Читать книгу Stony Mesa Sagas - Chip Ward - Страница 9

Chapter 2

Luna Waxwing tried not to tremble. Her voice cracked when she spoke so she stayed silent and pretended to be brave. The bulldozer with its enormous gleaming blade looked like a wall bearing down on her and a dozen compadres who sat chained together in front of the mining site gate. She noticed how the cobalt blue of the desert sky reflected in the mud-spattered blade that was about to chop and crush her. As the yellow monster closed in, she caught a fleeting glimpse of the maniac who was jerking levers back and forth in the bulldozer’s cabin. He wore a white helmet with a faded logo. The blade dropped and the helmet disappeared behind it.

The bulldozer growled forward and the crowd gathered at the tar sands protest screamed and waved their arms frantically, imploring the driver to stop. Some covered their eyes or looked away. Luna stifled a sob and whispered, “Please, God, no!” a moment before the machine stopped inches away from the chained protesters.

When it was clear that the dozer operator meant to scare them, not kill them, the protestors resumed their chant; “Tar sands no! Drexxel go!” Jacked up by the near slaughter, they shouted louder. Sheriff Taylor saw how the charging dozer infuriated the large crowd that had made the arduous trip to support those blocking the mining site with their bodies. He trotted over to the dozer and grabbed the sleeve of the man in the white hardhat. He ordered him to get down before he made the situation even worse. The driver walked away but not before flipping his middle finger at the chained demonstrators.

Most of the protestors had been camping nearby at High Hollow Springs for two weeks. The strip-mining had not begun but heavy equipment had been moved in so that the site could be prepared. The road would have to be upgraded and a parking lot for work vehicles scraped out. They needed a warehouse for supplies and equipment, an office, a repair shop, a pad for fuel tanks. And that was just the beginning. Eventually the mining site would be an industrial island squatting in the center of the once-wild Seafold Ledges with massive pipelines radiating out from a gouged and scoured landscape. It takes a lot of infrastructure to scrape a thousand acres raw and then boil the soil into oil.

The Seafold Ledges Tar Sands Alliance was a loose grassroots group that aimed at drawing attention to the toxic and water-wasting nature of tar sands production. They had a website and a Twitter account, an office in a converted storage shed, and an ad hoc staff that conveyed compelling information about the massive amount of water that would be needed to process the tar sands and the scary brew of toxic chemicals that would go into the soil and eventually into the groundwater. They posted photos of the apocalyptic destruction of northern Canadian landscapes wrought by strip-mining the tar sands there. They had demonstrated against the project at several public appearances of Drexxel’s corporate officers but this was their first act of civil disobedience at the tar sands mining site itself.

Luna took three deep breaths to calm herself. She exhaled slowly and checked to see if she had wet her pants. Dry so far. Her confidence returned, she reviewed the reasons she found herself on a dirt road thirty miles from the highway, joined to a chain-link fence with twelve people who shared her noble convictions but at the moment looked like a discarded charm bracelet of disheveled campers.

The Seafold Ledges was a remote landscape of broken cliffs and wide arid valleys that could only be reached by primitive dirt roads. You had to swallow a lot of dust to get there. The dozens of archaeological sites that were scattered across the high desert testified to a time before cows and sheep replaced elk and bison and the ancestors of today’s so-called Pueblo people could hunt and gather there.

After the original human inhabitants left, the Ledges saw few visitors: the occasional cowboy looking for stray cows, a few geologists who found fossils and mapped the tar sands below the Ledges, and a team of Army surveyors looking for a place to blow up bombs and practice war. The Sea Ledges was never adequate for their needs, an also-ran in America’s epic race to exploit its deserts.

A couple of times each fall, van loads of college students visited. They would burst from their dusty vehicles, their knees cramped from the long ride, and blink at the bright sky. Many had never experienced a sky so blue. They would be led by their professor to areas rich with fossils where they could paw and poke at the layers of rocks that were uplifted and exposed like the pages of a book. The ledger of the Ledges told a story punctuated with mollusks, trilobites, walking fish, and dinosaurs, a kind of evolutionary braille embedded in stone. In the winter, ice and wind scraped across the bare pinnacles and made a mournful song unheard by all but antelope and bighorn sheep.

Deserts are generally abused and abandoned or simply ignored. That was true for the Seafold Ledges, too, until humanity’s insatiable appetite for oil meant that even dirty tar mixed into sandstone was valuable. The fossil fuel industry had already picked the low hanging fruit and technology made possible the recovery of oil from even the crappiest scraps in sand. Suddenly, the Seafold Ledges held something that was wanted.

The Drexxel Development Corporation had bet that tar sands were the next big thing. They had been to Canada and the same landscape laid to waste that horrified ardent conservationists was a source of inspiration to the Drexxel team that surveyed the massive strip mines there. The scale was mind-boggling and they speculated that the profit to be made in a world addicted to carbon was limitless. A Drexxel scout told his employer that the Sea Ledges could be “better than Alberta.” They surveyed the empty landscape of the Ledges and dreamed of trucks the size of buildings moving the raw material of the world toward their bank accounts.

Drexxel’s scouts were leasing land and buying mineral rights in places like the Seafold Ledges. Most of it was public land, so leases were cheap. But their plan to dig up thousands of tons of sand and then boil the gooey crude out of it faced major hurdles. One, squeezing oil out of rock is expensive because it is also energy intensive—it would take almost as much fuel to produce the fuel as the fuel produced. Two, they needed a way to get the product out—a pipeline was another big and complicated expense. And finally, there were those crazies with their signs about pollution and global warming who showed up at every public meeting, chanting and yelling and now, damn it, chaining themselves to the mining site gate. Mining had not begun but the big machines were on hand to prepare the site and that cost plenty. Tar sands mining is marginal and risky enough without adding in such unnecessary delays. Something had to be done about those eco-freaks.

One by one the thirteen chained protestors were separated from each other by bolt cutters wielded by Sheriff Taylor’s deputies. They were arrested for trespassing and resisting arrest, read their rights, and carried one by one to vans, the one police van in Boon County and another borrowed from the senior citizen center. A deputy named Eldon Pratt found the entire operation baffling. Who were these crazy people, he wondered, and what are they doing so far from the highway? Why are they so mad? There is nothing wrong with mining, without mining there would be no cars. How do they think they got out here?

Eldon had only been out of Boon County a few times in his life, mostly when his uncle took him cross-country in his truck to deliver shipments of refrigerated meat. They didn’t tarry along the routes they followed and Eldon was left with the impression that the rest of America looked like truck stops, which were pretty much the same from one place to another. His fellow Americans were motorists just like him. The people he saw shuffling in and out of rest rooms or feeding coins into vending machines loaded with Red Bull, Slim Jims, and Snickers appeared to have no history, regional accents, political opinions, food preferences, sexual orientations, and so on. In truck stops, diversity is mostly in one’s imagination and Eldon wasn’t strong in that area. So this bunch of his fellow Americans chained to a gate and chanting incomprehensible slogans struck him as weird.

He whispered to Sheriff Taylor, “Look at that guy over there. He has those dreadlocks you see on TV. Can we cut his hair when we get him to the jail?” Sheriff Taylor frowned at him and turned away. Eldon didn’t suggest it to be cruel, he was just curious.

On the way back to the Boon County jail, the vans became mired in mud twice and sand once. A recent thunderstorm left soupy washes in its wake and while crossing one of them the van borrowed from the senior civic center slogged to a halt and stopped. It wasn’t designed to navigate four-wheel-drive roads and the clearance was too low. The prisoners were ushered out of the van and stood on an adjacent bank watching Taylor and his deputies try to rock and push the van through a fresh bed of sucking silt and clay.

The sheriff and his deputies slipped and swore, grunted, flailed, pushed harder and failed again and again. The arrested protestors watched the show for several minutes and then looked at each other, shrugged, and left their dry perch above the wash to join in and push the van free. Eldon reached for the handle of his revolver but they waded into the mud with such good cheer that he was confused. They pushed together with all their might and the deputies found themselves sorting out a confounding mix of suspicion, surprise, and appreciation. The van broke free and climbed the embankment, a cheer went up, and the prisoners climbed back into the van without being ordered to do so, carefully scraping mud off their shoes and boots first.

After that, the prisoners conversed freely and asked questions. They learned that the wife of one deputy was expecting a baby girl any day now and that Eldon Pratt recently won a trophy at the county fair for roping steers. The deputies learned that their prisoners included a retired professor, a garlic farmer, a concert violinist, a microbiologist, a computer programmer, an electrician, a nurse, and Luna, who described herself as a “budding rainbowologist.” By the time they were delivered to the county jail, Eldon’s confusion was complete. As the prisoners were escorted to the jailhouse door, he stammered, “Good luck,” then blushed and fell silent. He hoped the other deputies didn’t hear that.

The county jail was not designed for more than a handful of occupants. It was mostly a holding pen until the accused could be transported to a larger facility fifty miles away. Sheriff Taylor apologized for the crowded conditions. He and his men had never witnessed a protest or arrested so many people at once. They once busted four people when a fight broke out at the county fair during the demolition derby but that was the previous record.

Police work in Boon County consisted of ticketing speeding motorists, issuing DUIs, settling domestic disputes, rescuing stranded hikers, and rounding up horses that got loose and ventured too close to roads. The accidents they responded to were few and far between but tended to be gruesome given the high speeds that desert drivers are accustomed to, the unforgiving landscape of rocks and ravines, and the too frequent presence of deer, elk, and cows in the middle of roads at night. The previous week Ula May Bostick superglued her husband Frank to the toilet seat and beat him with a broom handle for having an affair with Myra Gundy. That was about as exciting as it got in Boon County. Compared to that, the tar sands protest was epic.

The morning after the protest, Gif Hanford called Orin Bender. Gif was the foreman on site. He’d been out of work for months after a shoulder injury and looked forward to a long, secure, and lucrative run as a field manager with Drexxel’s tar sands project. The prospect of losing that because a bunch of loonies with dreadlocks and backpacks got in the way was alarming. His sister’s kid had cancer and he was helping her pay medical bills. There was credit card debt and he owed child support. He had too much at stake to let a bunch of damn freaks stop work. He knew that the suits who ran Drexxel avoided embarrassing confrontations with the public and would try to PR their way around any ensuing controversy. No, Gif thought, this calls for someone who knows how to play hardball. Orin could do that as well as anyone Gif knew.

Meanwhile, the thirteen ardent members of the Seafold Ledges Tar Sands Alliance were whiling away in the Boon County jail. They were crowded together in a single holding cell while Sheriff Taylor figured out what to do with them. He called and consulted with the county attorney, Lawton Hatch, and argued that keeping them cost money he hadn’t budgeted for and there were not enough cells to handle them according to state standards.

To make room for the new inmates, he considered releasing Ike Mooney, who was arrested the day before. Ike was a driver for the state fish and game workers who were poisoning and draining Circle Bluff Reservoir to scour out invasive populations of zebra mussels and bass. Ike was supposed to haul a load of dead fish to the landfill but stopped at a tavern in Junction and got soused instead. He ended up at the home of his ex-wife’s boyfriend, Cecil Barney, who arrived home later to discover a truckload of stinking fish piled up against his garage door. The sheriff felt it would be best to keep Ike until he was completely sober and give Cecil time to calm down. He could release the woman they called Meth Head Mona but she’d only be back tomorrow.

Lawton Hatch interrupted him. He was adamantly opposed to an easy release. “These are the same damn people who shove every federal law protecting endangered species down our throats and keep us from getting jobs and getting rich by tying up oil and gas so we can’t get to it. I intend to make an example of them, not coddle them!”

So the prisoners stayed while the lawyer who volunteered to represent them bargained over charges and bail with Lawton Hatch. Luna Waxwing had three days to reflect on the events that put her into an orange jumpsuit several sizes too large and landed her next to a cellmate named Mona who had lost her teeth to meth. Mona was caught shoplifting cigarettes, her tenth offense. Luna had lots of time to converse with Mona and the others in the lock-up who were not there for protesting the strip-mining of the Seafold Ledges. She wanted to hear their stories. On day three she had a revelation.

“I get it!” she told Mona. “Addiction, alcoholism, self-sabotage, laziness, rage—they’re not just bad behaviors but ways we withhold our participation from a world that makes no sense, that cannot sustain us psychologically or spiritually.”

Mona cackled, coughed, then reached down into her jumpsuit to scratch her crotch. “You sure is funny, girl!”

Mona notwithstanding, Luna thought she was onto something. She herself had succumbed to drugs, failed, and raged because she just couldn’t belong to the program that her teachers and counselors, her mom, and her peers handed her. Why accept a way of life that is coldly competitive, even predatory? Why is it so important to own things, to have more, always more? Are the so-called successful happy?

In her teens, she looked around and saw judgmental hypocrites in charge at every turn. Greedy pigs wrote the rules. And the rules were imposed in an ass-backward way that offended her. Pink hair was criticized but it was okay to flaunt a diamond that was mined by workers who were essentially slaves. You were mocked for being a vegan but it was okay to eat calves that were trapped in huts and overdosed on milk so their flesh was pale and tender. People give their dogs Christmas presents and then eat ham from a pig that is every bit as intelligent and sensitive as their pets. Stealing millions from widows was punished lightly if you wore a fine suit and silk tie but rob beer from a liquor store and you could be killed, especially if you were born black or brown or red. It was all so transparently bogus and contrived to her but nobody else agreed. Lose the attitude, they told her. Liz, don’t be such a downer. Grow up!

Her search for a North Star to guide her took her to church where, again, the contradictions were ripe. Killing a fetus the size of a thumb that had no relationship beyond its host was a sin but it was okay to bomb cities full of whole people with parents, siblings, neighbors, and co-workers. Masturbation was a sin but the addictive consumption of wasteful bling passed for normal.

“I can use my two fingers to get off,” she told the pastor, “and you use your wallet, so my pleasure has a smaller ecological footprint than yours.” The pastor was both baffled and alarmed. She was asked not to attend the youth retreat that summer and so she left the church and never returned.

She didn’t stand a chance, Liz Waxwing with her poems and paintings, her guitar and her hand-colored scarves, her notebooks covered with drawings of fairies, horses, and snakes. To top it off, the American Way was boring. Boring! She rejected it.

At seventeen she was busted a second time for a purse full of pot. She failed to appear at her court hearing and a warrant was issued. Unfortunately for Liz Waxwing, a cop was sent to serve the warrant just minutes after Liz dropped three hits of the best acid she ever had.

Unfortunately for the cop who served the warrant, Liz was lean, supple, and so tripped out that she thought she was being abducted by an alien from outer space. She was pretty sure the shiny thing on his chest said “Pluto.” Ummm, maybe “Polite.”

When the blue uniformed space monster stopped to eat a whopper and fries, she managed to slip her cuffs and squeeze between the metal netting separating the back seat from the front. There was just one way out, she reasoned. I must steal this car and escape.

She was easy to catch, especially after she turned on the siren and lights. At ten miles per hour, a speed she considered dangerously fast, she was only a few blocks away when a cop on foot managed to reach past her and grab the keys.

She was appropriately contrite after the LSD wore off. Her father, whom she had not seen for years, paid for the best lawyer he could find and several teachers came forward to testify that Liz was a bright, creative, and sensitive girl who could be redeemed. The judge sent her to a wilderness therapy program in Boon County, far away from those hippies and punks who were a negative influence. Years later, Liz returned to the back-o-beyond desert that was once the scene of her exile, this time to sit in front of a bulldozer while chained to a gate.

Jay Paul Ziller was arrested, too. He went by the name Hip Hop Hopi, a reference to a maternal grandmother who was half Hopi and his childhood in Oakland where his parents taught in an inner-city school. They named him after a character in a Tom Robbins novel. It could have been worse. His sister was named Rosy Dawn and he had a brother named San Gabriel after the mountains his parents were camping in when they conceived him. Most people called him Hoppy.

Throughout his inner-city upbringing, Jay Paul Hip Hop Hopi Ziller expressed a primal urge to rush straight into danger. This tendency may have been reinforced by the frequent need to defend himself and his sister in schools where they were, ironically enough, a small white minority. Although their best friends were non-white and treated them well, Rosy Dawn was widely regarded as a honky name worthy of ridicule, especially by kids who relished the opportunity to give back to whites the hard time they got from them. Hoppy was her defender and jumped quickly into fighting mode whenever she was harassed. He took risks so often that it became habitual. His attraction to action also made Hoppy attractive to young women who had yet to discover that dashing and dangerous don’t pay the bills and may not be positive qualities in a father.

Growing up in the city, Hoppy loved western television shows and movies. He read Zane Grey in grade school and Louis L’Amour in high school. He also gobbled up nature programs and discovered he had an affinity for wild animals. He fed squirrels and pigeons in a park a block away from home and he knew where the raccoons who knocked over trash cans in the middle of the night denned by an abandoned railroad line. His parents took their kids camping on weekends, often accompanied by a half dozen of their city friends. He lived in the grimy fist of the city during the week but on weekends he learned by heart every trail in Muir Woods. Lately he lived on the road, taking in firsthand the best of the wonders he had imagined while living in Oakland. He visited national parks and other wild places he had read or heard about. He had just landed in Stony Mesa when he decided to join the Sea Ledges protest.

Hoppy brushed back a mop of sandy hair, quick-smoothed his beard, and walked over to the young woman who seemed to be as smart as she was pretty to ask her name and give her his. He’d been watching her for hours. He liked the way she moved so easily among those in the overcrowded lock-up, smiling, hugging, lighting up each person she encountered with her energy and charm. She could explain the chemistry of climate change to a fellow activist one minute and then engage in a heartfelt conversation about love and loss with that burned-out meth freak, Mona, the next. Her smile was radiant.

He stood near her and breathed in her aroma, an alluring mix of campfire, sage, and vanilla. Her clothes looked like a happy accident, maybe the best outfit that was ever pieced together from a free box. She even managed to make the orange jumpsuit that replaced her gypsy garb look stylish. She was small but athletic, and hot, very hot, in some way he couldn’t explain. He just had to get to know her. Since he was new to this crowd, having arrived only the day before the protest, he knew no one who could introduce him to her. So he swallowed hard and approached.

“You’re Luna, right?”

She turned to face him, smiled, and brushed a wayward tendril of hair from her eyes. Her gaze lingered and then she smiled, nodded yes.

“How did you get your name?” he asked Luna. “Is it your real name or did you make it up?”

“Waxwing is my mother’s maiden name. I took it legally as soon as I could because I didn’t want my father’s name. He left us when I was two. My mom says he was home so seldom that it took me a few months before I realized he was gone. He paid for stuff—my braces, piano lessons, my tuition, stuff like that, but I never saw him.”

Luna had secretly watched Hoppy from a distance, too, and now that he was in front of her she was so nervous that she couldn’t stop talking. Her explanation wasn’t going where Hoppy expected it to go but he did not interrupt her because he liked watching her talk, the way her brows danced above her eyes, the lilt of her voice, that beautiful loose curl of hair that would not behave.

She paused to brush the wayward lock away from her eyes and continued. “Well, I saw my dad once after he left us. He took me to Disneyland but I threw up on one of the rides and then he got in an ugly spat with some guy who was there from Utah with a dozen kids when my father cut in line. I cried and wanted to go home. For days after I awoke with nightmares about hydrocephalic mice. The next time my father wanted to take me somewhere I broke out in hives and my mother put an end to that. She said that he was her mistake and there was no reason I should have to pay for it.”

Luna’s heart raced and she was running out of oxygen. Stop talking, she told herself, but she couldn’t slow down. Words were the only defense she had against the urge to throw herself into his arms and melt. There was something about him that seemed so right. There was something she could almost smell or taste.

Hoppy primed the conversational pump again. “Where did he go when he left you and your mom?”

“On to the next wife and then another and another. He has a trophy wife now who raises Chihuahuas and has a line of little dog clothing and jewelry that she sells online. She calls it Bow Wow Wow! She has fake boobs and spends a fortune getting her nails done but she looks tan and fit on his yacht and stays out of his business. I guess she’s lower maintenance than the others who ended up in rehab. Low maintenance is important to my father because he has more important things on his mind than the wife and kids. And the ironic thing is that he gives oodles of money to political candidates who proclaim family values and the importance of marriage. The man is a total asshole and I want nothing to do with him.”

Hoppy nodded and furrowed his brow in sympathy. This chick was a trip. He could listen to her all day. “That’s all very interesting but I didn’t mean your last name. I meant Luna. Is that your real name?”

“No, my real name is Elizabeth—Elizabeth Suzanne Waxwing. My dad called me Betty Sue and my mom called me Liz. I decided I preferred Luna, after the redwood tree that Julia Butterfly Hill, the famous tree-sitter, saved. And it refers to the moon, which was worshipped by women and pagans before the patriarchs took over and burned midwives and crones at the stake for communing with nature and healing with herbs.”

Hoppy was impressed. “Sounds like you’re a student of history.”

“Not really. I’m just trying to figure out how this world we have inherited is such a mess.”

“So when did you do it? Ya know, change from Betty or Liz to Luna?”

She told him about the two seasons with the Pathway Wilderness School where she was sent after that unfortunate misunderstanding with the patrol car. She backpacked hundreds of miles with four counselors and a dozen fellow miscreants, a.k.a. troubled teens.

She arrived with a snoot full of resentment that she soon had no time or energy to feel because she was so busy just surviving. She had never backpacked before and it was grueling. Not only was the pack heavy, you had to find and filter your drinking water, make all the meals together, gather firewood, and wash yourself under a sloppy solar shower that was always too hot or too cool. Every day was a series of chores and struggles. At night she worked on staying warm. On days when they were not hiking they talked and talked and talked. The counselors were trained to rappel off cliffs and provide wilderness first aid but also to lead discussions about the emotional wreckage in the lives of their surly charges.

At night, the counselors took her shoes so she couldn’t run away. She wouldn’t have known where to run if she had the chance. Boon County included a thousand square miles of rugged wilderness. Although it was safer than any nighttime landscape she had ever known, with no cars to run you over and no lurking criminals, moving about at night was scary. Not a week into her first hike, she heard coyotes yip and a mountain lion scream in the pitch dark. There was no light but the moon and stars so it was easy to trip over uneven ground studded with sharp rocks. One must stay put at night.

Hoppy couldn’t get enough of Luna and was afraid she might stop. He told her he hiked through several national parks and wilderness areas but he was unfamiliar with Southwest canyon country. “You must know this land here very well after so much time on it. What can you tell me about the Colorado Plateau?”

She told him how they hiked across forested mountains cut by deep ravines that descended into redrock canyons with fifty-foot spillovers. She learned to rappel. Some canyons narrowed into slots that were scoured by flash floods. She learned to fit herself into them and climb with her back to one wall and her feet on the opposite wall—chimneying, they called it. They humped their packs up and over giant mounds of soft turquoise ash from prehistoric volcanoes long dormant. They camped in pinyon islands that covered the tops of buttes they had to climb with ropes. There was one gallery of old trees she named “the bonsai forest” for the twisted intensity of its venerable junipers. They drank from puddles in sandstone rills and from potholes that captured rain water running over open stone. There was nowhere to go but right here where you walked, no time but right now. This moment, no other.

Far away from the ubiquitous thrum, buzz, honk, and chatter of the city, she discovered a soundscape free of the collective tinnitus that is the murmur of civilization. It opened her. Eventually the noise in her head, all that blabber remembered and wished, the fragments of music, television, texts, tweets, and ads that cluttered her inner narrative, faded to silence. Sounds that had been masked or absent from her life returned to her. She began hearing the wind rattling delicate aspen leaves above her as a music more peaceful than music, something like it but without pretense or conception. She saw how the wind pulsed and whorled across an open horizon of rice grass and sand, leaving a signature that was the same rippled pattern she saw on the sandy bottoms of the stream beds they crossed. She heard ravens comment on her passing and watched the slow, effortless spiral of hawks so far above her that they appeared as dark specs in an azure realm.

She listened to her own breath. The rhythm of her footsteps crunching across the earth held her attention for hours. In the end, she learned to take pleasure in simple things like clean socks, shade when hot, sunshine when cold, laughter, an unexpected kindness, honey in her tea. For the first time in her life gratitude and grace bore forgiveness.

It was at night when she got it. She was lying in her sleeping bag looking up. She had never seen so many stars. The Milky Way. Shooting stars! She gazed into eternity and found it beautiful beyond words. And then she realized it was all beautiful. And good. And right. Enough. All of it: the steep ravines, the dragonflies, the trees, the fragrant meadows, the stink of sweat, the rose-lit cliffs at dawn, cold showers, and the crackling fire at night. All of it was good and so was she. For the first time in her life she belonged to a place that made perfect sense.

“It’s all connected!” she blurted out in the dark. “It goes round and round. Forever! And we are this momentary synthesis of sunlight, soil, and rain, seeing and feeling it all. That’s our gift, to see the beauty! The beauty of all of it!”

“Shut up, Liz!” said a counselor.

“Yeah, Liz, plug your hole!” added Junior Crenshaw, who was busted for secretly filming the girls’ locker room at his school and then uploading it to YouTube.

“From now on, call me Luna,” she replied.

And then she lay back on the bundle of clothing that served as a pillow and watched her breath rise and drift away on a current of air that had been flowing forever and would never end, joining together her and a billion other breathing creatures, human and wild, into one luminous, dancing, shared river of life.

A year later, Liz Waxwing, now Luna, was home. She made peace with her mother, Virginia Waxwing. Back from the wilderness, Luna discovered that her mom was actually warm and smart and it was not that hard living within the boundaries her mom set for her. She made new friends and finished high school near the top of her class. The day after graduation her mother told her that unconditional love goes on forever but devotion has phases. After eighteen years of putting her own life on hold while raising a shimmering smart daughter, she was leaving with a friend to ride horses in Spain, sail to Bora Bora, and climb mountains in Patagonia.

She did all that and more and Luna watched from a continent away, always a continent away. Luna’s mom was a moving target that was hard to contact. Although Luna loved her mom and wished her well, living independently was harder than she thought it would be. She admired her mom and was pleased for her but she wished she was near. She missed the bond with her mother, the security of that. She didn’t appreciate how much she needed her until she was absent.

Luna accepted her independence. When she looked into a mirror she saw her mother’s high cheek bones and the subtle cleft of her chin and she realized that as the years passed she would acquire the same laugh lines framing the same wide eyes. She would realize that as she lost her mother, she also became her.

Luna left for college on a handsome scholarship and support from the man she considered her ex-dad. Because the land healed her and made her whole she intended to return the favor. She majored in wildlife biology and became active in a community garden near her campus. She spent her vacations climbing through slot canyons in Utah and Arizona. After graduation, she did a brief internship with a professor doing research on the relationship between voles and soil moisture. Then she joined the Seafold Ledges Tar Sands Alliance and devoted herself to setting up their website and organizing demonstrations.

“My love of the land is like that,” she told Hip Hop Hopi. “It’s not just likeable land that needs nurturing. A pretty place like a national park will always have its defenders. The Sea Ledges has no fans. It’s the stray dog of the American West.”

“Sounds like you want to take it home and give it a bath,” Hoppy responded. They both laughed. She asked him why he was there.

“I’m just tired of rich guys fucking up the atmosphere. This is where it starts.”