Good Old Activism Taking Root in Ojai

The bitter wails, the boiling anger, the tears, the riot squad.

This was definitely not what Joyce Kilmer had in mind.

It was Kilmer, of course, who wrote the oft-parodied verse that begins:

“I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.”

Less well-known is his poetic musing titled “Chain Saw Charlie”:

“In Ojai, a guy

Might just avow

He eats burnt cow

And wants his kids

To smoke at three

As ever cut down

An old oak tree.”

Kilmer died in World War I. Even a combat veteran might have been unprepared for the scene at Ojai’s Libbey Park over the past couple of days.

There was the activist clinging famously to his tree. There were the weeping onlookers, the deputies in riot gear, the crush of protesters, the cameras, the lights, the mourners writing letters to the spirits of the soon-to-be-dead oak trees.

“I am sorry for all humans’ stupidity,” wrote a 13-year-old in a near-perfect expression of teen angst.

Wrote one woman: “Hearts are breaking all over Ojai with each crack of a limb, with each time the saw works. And we thought you would outlast all of us--how wrong we were . . . “

As sawdust drifted through the air, Margot Eiser, a longtime Ojai resident, sniffed a dark spot on a chunk of wood that had been cut from one of the trees.

“A little moldy,” she said. “But dying?”

Eiser spoke of the City Council’s “blood lust” and, like others, questioned the speed of the council’s action. The final decision to chop was made at a raucous meeting just two nights before.

“Nothing in Ojai has ever worked this fast,” she grumbled.

At issue was just how sick the century-old oaks were. The city insisted the three oaks were mortally ill and could come down at any time on the playground beneath them. But many residents contended the oaks weren’t all that sick, and could be braced in various ways. Why chop the oaks, they asked, when the playground could be moved?

Nobody suggested taking out the children instead of the oaks. If anybody had, public reaction would have been at least as heated.

Although the crisis seems to have made any number of people credible botanists nearly overnight, I wouldn’t claim to know which position is correct.

All I know is that the guilt oozes across boundaries, like melting brie at a poetry reading.

When my daughter was young, we loved to go to the playground in Libbey Park.

How could I have known what arborists know today? Sand from the playground choked off the trees’ shallow roots, they say. And over the years, those thousands of children happily swinging and sliding and running: If you’re looking for root-batterers, look no further than those murderous little feet.

I’ll take whatever punishment the system metes out. I will not use the “just-another-good-parent” defense. What’s right is right.

This I know better than ever, after John Christianson’s widely chronicled act of civil disobedience.

I have a great affection for people who fasten themselves to at-risk trees.

That’s how activism used to be, in a more innocent day. If you didn’t want the bulldozer to come through your neighborhood, you’d form a chain of baby carriages across the road. If your school refused to drop its investments in South Africa, you’d lock the trustees in their meeting room until they saw the light.

Of course, these tactics seldom worked for long.

But it would be heartening to see such passion on behalf of, say, the mentally ill, the homeless, the poor--in addition to aging lumber.

In the end, Christianson’s vigil failed. He was thrown in jail and at least two of the three trees are coming down.

But sometimes the only way to make your point is to go out on a limb.

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Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.