Speak to the Earth (7 page)

“Thanks for your help, Kevin.”

“No sweat.”

If Bryan had been slightly anxious that his mother would discover and disapprove of his arrangement with Kevin, his worries evaporated over the next few days. He hardly saw her. Instead, he would find notes on the kitchen table: I’ll
be at work until five
or I’
ve got an SOS meeting ‘til
late. Your supper’s in the oven
or
I’ll be at the peace camp all morning. I’ll go to work from there. See you tonight
.

The peace camp was the name the activists gave to their rallying point out by the Big Bear River bridge. What a laugh, Bryan thought. I don’t feel any peace.

The anti-logging protests began early in July, just as Iris had predicted. The tree-huggers, as Jimmy called them, blocked the bridge when the lumber trucks, laden with fresh-cut timber, tried to cross the Big Bear River. A few days later MFI obtained, in what Iris bitterly termed “record time,” a court injunction that forbade blockage of the road or bridge. The court order did not exactly strike fear into the hearts of the protesters, she said. On the day that the injunction came into effect, fifty-five people were arrested.

When Bryan dragged himself out of bed the next morning, later than usual, the house was quiet except for the hum of rain on the roof. He padded down the hall in his bare feet and found another of his mother’s notes. Knowing what it would say, he tossed it aside. He slipped down to the basement and listened for a moment. Kevin and Otto had left, probably to the peace camp.

Alone in the house, feeling like the only sane person in the universe, he put the coffee on and phoned Ellen. They talked for an hour or so. She was not allowed out that day, she said. “It’s clean-the-basement day.”

He was tearing into a plate of bacon, eggs and toast, reading a book on humpback whales, when the phone rang. Probably Elias, Bryan thought. His friend had the
day off, and the two of them planned to go down to the tiny arcade near the government dock and play a few video games. If the place wasn’t crawling with tourists’ kids bored from the rain in the campsites.

The male voice was businesslike. “Is this Norm’s B&B?”

“Yes, it is. But we’re full up for the next —”

“Does Jimmy Lormer live there?”

“Yes.”

“This is Scott Weatherby. His foreman at MFI.”

“He’s at work today. He left —”

“Jimmy’s had an accident.”

Time stopped for Bryan. He was standing beside his mother in their living room above the store in Drumheller. Her knuckles whitened as she clutched the telephone. Her face was pale. She asked, “Are you sure it’s him? Are you certain it’s Norm?” and then she sobbed, “No, no, no, no …” as Bryan was gripped tighter and tighter by a terror he had never imagined.

The voice snatched him back. “Are you there?”

“Is it bad?” he asked. He held his breath.

“Pretty bad. You’d —”

“Is he alive?”

“He’s alive, yeah. But he’s pretty smashed up, looks like. We’re taking him to the hospital now. You better get his sister.”

Bryan slammed down the phone and dashed next door. He pounded on the door, praying that Walter was home.

W
alter’s ancient pick-up truck rattled down Highway 93, its bald tires hissing on the pavement, its wipers flapping ineffectually across the cracked windshield. Walter sat grim-faced at the wheel, peering ahead into the rain. Beside him on the torn seat, Bryan willed the truck to go faster.

He was flung against the door when Walter swerved off 93, throwing the truck into a slide when it hit the gravel bush road. The thick conifers closed in around them. After a few moments jouncing along the narrow road, the truck broke out of the forest into an extensive and barren moonscape. The slopes on both sides of the road had been clear-cut and burned years before. Blackened stumps poked out of the denuded ground. Bryan remembered that Iris and her committee had dubbed this huge clear-cut “The Wasteland.” Large signs had been painted on plywood and nailed to posts held upright by piles of rocks:
Orca Sound, Not Clear-Cut Sound
and
Vancouver Island, Brazil of the North
.

Walter steered the truck around a bend and suddenly the peace camp loomed ahead in the drizzle. Dozens of tents had been pitched in the flatter areas of the Wasteland, making blue, orange and red blotches in a landscape of muted greys and greens. Hundreds of men, women and children in ponchos or raincoats milled around.

Walter brought the pick-up to a shuddering halt next to a huge tent with a poster,
Rainforest Café
, nailed to a stump beside the door. “Maybe she’s in there, your mother,” he said, uttering his first words since Bryan had banged on the screen door of his trailer.

Bryan led the way into the tent. A few dozen people were seated at tables, spooning soup out of bowls, cups and tins. Behind a trestle table a woman in a food-stained apron served soup out of a cauldron to a line-up of wet activists. Bryan asked her if his mother was around. The woman knew Iris but had not seen her that day. Bryan explained why he was looking for her.

“Oh, God. Just a minute.” The woman threw down the ladle and hustled to the corner of the tent, where a man sat at a card table. Before him, a laptop computer, two portable FM radios and several cellular telephones were neatly arranged. The woman spoke to him briefly, then returned to tell Bryan that Iris was up the road at the bridge.

Bryan and Walter jumped back into the truck. The road narrowed, dirt replacing the gravel. This must be the new section Jimmy helped build, Bryan thought with
a deepening sense of foreboding. Naked stumps lined the track where trees had been felled, and piles of forest debris marked the work of the bulldozers.

The road dipped and the truck rattled into an open area jammed with a chaotic array of people and vehicles, as if some madman had decided to set up a carnival in the middle of the forest. A yellow school bus, three RCMP cruisers and a police van with wire mesh on the windows were parked on both sides of the road. Walter parked behind the police van.

Just ahead, a knot of protesters stood listening to a woman speaking through a megaphone.

“Who is willing to be arrested?” Bryan heard as he approached.

A few hands went up. A girl of about ten — Bryan had seen her around town — put up her hand. “I’ll have to ask my mother first,” she yelled, pushing damp bangs away from her eyes. No one laughed.

“All right,” the woman continued, her voice metallic and impersonal as it squeezed through the megaphone. “Remember, when you join the people on the bridge, that we are totally committed to non-violence. When the process server reads the injunction, be silent: the judge will treat you more harshly if you do not show respect when the injunction is read. Do not resist the police. Let your body go limp and allow them to carry you to the bus. Don’t even hold on to them as they carry you away: if you do, they’ll charge you with resisting arrest. Good luck, and save Orca Sound!”

The crowd around her took up the chant as they moved slowly toward the bridge. Bryan darted among them as quickly as he could, anxiously searching for his mother. At the edge of the throng, just up the rise at the side of the road, he caught sight of Otto and Kevin, taking pictures. They look like reporters covering a car wreck, Bryan thought.

Bryan caught up to the woman with the megaphone. Shouting above the chanting, he asked her if Iris was nearby.

“Yeah, she’s around here someplace.” Before Bryan could explain, the woman vanished into the crowd.

Bryan had no choice but to follow them. The road fell away more steeply as it descended to the river. He could see the bridge now, with the Big Bear River foaming beneath it on its way to Gray’s Passage. On the bridge about a dozen people were sitting quietly in the drizzle, several rows deep, facing in Bryan’s direction. The road rising uphill on the other side was empty.

“See her yet?” Walter had materialized out of the crowd.

Bryan shook his head and began to jog downhill. A car pushed along behind him, horn blaring, forcing him to the side of the road. It was the first of a convoy. Elias’s brother, Zeke, who had joined the
RCMP
about a year before, was in one of the cruisers.

As the last car passed him, Bryan saw a flash of pink up on the bridge. A shade of pink all too familiar to him. He peered through the drizzle. Two pink knees stuck out
from under a dark green poncho. It was Iris, sitting cross-legged in the second row.

Like a lit match, anger flared through him. He began to run. You idiot, he thought. Your brother is on his way to the hospital and you’re out here with a bunch of crazies sitting on a bridge and getting your ass wet. “Who is willing to be arrested?” the megaphone woman had asked. As if they were at a carnival and this was all a big game.

“Mom!” Bryan shouted, jumping up and down, waving.

Things began to happen quickly. The cars stopped at the river’s edge. Doors flew open and cops walked toward the bridge, accompanied by a bald man in a trench coat. On the other side of the bridge, a lumber truck appeared at the top of the hill, laden with four mammoth trees, and on each side of the truck was a column of people, walking silently.

There were men, women and children in the columns. Each of them waved a yellow ribbon. Most wore yellow or red hardhats. A few signs bobbed up and down:
We Want to Work
and
Obey the Law
.

As the truck and its silent escort slowly approached the bridge, the bald man raised a megaphone. He sounded impersonal, even a little bored. He told the protesters that they were in violation of a court injunction that forbade such actions. “If you are not off the bridge before that truck stops moving, you will be put under arrest.” The megaphone dropped out of sight. The man walked
back to his car as if he didn’t care whether the people had heard him or not.

Bryan’s fear grew with every metre covered by the big yellow logging truck. The crowd around him took up the chant again: “Save Orca Sound!” And now the counter-protest gave voice: “Let us work!”

The truck was on the bridge now, inching toward Bryan’s mother, its diesel engine barely audible above the chanting war. Cops marched purposefully onto the bridge. The truck came on, its huge grille towering over the silent, seated protesters.

“Mom! Mom! I have to talk to you! Dammit, get out of there!” Bryan screamed, pushing toward the bridge.

It was no use. The eighteen-wheeler came to a halt inches from the backs of the protesters. The counterprotesters formed a wall, waving their ribbons and rhythmically demanding to be allowed to work. Shoving two or three people out of the way, Bryan stepped onto the bridge.

“Mom! Uncle Jimmy —”

A burly cop pushed him back. “Take one more step on this bridge and I’ll have to arrest you. Now get away.”

“But I have to —”

The cop pushed again. Bryan fell backward. He scrambled to his feet, looking around frantically for Walter. The police were carrying protesters away and dumping them in the back of the blue van.

And then Bryan saw Zeke Wilson and another cop lugging his mother, like a drenched pink bag of sand, off the bridge.

B
rian stood helplessly at the side of the road, watching the strange convoy. Two police cruisers drove slowly up the hill, their revolving lights flickering through the fog to the green wall of forest. Behind them, the yellow school bus with a few faces showing in the windows, then the van full of prisoners. And last, the huge eighteen-wheeler snorting along, hauling four trees out of the bush, flanked by people waving yellow ribbons.

When the truck had ground past him, Bryan saw Walter standing at the side of the road. His arms were crossed and, to Bryan’s surprise, he looked angry. He looked, in fact, as though he’d been saving up a few decades’ worth of anger and now it was forcing its way out. When Bryan reached him he turned and began to walk to his truck.

Bryan tramped along, head down in the rain, furtively searching for faces he knew — so he could avoid them. He did not want to be recognized, not where his mother
had been picked up — literally, he thought without humour — for making fools of her whole family.

He climbed into Walter’s truck and they moved off, creeping along the road crowded with activists. She should be at her brother’s side, he thought, not playing politics out here in the bush. Rain beat on the roof of the truck, the wipers flapped, streaking the windshield, the old motor strained and grumbled, pushing the truck past the café and through the Wasteland. Not since his dad had been killed had Bryan felt so depressed and empty. His mother was on her way to jail, his uncle on his way to hospital.

Walter drove straight to Nootka Harbour’s small hospital and pulled up at the Emergency entrance. Bryan jumped down and ran through the automatic doors. He skidded to a halt in front of the desk and told the old woman behind the glass that he was Jimmy Lormer’s nephew. After clicking a few computer keys, she told Bryan that a doctor would be with him soon.

He sat down in a plastic armchair just as Waiter entered the waiting room. Bryan wondered if he looked as wet and bedraggled as Walter did. Across the room a young mother waited, a toddler with a runny nose squirming in her lap. Bryan fidgeted. He drummed his fingers on the chair arms. He crossed and recrossed his ankles. He flipped through a four-month-old magazine and tossed it back onto the coffee table.

Jimmy must be pretty bad, he thought, or they would have said something to me right away. If he was okay, the
lady at reception would have said so. I wonder if — Bryan did not want to complete the thought. He felt an ache in his throat and suddenly his eyes filled with tears. He wiped them away quickly, stealing a glance at the woman nearby.

Mom should be here, he thought. She’s so damn selfish with her stupid causes. She —

“Bryan Troupe?”

Bryan jumped from his seat, eyes riveted on the doctor who stood in the doorway of the waiting room, holding a clipboard. His heart raced. Here it comes.