One April day, I made the three-hour drive from my home, in Halfmoon Bay, to the tree house, crossing the sea on a ferry and then weaving through the gleaming cyan towers of Vancouver. By early afternoon, I had reached the city of Burnaby. I parked outside a massive Korean grocery store, grabbed a backpack filled with climbing equipment, and walked along the shoulder of the highway. I could feel the eyes of each passing motorist scrutinizing me, skeptical of this strange human figure amid the machinescape.
After a few minutes, I spotted a small trail leading through a stand of cottonwood trees. It was blocked off with a yellow rope and a sign warning that I was now entering “a Trans Mountain project/operations site.” Ignoring the sign, I passed two portly, aging security guards wearing reflective yellow safety vests. I was worried that they would try to stop me, but they merely filmed me with their phones. Once I reached the tree house, a rope was lowered to me. I climbed up, using a harness and a pair of mechanical ascenders.
The tree was inhabited by a bearded, bespectacled man in his sixties named Tim Takaro, who often acted as a spokesman for the blockade. It was a mild, pleasant spring afternoon; sunlight slivered through branches hung with green catkins, like tiny chandeliers. Takaro opened a can of beer and sipped it while we talked. His manner of speech was genial and punctiliously intellectual—which should not have surprised me, given that he was a Yale graduate, a medical doctor, and a tenured professor of environmental health. But it nevertheless struck me as incongruous, given that he was, currently, an unwashed, barefoot eco-radical living in a tree.
One of Takaro’s chief tasks was to recruit and train new tree-sitters. The movement had about a hundred volunteers, although people continually drifted in and out; a core of about twenty individuals did most of the work. Finding dedicated tree-sitters, ones who would come back, even once the novelty had worn off and the legal risk began mounting, was a challenge. “We always need new people,” he said.
While talking with Takaro, I realized that, in some ways, I was ideally suited to the odd task of sitting in a tree and doing nothing all day. As a freelance writer, I did not need to show up to work at an office; I had no kids to tend to; my husband was accustomed to my being away on reporting trips; and, while researching my latest book, I had already learned the arcane art of climbing trees with ropes.
A decade earlier, when I was reporting on the Occupy Wall Street movement, amid the panoply of signs that people held, one in particular had pierced me. It read, simply, “Stop Gawking. Join!” Why, I wondered, had I been content to stand on the sidelines and watch while others fought for the things I believed in? Why wasn’t I sitting where Takaro was sitting?
The most obvious reason was professional—and, somewhat ironically, ethical—in nature. Traditionally, there is a bright line between journalism and activism; choosing to cross that line felt unseemly. More worrying still was the fact that I wasn’t yet a Canadian citizen; I had only a “permanent residency” card, which had to be renewed every five years. This meant that, if I were arrested, I risked being kicked out of the country. Takaro assured me that there were ways of minimizing my exposure. If arrests were imminent, he said, the police were obligated to read aloud a legal document known as an “injunction” and then give me about ten minutes to vacate the tree. So I could always run away, if need be. Ideally, of course, I wouldn’t run; I would chain myself to the tree and slow the loggers down for as long as I could. But Takaro explained that my very presence in the tree would suggest that I was a person willing to chain myself to it, which would force the police to assemble a special tactical unit to extract me. That would take time. And time—taking time from them, buying time for ourselves and the planet—was what this protest was all about.
