitter was extracted and the fictional tree felled with a deafening crack. Shunka had a bad feeling. He slipped into the woods outside and cried too.

*

Shunka recently turned 30.

This spring, he filed a complaint with the Sheriff’s Department asking that officials reopen the investigation of Chain’s death. The district attorney, who had previously declined to file charges, recently told Shunka that one of his prosecutors would take another look.

Pacific Lumber says it has spent $4 million to $6 million yearly on outside lawyers since the Headwaters Deal. A few week’s after Aradia’s fall, the Garberville-based Environmental Protection Information Center filed suit in federal court demanding that parts of the Headwaters Deal be revamped to better comply with the Endangered Species Act.

Pacific Lumber has declined to comment on pending litigation. Most troublesome for the company, however, have been logging restrictions near environmentally sensitive streambeds -- constraints that Pacific Lumber recently warned would push it into bankruptcy.

The company won a victory last month when a Superior Court judge tossed out the district attorney’s lawsuit -- on grounds that the company’s interactions with state officials were insulated from civil liability.

Pacific Lumber has begun holding community meetings in various watersheds “to reach out to residents,” spokesman Chuck Center said. Citing “one of the most difficult seven months in the company’s history,” executives last week closed their Fortuna sawmill, laying off 100 workers.

“We’re just trying to stay in business,” Center said.

In part of Freshwater Canyon just uphill from the logged Lower Village, meanwhile, activists recently scored a victory by remaining in the trees until Pacific Lumber’s approved timber harvest plan expired.

No sitter has been extracted from a tree since Aradia came down. Center declined to say whether the tactic would be used again but said it was employed in the past only when sitters posed a danger to themselves, the public or habitat.

“It’s our property,” he said. “We consider them trespassers.”

Shunka thinks fondly of Pecht, the Maxxam attorney. If they speak again, he said, he would “thank her for what I feel was her sincerity in wanting to help save Aradia.”

But Shunka also learned a lesson about corporate America: That kind of sincerity rarely matters.

For him, the heavy weight remains. He and other activists are supporting new tree-sits in Fern Gully, not far from the Freshwater sites.

“There’s, like, 12 Aradias up there,” Shunka said. “I offered to leave if they would save Aradia, but they didn’t take me up on my offer.... I’m on the nonviolent warpath.”