Going out on a limb for love, activism

SUZANNE MATSON has written a confounding but compelling romance with impeccable timing -- and a slightly misleading title. In “The Tree-Sitter,” Matson revisits the New England-to-Northwest connection she explored in her novel “The Hunger Moon.”

Here, the Boston College professor who did graduate work at the University of Washington ties a coming-of-age love story with a Gordian knot of protest and eco-terrorism.

Last month, 11 people were indicted in Eugene, Ore., for 17 acts of eco-sabotage on behalf of the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. The crimes, many committed within an hour’s drive of the university town, killed no one but destroyed more than $23 million in property. Three suspects remain at large.

Julie Prince, the narrator of “The Tree-Sitter,” is a blue-blooded Bostonian, Wellesley undergrad and self-styled spoiled rich girl. Her mother, a never-married lawyer, loves her dearly but has trouble showing it. For Julie, travel has always meant European capitals and Caribbean islands, so she jumps at the chance to slum it with her new boyfriend, Neil, an MIT grad student, on a road trip west to protect endangered old-growth forests in western Oregon.

“I felt a rush of homecoming,” Julie recalls upon seeing the Grand Tetons, “at the same time I was registering its strangeness.... Like going back to a place half dreamed or half remembered.”

Julie begs comparison to Julia Butterfly Hill. Outwardly chaste, inwardly spiritual but surprisingly media-savvy, Hill first adopted the middle moniker within the Earth First! movement. She soon became the world’s most famous tree sitter, opposing Pacific Lumber Co. and Charles Hurwitz, chief of its parent company Maxxam Inc. She wrote the bestseller “The Legacy of Luna.” Hill spent 738 days in Luna.

Julie -- a.k.a. Emerald -- spends only six nights atop a Douglas fir. Her main mission is to work as a temp in the quaint offices of a local logging company, ostensibly under deep cover for her boyfriend’s circle of Eugene radicals. In reality, she’s more preoccupied with her relationship with Neil than saving spotted owl habitat.

But Neil -- the stereotypically brilliant, idealistic loner -- is no mere chapfallen tree hugger; he can sabotage SUVs as adeptly as he climbs firs. “[I]t’s really that stark, you know?” he lectures Julie while channeling Thoreau. “You’re either in the system or out of it, no having it both ways.”

While a slow start and Neil’s formulaic character forge the book’s weakest link, drama slowly builds as we navigate a setting that is so real you can smell the patchouli oil.

“It was as if all the toxin-free air they breathed and vegan food they ate had worn away too many edges,” thinks Julie, describing the Eugene activists. “Their unshaved gentleness, their own particular brand of conformity in their tie-dyes and Indian cottons or Guatemalan wools, seemed too pious, and somehow -- I don’t know -- witless. Not as in stupid, but as in smilingly humorless, without irony or surprising jests of thought.”

Julie’s first inner conflict is a familiar one: resolving the Venn diagram in her relationship where sex and love overlap -- or don’t.

“There were times I suspected he didn’t need me ...,” she remembers. “Not that he didn’t want me in some fairly intense way. But was I required? Most of the time I felt him hungering instead for an engagement with his beliefs -- a way to ground his actions in them.”

Those actions escalate quickly. “As long as no one gets hurt,” she thinks, “that was my line. He’d assured me it was his, too. But when we said it was okay to move from jamming up logging equipment to exploding things, how could you guarantee anything? Didn’t the line itself then fracture into shrapnel, dangerously jagged and random?”

When the activists’ actions finally make Julie question her allegiances, she comes to understand that the decisions she makes will define her adult life. Maybe too late, she realizes that for those who draw an absolute line between the human world and the natural one, the primeval forest is not only vanishing but lonely.

Jim Rossi is a San Franciscobased writer who covers science and the outdoors.