“You Think You Know”

Creators of Justice Award 2021 | Third Prize: Short Story

Joe Johnson is a monthly columnist for North of the James Magazine in Richmond, Virginia; an editor of The Alliance for Progressive Virginia blog and a contributor to Style Magazine. His published works include short stories, articles and the novel, An Animal's Guide to Earthly Salvation. His latest novel, In Black and White -- about the life of Dr. Vernon Johns and Barbara Johns -- is scheduled to be published by Propertius Press in 2022.

One day a hawk’s scream fills the air. Followed by a deep silence, a tremoring almost as though the Earth were waiting. Then, an explosion. Some men talking in shallow voices with smudged white hard hats point toward your apple orchard. Bull dozers begin to grumble. County police cars surround your property. Officers edge your yard with strands of yellow plastic tape, like they are outlining a body. Yours. And you realize you’ve never known. Not really.

In a board room somewhere they exists, you think. Inevitably they are men, mostly white. Thick paunches, perfect hair: their hands un-calloused, unworked, as soft as a baby’s behind. Their tongues are light with numbers, future prospects. Projects fire in their eyes, lit up like a thousand methane burns in a desert night. Out of this intensity is born a map. With lines curved as a snake. You are on this map. The lines cut through your apple orchard, cut through property that your family has worked for five generations. No one in that board room knows your name. Or your father’s name, or your mother’s name. No one knows about the apple orchard planted near the beginning of the Civil War. No one even pays attention to the other lines, though they are clearly drawn on the map, like blood capillaries in the Earth’s lungs. The creeks, the rivers, the streams. The springs and wells. Colored blue for water, for life.

You contemplate this from a platform hovering fifty-five feet in the air, above your own property. It is made of sheets of ply board, a quarter inch thick. The kind you might use for an attic floor. In the first days, when you realized what was happening, you and your daughter built the platform in your tallest Sycamore. Directly in the pipeline’s path. You had read about others doing this. You were raised in a Southern Baptist household and as a teenager your idea of being radical was drinking moonshine in a cornfield with Sammy Jenkins, or smoking weed or wearing hot pants. But now you realize it is much different, both more bold and more terrifying.

You read about Julia Hill spending 738 days in a Redwood Tree in California. Two years, and eight days. Julia called herself butterfly, the tree’s name was ‘Luna.’; and you think, ‘crazy.’ You read about the Bishnois Hindu religious sect. They were around in 1485 in the Jodhpur desert of India. That’s how long this has been going on! A marvelous people, they refused to kill any living thing, including trees. The king of Jodhpur decided that he needed to build a new palace and wanted to use the Acacia trees the Bishnoi had grown. He sent soldiers to gather the wood. A female villager, Amrita Devi, would not relent. There is always an Amrita, it occurs to you. She decided to hug the trees to protect them, and encouraged others to do the same, proclaiming: “A chopped head is cheaper than a felled tree.”

This is all true.

Now…now this notion of sacrifice, of priorities, is exactly what you understand by the word ‘radical.’ After her example, other Bishnois from nearby villages traveled to the forest and embraced the trees to protect them. As each villager hugged a tree, refusing to let go, they were beheaded by the soldiers.

News spread. Bishnois from some eighty-three villages traveled to save the trees. Older people went first. Many of them were killed as they hugged the Acacia. Like some cheap FOX News host, the king, a fellow named Giridhar Bhandari claimed that the Bishnoi were only sending people whom they thought were useless to be killed. In response, younger men, women, and children began to guard the trees, resulting in many of them being killed as well. In all, 363 Bishnois were murdered while protecting the trees.

You ask yourself. Would you do the same? Would it be worth it? You think you know. And really, you want something not nearly as grandiose. You merely want to preserve your apple orchard.

So, that’s it. You and your daughter find the Sycamore that will block the progress of the pipeline, and that’s big enough. You begin building a platform that would support you. Six by eight feet of ply board, two by four supports. Ropes and nails. The bark rips, but the platform holds. You buy a cooler and some blankets. You figure out the length of ropes you’ll need and buy 20 square feet of blue tarp. This is to provide cover from the rain and hail. A pulley, rope and bucket is rigged to pass food up, and waste down. You feel like Swiss Family Robinson. You feel like Julia Butterfly. You don’t want to feel like Amrita Devi, but you realize, you do. You aim to stop this pipeline. Or have the pipeline stop you

**

On the day you ascend, it is brilliantly sunny and triumphant. Friends and family come out to support you. To cheer you on. There are activists from across the state. You are surprised by how many people have shown up. The activists look a little mangy in your view, a little hungry and beaten down, but you will not judge. You welcome all support. The day is clear. A news reporter from WWRX asks you why you are blocking the path of this pipeline which has a legal permit.

“This is my land,” you say, “this is my house and my apple orchard that they want to destroy.”

You explain that all that is legal is not right. You say that Hitler’s Germany was perfectly legal and criminally insane.

“Are you suggesting that the pipeline workers are evil? Are you saying the pipeline developers are insane?”

You decide to limit interviews for the rest of the day.

That night, the sky is clear and you can count stars through the black tree leaves. Your first night in the tree is amazing and strange. It is also an introduction to inconvenience. You are not used to performing yoga in order to use the toilet. You are not used to the incredible noise of the night forest in the trees. The cicadas, the tree frogs and the owls. And other unnamable sounds as well. There is so much you will need to learn. So much you want to learn.

You wake up in the morning and the sweet familiarity of the dawn’s chorus greets you: a sparrow’s song, a wren’s trill, and you wonder why anyone would destroy this sacred moment. You want to understand who is doing this, and why. You think you know these men. Can imagine them in their perfidy; their desires, to own, to control, to increase. What you don’t know is what they lack, what they can’t see, or understand. You don’t know the great hole that they must fill with their empty schemes. It’s a nearly impossible task to measure their absence of sounds, their lack of vision, their empty souls. Yet, you are convinced this is associated with their greed. With their insanity.

If they could be here, if they could only see what they are destroying you think. You think you know what their response would be. If you could get them to sit still long enough to understand. You want to believe they could understand.

**

Each day on the platform has been its own gift. Days of rain and days of sun and days of wind. How can you measure the absence of those sounds? Not hearing the trickle of Bent Creek on a summer’s day? Has all this less value than polyurethane?

Months go by and one day you wake to the hawk’s cry again. You think this is the time they might pull you down. The yellow tape is circling the tree. They’ve stopped allowing anyone to give you food. You have supplies for a day or two more. You think you know how this is going to go, but there’s a man now stationed at the base of the tree with an ominous security patch wearing a black mask. He holsters a weapon, a 9 mm, and you suspect if you come down, he would happily take you to jail.

You think it cannot end this way, after all. You are a little relieved realizing this. You lean back on your ply board and stare at the accumulating clouds. They are dark and promise a coming storm. A breeze cools you down. Remarkably, there’s still the sweet honeysuckle scent, even fifty feet up! You will string this out for as long as it takes, you realize. This is the only way left. You understand a little better the weird Hindu sect that worshipped all of life; that hugged trees.