Freshwater, CA
Sunday September 14, 2003
10:15am This morning I woke up at like 6:30am or seven. My feet feel much better now. I got my much-needed rest. Now, I'm going to wake up and go find some tree sitters and talk their ears off.
11:05am I came out to the road and saw this dude. I asked him if anyone was going back to Arcata soon. I sat down and he let me roll a cigarette. Now, I'm just going for a walk. People should pick me up, hopefully.
11:56am It wasn't too big of a waste of time coming out here. I got overly excited at the Earth First thing, but I shouldn't have expected anything. Anyway, I'm walking down this road, down the mountain. Nobody has picked me up yet. I had gone to the after-party last night, which sucked, too. It was all Babylon. But, last night I found these two kids sitting out in the woods and they listened to me. They loved me and were all about it. So, it was pretty good. I got a little bit further in my mission. I got tons of email addresses. My book is almost full.
12:23pm Man, it's beautiful up here in these mountains. Ouch, I see a big clear cut out in the distance. It's obvious rape. You see this big beautiful view then you see all these trees cut down and it just sucks.
12:28pm I walked up to these trees where there's treesitters, where we stopped yesterday.
12:34pm Synapse(budgreene2002@yahoo.com) just hooked me up with a fat ass nugget. Badass.
12:41pm It was the same place we stopped at yesterday with the treesitters. I walked by and I saw Synapse, the guy I talked to last night. He ended up kicking me down a fat bud. This is awesome. I needed some weed.
1:17pm I loaded up my stuff into my bag, ate some of my Muscle Blast 2000 and I'm walking.
1:26pm I was just walking past the trees close to Synapse and I heard somebody call down from the tree, "Hey, is somebody walking on the road?" I started talking to this girl, Lisette. She's going to transfer over to this other tree and come to a lower branch so she can hear me better. I told her I could talk her ear off if she let me. I told her what I was doing.
1:37pm I met Lisette, also known as Starlight. She's a treesitter. She's been up here for a month already. She's invited me to stay for the night. I just might do that, for the book. Seems like I was meant to walk down here. It'll be awesome. That's cool.
She was pointing out all the trees nearby and how they have names. She was telling me that one time there were twenty-two treesitters up in a tree and that now it's all cut down. Umm, I'm just going to take this all in. I'm going to smoke some weed.
1:54pm I'm gearing up to go up in the tree. I've got this harness on. Starlight is showing me the ropes, literally.
3:20pm I climbed all the way up in this tree. I'm in this hammock, err dreamcatcher I mean. I'm scared it's going to fall, but I was told it's not going to. Wow, this is just awesome. It's just breathtakingly beautiful. I can see way across the valley to this big clear-cut section. Why isn't this destruction obvious to everybody?
4:17pm Man, it sucks when good things are said and I always forget to record them. Nobody wants to repeat themselves, and I can't remember exactly what they said. I hate wasting history. Anyway, I'm sitting up here in this tree. Starlight came back and we are talking about treesitting.
Starlight: "Our sun is just like any other regular star, no bigger than any other main sequence star. It's just a basic regular star. The sun's a star. And then the moon is just reflected sunlight, which is starlight. So the moon's light is also starlight. All this light we see that is reflected to make this brown and green is also starlight, much like everything else.
When I realized the more I do something out there(in Babylon), the more I am doing against everything that I really believe in. Everything against Mother Nature and life and beauty and love. Those are the things that I truly believe in and out of this tree I am doing all kinds of things against that. Every single day that I am out in society, every single day that I think I am helping I am actually harming my true honest beliefs.
Out here I am not. Out here I am actually doing something to propel those beliefs that actually go beyond just speaking about living this fantasy world that I've made up. I'm actually living it. Living off the extras of mankind. And until we can provide for ourselves and actually do something about everybody that is taking action against what is true to my heart. So yeah, I don't know, it's kind of like give-and-take. Because even up here I'm just sitting here. You can't do much more than sit, but what good am I doing? Well, I'm doing a lot of good, because every single moment I spend up here, it's building a foundation for this voice that I'm going to be able to have and actually save these trees. Not just these trees. There's less than three percent of native Redwoods left. Less than three percent of these old growths. These coasts were littered with Redwoods. Can you even imagine these huge monoliths all across the land. These trees take two thousand years to grow. In less than three hundred years we have wiped them out. What to do? What to do?
The world comes to you up here. Like, when I left Anastasia(a tree), The Radio for Peace International came to us and interviewed us on this very branch. It was telecast all across the world. I've been interviewed, but not very much and I'm not really looking for that right now. I'm not going to start calling for that until a little bit later on. Give me four months up in the tree and my thoughts organized and everything. I'll be more stable. I really need to make a communion with what I'm doing first. It's a very strong statement that I'm trying to make and I better make the right one if I want to be potent and truthful to my words. And also I have to practice what I'm preaching. If I want to go out there and I want to be saying things I want to be acting and in that manner also."
Okay, I had a pretty interesting time in the tree. They have a network of like four trees. The sitters have these ropes connecting them and they traverse between them using harnesses and pulleys. I got to traverse over to Starlight's platform and everything. Her neighbor, I forgot his name, would come visit and smoke with us. It really pains me that I didn't record more, but something really, really bad happened.
Okay, everyone. The shittiest thing happened. I accidentally dropped my recorder out of the tree, a hundred feet up. I noticed I dropped something and saw it bounce off some branches, but I couldn't make out what it was. It wasn't until the next morning that I realized my recorder missing from my pocket and pieced it all together. I was devastated. I could've sworn the side of the tree it fell off of was the slope side and that it was lost forever in the thick jungle below. When I woke up the next morning I climbed down to the lowest branch, leaving my bags up on top. I was just going to look around and see if I could spot it. When I climbed down, I said screw it and lowered myself to the ground. Starlight was still sleeping. I remembered there being a slight lean to the tree, so I looked around on the road, hoping the recorder bounced off a branch and fell over the road somewhere. I combed the area under the tree good, but with no luck. I almost gave up, assuming it fell down the slope. When all of a sudden near the base of the tree I spotted something grey. My recorder! It was lying on the ground face-first. I noticed the lid to the battery case was a little broken. I picked it up only to find it missing the door and cassette. I tried the buttons, but it was non-operational. Shit, it wouldn't be that bad if I still had the tape. I was pissed. I moved over some leaves near where I had found the recorder and tada, the tape! Badass. It seemed intact. The only history I lost is what I forgot to record. I still had my tape. But no working recorder.
I decided I would go back to Arcata today. I couldn't get back up in the tree because I couldn't reach the nearest branch. Remember I needed a harness to get in it yesterday. I waited for Starlight to wake up and asked her to traverse over and lower my bags. She did and she wished me safe travels.
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