The CJ Seven

(10 pages)

The Middle of Nowhere. It’s a place where I met some people to build the movement. I think I was expecting a plan to develop, like something peaceful but explosive that would stir the country and Canada. On the train I struggled to write my own agenda, each one spilling into ethical dilemmas. Should I invite two people to the meeting or did I have to tell Maggie about everything or does that mean it then will have to wait three weeks and include the whole world and that will disempower key people? Secrets! Was it a problem that I’m not catching a glimpse of the natural whatever outside the window? Do you know how maddening it is that I’m going into the “Middle of Nowhere” at a time like this? These were my journal writings because I also suffered from terrible spiritual questions that one time had a room dull of Radical people practically throwing cans at me for wasting time. Or maybe that didn’t happen but I remember it that way. It was August in the Northeast, which is somewhere very voluminous in trees. The sky was blue.

The station was bleak. The platform was old, creaky wood. Beyond the platform was a stretch of concrete, an abandoned parking lot with grass protruding in various places to wild heights. There were some small buildings with large truck yards. There were no people. Then there was barren farmland until distant forests. There was a crazy stillness until the train moved on

“Hey there.” It was a guy. There were two of us. We were college-age people. I was white and he was black.

“Are you looking for Middle of Nowhere?” I asked.

“Is someone picking us up?”

“If not, this has been a prank.”

“Yea. I cam all the way from Texas, so to speak.”

“You don’t sound like a Texan.”

“Because I was born with an ambiguous accent. Where are you from?”

“New York City. Are you from anywhere else?”

On the other side of the track there was some field and a slope that fell into woods. Great mountains perched over the woods beyond.

“The ‘Middle of Nowhere,’” he said, also taking a panoramic view. “That’s kind of like where I’m from, because I’m not really from anywhere.”

I stepped down from the platform, dropping my backpack and sleeping bag on the ground. I was tired. I’d been traveling for a whole day. He climbed up on the wooden railing and perched like a pelican, looking over the wasteland.

“Think it was a prank?” I asked.

“Maybe. This place is interesting. I’d camp out here a night.”

“Did you really come from Texas?”

“Well, I’ve honestly just been going places since I graduated school.”

I was then a little fascinated with him. “The summer?” I asked.

He nodded.

“You don’t belong to any organization?” I asked.

“No. I don’t belong to anyone.”

“Well. You belong to the movement.”

“Do I belong to the movement?”

A small truck emerged far in the distance, speeding towards the town, dirt blowing behind it. “Here they come to kill us,” he said.

They were two women roughly our age. The driver was Annette. She was wearing black boots, jeans rolled up at the
bottom, a plaid, turquoise shirt and a red bandana around her neck, long black hair. She was from California but had been living in the Middle of Nowhere for a month she said. The other girl sat in the back with me. Her name was Mina. She was originally from Bangladesh. I think she was really living in Massachusetts at the time but was hoping to move back to Bangladesh if she could get some scholarship. She had been in the States for like six years or something. She asked me a million questions in the back seat so I missed something up front. “What’s your middle name?” she asked.

“Don’t have one.”

“Have you ever swum in the Pacific Ocean?”

“Yes.”

“Do you ever check under your bed to see it a monster is there?”

“No. Do you?”

“Yes. And once there was one. Are you anxious to get out of Manhattan?”

“I don’t know. Are you anxious?”

“No. I think I’m where I’m supposed to be.”

We were going down the slope I noticed. The mountains opened up like a hand. There was more green and the road had become dirt. Soon we were in the forest and the road turned. Annette slowed down on the bumpy road. She let Pilot, my new friend, smoke a hand rolled cigarette out the window.

We arrived at a gigantic hole in the ground. It was like a big swimming pool with these metallic cubes like a close-up of a
micro-chop except there was dirt on the bottom. This might sound weird but we drove into the hole, slowly and then into this cave, which had a string of lights like in a mine or something. I was expecting various tunnels and then a big room where people had charts with figures on the wall and equipment for climbing and computers everywhere. But the truck stopped. Annette turned the truck off and said, “All right!”

We emerged up to the surface. The cubes appeared to me to be old tin construction pieces but with solar panels lying on top. We walked down a path through the woods as the sound of voices grew.

Then there was another similar hole except a little bit larger and much deeper. It was much more shaded by trees. We climbed down a rope latter to get in. There were broken cars and all sorts of machine parts. Annette opened a big door on some trapezoid-like pile of iron. Light shone from inside. It was a deeper underground room the size of the upper hole. The ground was covered with sheets, the walls with scrap metal. There were three people sitting at two connected folding tables, smiling at us, a man and two other women. Against one wall were additional folded tables. On the ground were duffle bags and several cardboard boxes.

Quickly, they arranged food from the boxes, much produce and bread. It was delicious. There were seven of us. There was a bearded man, some years older than I with a beret, Thompson. Thompson was from Africa. Really. He had an accent. He was from Uganda. He seemed to glow with a determination that the world would revolutionize, according to his definition, in his lifetime.

And there was Charlotte, who was from Kentucky and might have been a year younger than I. She was just a bit enthusiastic and wore a yellow rain coat, I don’t know why. She had lots of stories about sitting in trees on targeted Coal mountains and lying in the road.

Luna was from Alaska but had lived in Mexico to get a PhD. I think she just didn’t accept scholarly recognition from the United States. She maybe had the best story, but it was a sad story. Her tribe was suing one of the Energy companies for the protective ice around their village that had melted extremely suddenly. Luna also loved food. She said, “If we didn’t have all these problems I would dedicate myself to Food arts and culture. You know what? The sounds kind of, I don’t know, boring compared to what I’m doing instead.”

“What are you a doctor of?” I asked.

“Indigenous philosophy. I almost wrote my thesis mainly on Food but I couldn’t ignore more general problems.”

“So Indigenous people and the environment?” asked Charlotte.

“Basically. Probably you know about the Seventh Generation.”

“That’s a brand of toilet paper,” Charlotte said.

“The Indigenous were into a generation of youth that would fight for the Earth, and recognize it within themselves.”

“Do you think,” I asked, “that they could make that connection in a city?”

“I can’t wait,” said Thompson, “for tomorrow.”


The next day we drove back up where the farms were and we drove the opposite way from the train station and the town, through the deserted farmland. At the end of the first two farms we turned down another empty, concrete road. It seemed the clouds weren’t moving, the wind was waiting and everything was dead. Soon, after the road slumped, an interesting sight appeared. There was immense barbed wire fence with a little house and acres of concrete broken up on the land within. As we got closer I saw there was caution tape wrapped up in the fence. Within the maybe twenty square acres of fence, the concrete was randomly broken up all throughout and some sort of clay. Annette stopped the car on the grass and we all poured out. We walked alongside it on the road. In the distance I could see the little house was boarded up. In the middle of the fence we stopped at a door.

“Are we going to break in?” asked Charlotte.

Annette pushed open the door. “We took the lock off some time ago.”

Everybody walked in. “Don’t step on the dirt,” said Thompson. “Stay on the thicker concrete.”

It felt as though even if we were in the middle of nowhere, we were being watched by the space outside of the fence. Of
course I wanted to ask questions and probably so did everybody else, but the sky seemed to impose a silence on us. Soon we were walking towards the house and I was certain we were going to go inside but I couldn’t imagine why we would go in there. I had the feeling that everyone but Thompson, Annette and Luna were thinking that there was a dead Mrs. Bates in there and she was magical. But we went around the side of the house to the back. There were caution and do-not-pass signs in the ground. But we passed. We stopped at the edge of a large pit. It was covered in tarp. It was like half or more of a football field.

Thompson, Luna, Annette, Mina, Pilot, Charlotte and I. It was August.


It was the following spring when I would really find out what happened to everyone. Thompson told me in our prison cell. When the door closed on us he smiled at me. “We’re in a concrete room,” he said.

“I can see your body,” I said, “and that’s a biological sight.”

“It’s somewhat in its primary sate besides my clothes and the culture of my cut hair and brushed teeth. What about my language?”

“How long do you think we’ll be here?”

“I don’t know. Good job though.”

“Do you have a cell phone?”

“They’ll give it back.”

“I could memorize your number. I might need to find you if I get left alone somewhere in this city.”

“Only when we split up I’ll tell you. Don’t say bye. Just repeat the number to yourself.”

“What’s happened to the rest of The Seven? Do you know?”

“Mina went to Bangladesh. She did it without the scholarship. She met everyone she needed to, someone documenting the
flooding fields and the flood and water problems, and all the Climate organizer people. So her project for months was to organize a cultural collective. She dropped all these other ideas when she found the documentarian. So she’s trying to make the film more interesting so it’s not just seen by a few thousand people on Houston Street, but more importantly, other young people. Because she’s not trying to persuade the UNFCCC. She’s trying to build the movement.”

“God. I want to go! Why aren’t we all doing that?”

“Well, we are in some ways but direct actions are obviously more important in the North.”

“But Pilot- didn’t he go to Puerto Rico or something?”

“He actually applied for school in Texas and has been trying to build a campaign to stop the pipeline from the other end,
so obviously he’s coordinating with Luna.”

“No,” I said. “Isn’t she in Mexico?”

“She’s on one end doing the same thing where the damage is really bad.”

“Is she in Canada or South Dakota?”

“Canada. Her situation is more serious so she not only has to get the workers on her side, which they have to some extent
done I think, but-“

“Shouldn’t she be in Alaska?”

“She went to Canada to the Indigenous organizations. She’s going about like she’s writing a sequel to her dissertation so
when she asks everyone questions she’s really trying to provoke this ancient wisdom stuff about how to easily win because
they’re obviously right. I wish I was there.”

“Me too.”

“But I don’t really know about their progress too much. Charlotte organized a strike at her school. They occupied it for a
whole week. Now she’s meeting with other schools to do it all throughout Appalachia for more than a week.”

“Was she arrested?”

“Of course, but she was bailed out by hundreds of people.”


In front of the pit, Annette closed her eyes and sang “This Little Light of Mine.” We all joined her.

“Can’t we get poisoned by breathing the air?” said Charlotte when the song was over. That made everyone laugh, but also
made me paranoid because laughing of course makes you inhale more deeply and I have a record of being extremely vulnerable
to the placebo effect, or at least I think I think I’m sick all the time. The trees appeared green to me, but when I mentioned it, Annette said they’re supposed to be green.

“You’re safe,” she said. “There’s probably nothing under the tarp anymore anyway. I mean a massive flood is why the company put concrete down. The fluid completely overwhelmed the land. Everyone’s plants and animals were dying right away, in this town. The mutation that happened to people, that was more gradual.”

“Whoa,” I said. “Why are we here?”

Luna lifted her palms upwards, like Jesus Christ. “This is the holy land,” she said. “This was my idea by the way. Annette, Thompson and I all decided to come here to film it. But when we got here, we found that it was all too beautiful to just document. Instead of showing how bad it was we saw a potential positive in it. So we decided to invite people to organize the Revolution with us, based on ancient concepts, but even more so, our own concepts, of our own time, of our own surroundings. Because my thesis was the surroundings were the roots of ideas, language, attitude. If our surroundings were so different than our ancestors, why should we look in books for answers that would have a high percentage of abstractedness to us anyway?”

“There’s no plan,” said Annette. “We just want to believe and believe that even a few open minded people could take part in it with us, and believe that it could do something, but not care if it doesn’t.”

“So no one lives in this whole town?” asked Mina.

“The buildings in town are mainly storage?” said Anette.

“What happened to the people?” I asked. “Did they all get sick?”

“Let’s walk back and talk,” said Thompson. “We don’t want out truck seen.” We walked back. “Not everyone got sick but
animals died. Some people experienced skin diseases or their hair fell out. There’s this one family called the Waxners. They lived here. Oh man. First the father had Vietnam War flashbacks, only he wasn’t in the Vietnam War. The mother suffered the most because her husband was diving on the ground when someone made popcorn; her daughter suddenly had these wild mood swings and outbreaks or rebellion but she was only seven years old; and the boy lost his appetite all together and his sense of taste. It was when the mother saw the boy eating the wrapper of his burrito that she scheduled herself a doctor’s
appointment.”

“Why would she schedule herself a doctor’s appointment?” I asked.

“She figured she had to have it too, plus she was the only one over due for a checkup, which was all they could afford with their insurance. The story is that the doctor turned off the lights for an x-ray, turned them back on and said, ‘You don’t spend time in pitch blackness do you?’ And she said, ‘No not really.’ And he said, ‘You glow in the dark.’”

“I don’t think we should be here,” said Mina.

“It was years ago, before more famous cases happened,” said Thompson.

When we passed by the house I looked at the boarded windows, spooked. “Where did you guys get all the food, the solar panel stuff and how did you make the whole hole thing?”

“I’ve had those panels a long time,” said Thompson. “They were on my house but I was evicted so I went to Canada for a conference about the Tar Sands and met Annette and Luna.”

“And you all sent out emails to every Green organization everywhere,” I said. “And four people showed up.”

“From New York,” said Luna, “Appalachia, Florida or Bangladesh, Texas or Caribbean Islands, and that’s it. Then I’m from Mexico or Alaska, Annete’s from California, and Thompson is from Uganda or New York.”

“What are you trying to figure out?” said Thompson.

“Maybe it makes a shape,” said Charlotte, “on a map.”

“So are we not going to come up with a strategy,” interrupted Mina, who, like Pilot, had hardly said a word since we got to the dead zone.

“I agree, “ I said. “I like the deep stuff, but when I get back to the city, I’m probably going to be even more conflicted. Now I have to meet all of these new ideals in everything I do. How am I supposed to get through a day? And does everything have to mean something more now? I mean like, can I never do something strategically the same ever again or am I Gandhi now because I came to Toxic Neverland?”

“Dude,” said Luna.

Pilot gave me a funny smile. It occurred to me that if he lit a cigarette he might blow up. I went over some of it in my head. Thompson was a Ugandan immigrant that lived on a farm upstate but got evicted and put his solar panels in a truck and eventually squatted in a hole. “Wait a second!” I yelled. “Why did you live on a farm, and how did you know there was a hole?”

“There are lots of holes out there that were never filled,” he said.

“They were supposed to be filled with liquid carbon,” said Annette. “But the environmental agencies said the companies had to cease all radical changes to the land.”

“So they can stop them from doing something,” said Pilot.

Thompson had come to New York City to study Sustainability with a scholarship. He worked part time and after he
graduated, moved onto an organic, off-the-grid farm. After their eviction, the farm-mates gave him all the truck, food and solar panels as a trade off as they got to WHOOF somewhere, which is worldwide organic farm hopping. He first went to the abandoned town to sleep there in his truck, being one of the few people that knew about it, but also just to see it. He left half of his stuff in one of the caves so he could get to Canada with a lighter truck and less gas, so he had to go back anyway.

We went to the town and parked in front of the storage places. There was an abandoned café. It still had a little picnic table out front so we sat at it. A truck left one of the yards going the way of the tracks. We finally discoursed our plan of action.


“What about Annette,” I asked in the cell.

“Remember, she talked about water?”

“Yea.”

“She got all the Climate Justice organizations together, local farmers, student groups including Education Rights activists to some extent, and Water Justice groups and organized a mass thirst strike and lobby with the governner. Actually they fasted for two days but didn’t drink on the second when they crammed in this conference room with reporters in there and activists in the hallways talking to media about the water situation. And they got the Education people involved because they called for loan forgiveness for students that were going to farm for at least four years in the more northern part of the state. I think they’re making it and they made a story.”

“I’m sorry I dropped out,” I said. “Everyone has been doing such awesome work and I just got caught up with school and tuition and medicine and my family had problems, and-”

“Shut up,” he said. “Big deal. You made it to this. Obviously, a crack in your life opened and you fell back into the movement.”

“But I wasn’t prepared to get arrested.”

“Listen. We have more serious charges than everyone else, obviously. I’m not sure they’re even going to let us go but if they do we can possibly fundraise our charges or refuse to pay.”

“I have school. I have finals.”

“Right, well. I’m probably not going to pay any charge but we can fundraise for you.” The officer appeared at the door and asked for Thompson. He told me his number, which I repeated as he left.

I felt bizarre without a pen to write with. It had been a year since we met in the Middle of Nowhere. When I came back to
the city after our gathering there, my uncle who I lived with was in the hospital because of an alcohol related incident. As I was
trying to articulate these ideas with Maggie, my uncle checked into a clinic. I thereafter spent time with my teenage cousin, Alice, who lived with us and was also moderately mentally retarded. I had to make sure she could still focus on her schoolwork, et cetera. But the most difficult thing that happened was two weeks into the fall semester Maggie fired me from our organization. I had gone to a hearing and spoke out at the microphone before the Environmental Protection Agency. I said I was from our organization, and that I hoped the spirit of Nature would get into them. Instead of testifying I sung “This Little Light of Mine.” People joined me and while I still had twenty seconds on the clock I said, “I sung this at the site of the Frack-flooding of a whole town on the property of the Waxners, a family with terrible problems from being exploited.”

Then the moderator asked me if I trespassed.

“Yes,” I said. “To see the truth.”

Then my time was up and I said, because it was really a hearing about Carbon Sequestration, “Putting Carbon under the
Earth where no one will care is the equivalent of poisoning poor people for profit, as if no one would care, all over the world.”

She said she had to fire me to maintain their reputation as law abiding because she had already been trying to hide our affiliation with Anarchists and we were on an eco-terrorist watch list. It wasn’t so bad personally at first but I became totally isolated from the group. I couldn’t go to meetings. Soon I had a reputation for being fired and my opinions and strategies didn’t matter anymore. I couldn’t stay at the environmental happenings at school because of my cousin and I had to work more hours at the bakery. At times I collapsed, overwhelmed by being rejected by Maggie, an organizer whom I respected, and for feeling like the rotten activist, the one that ruins things.

Over the winter I got myself back into spiritual study. I needed to make sense of my unexpected disappointment overall. It had felt as through Luna’s destiny didn’t have me in mind.

In January, I called Thompson, and he told me about the action, so I felt better with it on my calendar, only I didn’t know I was going to take it so far.


There was a whole two-day gathering before the action, but I didn’t go to that part. It was way upstate. I was able to
connect to this guy who also left last minute. He was balding. His car was messy. He smoked manufactured cigarettes. “I’m a cartoonist,” he said as we drove up the West Side Highway.

“That’s you- what cartoon?”

“It’s a space cartoon. It’s about a turtle that floats through space.”

“Does he meet anyone out there?”

“He meets all sorts of characters. He meets the presidents, he meets Ray Charles, he meets General Petraeus.”

“Oh, okay. Where could I find this cartoon?”

“Oh, I don’t publish it.”

“Oh, okay. So, do you work in the city?”

“No, I illustrate at home.”

“The space turtle.”

He looked confused. “Yes. Mr. Hardshell.”

“So why are you going to this?”

“Save the water. We’re from the water, you know? We evolved from the water and this stuff is ancient sea creature fossils.
Probably it’s us prior to reincarnation. So we’re sucking our ancient, ancestral bodies from the rock, and putting it in our generators. And Coal was plants originally. It goes from plant, to Coal, to zoom-down-the-road.”

His car was hybrid, I noticed. “Well what the heck is idle, black goo and carbon-potent rock for?” I asked, playing devil’s advocate.

“What’s your dead body going to be for? He said.

“Maybe it’s like the apple on the Tree of Knowledge.”

“Except we don’t learn anything,” he said. “And they suck out the gas and put carbon liquid in there and call it “Climate
ground zero,” God forbid it comes up. Want a cigarette?”

“No thanks.”


There were fifteen hundred people standing as a ring around a massive gas rig. Maggie and her organization weren’t there.
Thompson had tied himself to the top of the rig, about two hundred feet up, alone. The first day of drilling was suspended and eventually police and activists left. Only about two hundred people stayed over night. Supporters returned with food. I called my cousin Alice on the phone and told her I wasn’t going to be home because, “I’m taking a stand.” It began on a Monday. I gave up worrying about school by the Wednesday. There were massive cheers every time people left. I ate some food throughout but mostly didn’t eat. By Friday there were only fifteen people, the police returned and everybody was arrested. At the time of the arrests I climbed to the top of the tower and Thompson shared rope with me. The police eventually used a cherry picker to safely but forcibly remove us.

Later, in my cell, I thought about tuition, since it was the only perceptible obstacle, since making up a semester didn’t otherwise matter to me. Resolving my relationship with Maggie seemed suddenly dire. Why had I been letting life push me around? Maybe though, I had to be able to take the sort of action that I wanted to on my own. Maggie wouldn’t have let me tie myself to the rig! Maybe it was a blessing in disguise, if the tactic was at all profound in any way.


The next day I was released with a court summons. They gave my phone back but Thompson hadn’t been released yet. I called Maggie, who came to get me while I waited in a diner.

“What the hell is CJ Seven?” she asked as we sped through the night highway.

“Where did you hear about that?”

“Someone in California said to the press that all of these recent actions, including ones not widely known, were connected
through a group called the CJ Seven.”

“Oh, yea. That was Pilot’s idea. It was when we were leaving the Middle of Nowhere. There were seven of us and this girl Luna wanted it to mean something, like related to the Seven Generation and so on. Mina, who was planning an action for Bangladesh wanted our actions to draw attention to hers, so she said we needed a symbol or a name. Pilot, this guy from Texas said, The CJ Seven and we all wrote it on our hands.”

“Well now you’ve all made number one on the eco-terrorist list.”

That seemed pretty cool to me, but I wasn’t sure what to say. It brought every thing awkward between us to my mind. There was too much to calculate. I didn’t know where to start but I knew it was going to be a long drive. “I got a chance to think in jail,” I said.

“About what?”

“My uncle’s going to be back home from rehab soon. I feel I have to figure out how to get active again. What if no one had time to save the water? We’d all be poisoned!”

“I think the universe works it out so that people could be involved and there’s a reason other people can’t be.”

“Yea, I tried believing that for some seven months.” Suddenly I wondered if that seven meant anything. It seemed like a clear sign that I couldn’t be inactive for longer than seven months.”

“I love you but we have to maintain a reputation of our goals,” she said. “We don’t climb onto equipment.”

“So maybe I’ll join a different group, or start a local one.”

When I got home at two a.m. my uncle flicked on a light, in his underwear and with messy hair and a long face.

I froze.

“I was going to get you,” he said.

“How did you know?”

“I read a paper on the train ride down. You left your cousin home alone for a week. Can you even graduate school now?”

“I think I’ll just graduate in the winter.”

“Can you get reimbursed for this semester?”

“No.”

“Well Alice didn’t burn herself or miss any homework. Also I’m not drinking.”

“Do you feel okay?”

“No. Maybe you should finish the semester anyway, or work more hours.”

“I could help Alice with her school work.”

“Just tell me the story when you have time.” He turned off the light.


I finished the semester and nobody knew about the CJ Seven or no one knew I was involved. The Middle of Nowhere was completely locked up and had major trespassing fines attached to it, the whole town beyond the storage buildings and road that went alongside the tracks. The CJ Seven had another gathering anyway in an old church. About three hundred people showed up. It was wild. There were so many instruments. There was so much interesting food. The walls were covered in charts with figures.


When school started the following fall, I waited alone at meeting I had organized. A freshman showed up, a girl with pigtails and a striped shirt. She said, “You were in the CJ Seven, right?”

“Yup.”

“I’m going to bring all my friends and tell everyone I know to get involved. I heard about the Seven because my father said it was stupid, some stupid thing people did in the news. So I read it and then I started reading the news every day. My name’s Luna Waxner.”

In Contact

(This is 9 pages)


It started when the password for my email wouldn’t open. I tried my various other ones, including shared ones and my school account. Nothing opened. My Facebook account wouldn’t open. Interestingly, I could look at my page from the outside. My wall read, “Went on a trip. Will be out of contact.” Chills went through me. I looked around my room at the darkness behind open doors. I turned on the light and looked everywhere, even out the window. I had an idea of what might have happened. I called Andrea. She said, “Aran, where are you?”

“Home,” I said.

“Are you going on a trip?”

“I don’t know.”

“I read your blog.”

“Which one?”

“The one you just wrote.”

“What did I just write?”

“What do you mean? You said you need to take a break and think things over. You said you’re sorry if you've led people astray?”

“No. Someone hijacked my identity online. I can’t login to anything.”

“…”

“Andrea?”

“Be careful what you say Aran. Our phones are both bugged. They said you’re going on a trip. Think carefully about where you go. If I have any idea I’ll call you. Just get out of there.”

“Should I go there?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not yet. If anything, we need to not contradict the message that you’re on a trip.”

She hung up. I put on my shoes and coat, put my water bottle and journal in my tote bag and left. It was past midnight. I got on the train to Manhattan, not sure if I should go to Andrea’s. I looked around and it didn’t look as though anyone were following me. I figured if I went to any friend or relative’s place, I could contradict the message, so someone had to be after me, unless they weren’t so serious.

Walking down 6th on 10th street, I saw a cop car and waved to it. The cop got out.

“Hi,” I said. “I think I’m being chased. I’m afraid to use my phone.”

“Get in.”

At the station I was brought to a detective’s desk. He hard curly, brown hair and spoke very unenthusiastically. “What’s your name?”

“Aran Davis.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-two.”

“You live alone?”

“With my sister.”

He jotted this down. “Who do you think’s chasing you?”

“The natural gas industry.”

“The whole industry?”

“I don’t know. Someone made my blog say I needed to rethink things and that I was sorry I led people astray.”

“You write about natural gas?”

“Yea. And they wrote I was going on a trip and would be out of contact.”

“So you ran.”

I nodded.

“Did you call anyone or tell anyone else besides us?”

“Yes. I told Andrea Lewis.”

“Who is that?”

“She’s an organizer for Water Fights Back.”

“Did she also experience suspicious activity?”

“She’s been talking about it for a while now. She’s convinced her phone is bugged. She might have frightened me into leaving my apartment.”

“Can you write her number here?”

I wrote it down. He said, “Do you mind if I call her right now?”

“No.”

He called and I watched him wait for an answer. He sighed. He looked at me. “Hi Ms. Lewis. This is Detective Solonger. I’m
with Aran Davis. Call me back at 212-999-4454.” He said to me, “Stay here.”

I looked around. No one looked familiar. Solonger was facing the other direction on the far side of the room. I leaned
forward and tilted his computer screen towards me a bit. It seemed like my picture was on it so I pulled my chair forward. It was my picture. The words, “Warrant for arrest,” were on the screen and “Eco-Terrorist.” I looked over at Solonger again who glanced back at me and then turned back to another person. I got up and walked to the door. I looked once more. He wasn’t looking. I went out the door and walked down the steps. I kept by the side of the wall and turned the first corner. There was a bar two buildings down so I ran to it and entered.

It was somewhat crowded with people. The music was loud. I waited on line for the bathroom. It occurred to me I could try to get a hat from someone. In my wallet was just twenty bucks. Could they have bugged or cancelled my ATM card? Could they track me if I used it? In the bathroom stall I wondered if I should stay there but no, of course escapees always went to that bar, so even leaving was going to be tough, even leaving the bathroom. Why did I go to the police! If I lied on my phone about where I was, would they track my location anyway? Then I figured, what do I have to lose? The only thing left in my mind was, “Be careful where you go.” All I needed to do was not contradict the message so I needed to be out of contact. I turned my phone off.

I walked out of the bar and went to China Town, bought a fifteen buck ticket to Boston. I figured, I’ve hardly seen Boston, and as far as I knew, there was no movement against hydraulic fracturing there, plus I didn’t know anyone there, except for the food justice activists I knew there. This occurred to me on the bus and I started to worry. I only needed to stay out of Dorchester, I figured.


On the bus I got a good amount of sleep. Feeling calm in Boston in the bright morning, I wondered if I had overreacted and maybe I should go back. Maybe it wasn’t even the gas industry. Maybe there was something wrong with the internet. No, someone was trying carefully to get rid of me. Otherwise they would have killed me, no? Did they come with me on the bus? Still, no one looked familiar around me. People were walking to work.

I went into a coffee place. Maybe I should go to Dorchester. The organization could send out a blast about the whole thing. But I would probably be putting them at risk as soon as I talked to them. So far, I had done as they wanted me to do. I only contradicted their story with Andrea and I wasn’t sure what the deal was with detective Solonger. Maybe I should try to get to the hearing in Binghamton that was a couple days later. At least I could speak out before they arrest me. I took a break from thinking and drank my coffee.

Then I figured I’d open a new email account at a computer in a library. It seemed I could have done this in New York, if I walked around until dawn. I asked the counter girl where it was but got lost anyway. I don’t know why but I tend to feel more comfortable asking directions from people who also seem lost so I asked a tourist family, middle aged folks and a thirteen-year-old girl.

“Where’s the library?”

The bearded man said, “Don’t ask us.”

The woman said, “Are you from New York?”

“How did you know?”

“I’m from New York.”

“We’re upstaters,” said the man.

Where had I heard that phrase before? Oh yes. It was in Union Square. I held a huge sign that said FRACK with a circle around it and line going through it while my friends gave out leaflets for a meeting. A man said to me, “We need that. You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s all we’ve got to get off foreign fuel. I’m an upstater.”

“Good luck,” the woman said.

“Thanks.”

Finally, I sat down at a computer. I figured I’d try Hotmail because I’d never used it before. For a username I sat there thinking, for too long. GreenFist@hotmail.com. BlueFightBack@hotmail.com. Then I knew my username. TurquoiseSoldier@hotmail.com. I skipped down to enter a password. The computer turned off and the lights of the library went out. I looked around. Should I stay still? Should I run? Should I wait? I probably shouldn’t wait. The police might come. I remembered the stall in the bar, got up and walked out the front door. It was already time to get out of Boston.

There was no destination as I walked down the street. Probably it wasn’t good to be arrested for eco-terrorism but I couldn’t let the industry make me paranoid. Someone tapped my shoulder. I kept walking.

“Hey New Yorker!” said a woman. I turned. It was the tourist family. The woman said, “Did you find the library?”

I walked to them. “Are you all leaving Boston today?”

The man, putting his hands in his pockets, said, “We might be.”

I said, “You live in Upstate New York?”

The man nodded.

“I think I’m going to Binghamton. Are you driving by Binghamton?”

“We’re not going quite that far,” the man said.

“Are you going in the direction of Binghamton? Maybe you could just get me maybe halfway there and leave me at a bus station. I’m an environmentalist. I’m just trying to get to a hearing.”

The woman’s eyebrows went up and she elbowed the man. “You’re talking about the hydrofracking hearing.”

I smiled, “Yes. Yes!”

She smiled too while the man rubbed his chin and the young girl had a look of suspense. The woman stood in front of the
man with her back towards me. The man looked over at me a couple times while they spoke.


Outside their car window I watched the country go by, farms, mountains and forest. The young girl sat across from me in the back seat. The man drove while the woman jotted numbers on a pad. The man said, “Aran.”

“Yep?”

“How’d you end up in Boston?”

“Oh, it was just so spontaneous. I didn’t have a full plan. I’m not sure I can really tell you why I was in Boston.”

“Oh,” he said. “Okay.”

The woman said, who might not have been paying attention, said, “I take it you’re against fracking?”

“Why, because I’m an environmentalist?”

“Well, seems to fit the ratio.”

“Right. What about you all?”

“You mean what do we think?” said the man.

“Yea.”

“I’m for it,” said the man. He laughed, “This is honestly why I was hesitant to give you a ride.”

“Alan!” said the woman, turning in her seat. “Aran, I think what you’re doing is great. I was really on the fence when I first heard about it, even before it got controversial. I just didn’t trust the companies, but I could also understand how people can blow things out of proportion.”

“What do you think, Tina?” I asked the young girl.

Surprised, she said, “What?”

“What’s your stance on hydrofracking?”

She sighed. “It’s risky,” she said.

“Do you support it?” Alan pushed her to answer.

She said, “I think I support it if you support it.”

“Tina,” said the woman. “You’re allowed to not support it. Aran,” she said. “One of the reasons I did want to give you the ride was because you were a flashback to our son, Francis.”

“Beth,” said Alan, annoyed.

She laughed. “Look, Aran. Two years ago, Alan and I both had jobs. Mine went quick but that was no surprise. It was an internet thing, a news site just online. I edited and took some nature photos. But Alan worked for the state, in charge of certain infrastructure decisions.”

“Like fracking would have been,” he said.

“The point is, Aran. We’ve been downward spiraling financially. We were in Boston because I had a job interview. We didn’t want to live in a city.” She shrugged. “You understand if we allow this drilling we’ll be able to live in our town peacefully and be able to take care of our kids, and even reduce our footprint in the atmosphere.”

I was calm. I said, “Well.” I wanted to say something but it hurt me to say it. Every time I tried, my heart beat faster. “I guess we don’t have to talk about it.”

“Oh yea,” she said, recovering something. Alan turned his head to her for a moment, seeming to dread whatever story she was about to tell.

“Francis,” said Tina.

“Is it okay if I tell this?” Beth said.

“I want to hear it,” I said.

“Why don’t you tell him, Tina?” she said.

Tina said, “When we got the form about the drilling in the mail, there was something we could sign to say we wanted to do
it. So they showed it to us, Francis and I, and just let us know about it. Francis ended up the next day saying it was dangerous and we shouldn’t do it. Dad was still doing research on it too, so he didn’t send it in yet. So maybe five days later, dad said he couldn’t find the envelope. Francis admitted that he’d burnt it.”


It was twilight when we drove up to the bus station. “Are you going to be okay from here?” said Alan.

I didn’t answer right away, because I was afraid to use my debit card. “I think I should tell you something,” I said. No! I
remembered I couldn’t tell them. “Thank you so much for the ride. It’s really hard to express how much it meant to me that you all risked driving me. Will I see you at the hearing?”

Beth and Alan stared at each other, not saying anything. She lifted her eyebrows at him. He turned towards me. She smiled. “We’re going to the hearing Aran. You can stay over and come with us.”

A tear actually emerged in my eye. I wiped it and got in the car. “I promise I won’t talk about hydrofracking,” I said.


Beth set me up in their basement with some blankets on the couch. I took off my boots and looked around as she left. I looked at the glass eyes of stuffed animals on a rack. I looked at the wine bottles in the wall behind the bar. Then I found it. There was a smoke detector on the ceiling with the usual red light, but there was definitely a glass eye on the side of it. I waved at it. I made the gesture of zipping my lips.


Francis came home around five pm. He walked into the kitchen. He was tall, had short hair, and an angular face. I was
wearing a watermelon apron, slicing a carrot. Beth was stirring something. I looked up and saw him. “Hi,” I said.

His eyebrows went up.

“Francis,” said Beth. “This is Aran. He’s coming to the hearing with us. We’re eating outside in twenty minutes.”

The bowls of food were on a picnic table behind the house. Their house was small, close to the hilly road and near about five other houses, stretched apart. In the distance was the river below by rocky terrain.

“You know what’s across there?” Alan said, sitting down as everyone came outside.

“Pennsylvania?”

“That’s right.”

“I heard that the states were drawn by guys walking around with thirty foot chains, making marks every thirty feet.”

“Well the river helped,” he said.

“Yea. They were lazy.”

Everyone sat down. Francis came out last. When he sat down, Beth said, “Let’s give thanks to our guest, and to this food.”

“Amen,” I said by myself.

“So what’s going on?” said Francis. “Is he with the gas industry?”

I said, “No. I’m on the opposite side of your parents.”

He smiled. “That explains it.”

“We found him in Boston,” said Beth.

“Oh,” Francis said. “How was the interview?”

She sighed and shrugged. “I don’t want to leave here.”

Francis turned and looked at the river or the scenery and turned back. “Well, if I go away to school it will be one less person here.”

“And to pay for you to go anywhere,” said Alan, “we’ll have to probably move to Boston.”

“Why not Mexico?” Francis said. “Or Africa?”

“What do you want to major in?” I asked.

“Everything,” he said.

“Maybe you can be a land surveyor,” I said.

“He just looked at me with his eyebrows up.

“They draw the perimeters of states.”

“Aran,” said Beth. “Why don’t you tell Francis about your environmental work?”

I gulped and looked around, in the windows of the house, in the trees. Alan said, “Sometimes it seems you’re looking for something, like the answers to our questions.”

“It’s hard to explain my situations,” I said. “But I volunteer with some groups. One organization pays me to blog.”

“Really?” Francis said.

“Yea, so, the free one is about the fracking issue, like crazy activism and stuff but the other is about Climate Justice.”

“Don’t you have to go to Bangladesh to do that?” said Alan.

“Yea well, actions happen in New York and stuff, and sometimes it’s really about extraction. So I’ve gone to fracking towns in Pennsylvania and destroyed mountains in Virginia.”

“Have you ever strapped yourself to a rig?” asked Francis.

I laughed and Alan looked concerned. “Francis,” he said.

I ate my mashed potatoes. Tina stared at me waiting for an answer. I looked at Alan. “I assume you’ve thought about that. I’m not sure that’s what you would do,” I said to Francis. “You’ve got to put yourself, and like ten other people on the road, or make a barrier around it with linked arms.” I could see Beth looking at me disapprovingly.

“What have you done?” Francis asked.

“Hunger strike, blocked a conference room, crossed a police line.”

Tina laughed. Beth said, “I think you just crossed a different line, putting thoughts in his mind.”


We were laughing in the car on our way to Binghamton. Tina said, “No, it’s not an airplane!”

Beth said, “Is it of the spider kind?”

“It’s not arachnid!” she said.

“Does it roam with the deer?” asked Francis.

“It’s not antelope!”

I was laughing when I saw in the rear view mirror a big, white van.

“Do you receive frequency with it?” said Alan.

“It’s not an antenna,” she said, exhausted, looking out the window.

After we drove into the increasingly developed scenery, Beth said, “Aran, you haven’t been playing for twenty minutes. I thought this was your favorite car game.”

Staring at the white van in the rear view mirror, I said, “Is it a chemical that sets things on fire?”

Tina couldn’t figure it out.

“Contact,” said Francis.

We counted down from three and both said, “Arsenic.”

“Okay,” said Tina. “The next letter is I.”

“Is it dry?” I said.

“We’re here,” said Alan. The white van pulled in next to us. There was a big rally in front of the building. There were over a hundred people, some holding signs that said, “Safe Water Now!” and “Stop the Fracking Hysteria!”

People wearing matching yellow t-shirts that said, “Respect our land rights,” and hats that said, “I support Safe Drilling,” walked through the crowd like rocks falling through a river.

Fortunately, we were able to sit down with each other. I waved to friends of mine that were standing with signs. The moderator called up the first testifier, Andrea Lewis.

She went to the podium. She said, “My friends. I’ve testified so often on this that I only want to say that I’ve learned that certain people will not believe us, that this is a nightmare waiting to happen, even though it’s a nightmare across the river. So I say that there are real solutions to our economic issues. People say they’re idealistic, or unrealistic, but I don’t see why. A sustainable economy is only unrealistic if we put it after this, and then it will be too late anyway. If the industry were here for you, they’d change their product. Thank you.”

All the water people cheered and the landowners booed.

“Next we have Arnold Solonger,” said the moderator.

I gasped. The man with curly, brown hair, wearing a yellow t-shirt said, “I do social research for Clear Skies Energy. It’s amazing what I’ve found. There are eco-terrorists, occultists, and people just trying to start wind turbine companies -that kill birds and ruin sceneries by the way- these people are creating false information for environmentalists. This water scare is a hoax that has fooled countless numbers of people. I have endless documentation to prove it and we’re going to email it to everyone who signed in here and the board. Thank you.”

Many of the landowners clapped. Someone yelled, “Yea, bubbling river hoax!”

The moderator called for order and called up Alan, our Alan Catoon. He made his way to the aisle. Someone handed him a
microphone. He said, “I live here just over in Sullivan, right by the Delaware. We are here because we do care about the beauty around us, the quiet, the wildlife. When we heard about this, we did research, lots of research from all angles before deciding that the risks were big in certain people’s minds, but not in ours. We see it for what it is. I think risks can happen, and this isn’t perfect, but I remember the hype about nuclear energy when I was a kid. This technology got off to a bad start. When my kids mess up, I don’t get rid of them, because they don’t repeat serious mistakes and no one wants to contaminate water. I appreciate the concerns of the environmentalists. I also know that we love our environment and that’s why we accept the opportunity to let us stay here. Thanks.”

People clapped. Some landowners stood up and clapped. The moderator said, “Now we have Aran Davis."

As I made my way to the aisle, police officers walked down the aisle from both sides. There were two at first and then others emerging. One said to me, “Aran Davis. You are under arrest for organizing an eco-terrorist scheme." He handcuffed me. "You have the right to remain silent.”

A sergeant said at the podium, “We apologize. We found our suspect. We’ll have him out quickly. This person has been organizing a scheme to wreak havoc on drill rigs and natural gas company sites.”

Andrea shouted, “That’s not true! Let him speak!”

All the environmentalists chanted, “Let Him Speak! Let Him Speak!”

“He has spoken enough,” said the sergeant over their voices.

As they escorted me towards the doors, several environmentalists blocked the door, even putting their pickets through the handles. “Clear aside,” a cop said. “You will all be arrested if you don’t clear aside.” More environmentalists blocked the doors until half the room, over a hundred were between me and the doors and another fifty tried to get there but a line of almost twenty police blocked them. The landowners made a lot of disapproving noise while the environmentalists chanted, “Let Him Speak! Let Him Speak!”

I wasn’t even sure then, what I would say. Beth shouted, “Francis!” I turned my head and saw Francis pushing himself into the mob. People pulled him in while police held him back. Finally he broke into the mob and disappeared.

Over the noise, the sergeant said, “Everyone blocking the exit will be charged with safety violations, refusing to obey police orders and other charges. He will not speak because he is a prisoner.”

Police cuffed people one at a time while they changed their chant to, “Davis Speaks or We Don’t Move! Davis Speaks or We Don’t Move!”

After some dozen people were cuffed, Alan said into podium microphone, “Please, everyone. I am a landowner. You are arresting my son. Please be quiet everyone. They are arresting my son.” The room quieted down. “Let me save my son, please,” he said. The room became totally quiet. He said, “I just testified. I’m a supporter of Fracking. I came with Aran Davis, and my son who is getting caught up in this. He’s only seventeen. So please just let Aran speak so no one has to get arrested.”

Some people cheered and applauded. The sergeant nodded and a microphone was held up to my face. I said, “Thanks Alan. I came here with these great people. And a lot of people here know I’m not an eco-terrorist, whatever that is. I’d like actually, to give up my spot to someone else in the Catoon family that has a different point of view but was maybe too shy to sign up, Francis Catoon.”

There was applause while the microphone passed around the mob to Francis who emerged with his hand in the air. He said, “I’m Francis. I grew up by the river in a small town. I might leave it if I can go to school. We are getting increasingly poor. I know I’m the younger one. I don’t know what will happen to us. I could be wrong, even. But I’m not going to give up the river.”


It’s been a day in jail and no one told me what happened to Francis or at the hearing afterwards. There are no computers here, but I’m going to copy this by hand and pass it around. It’s like a prison-blog. My pen name could be Turquoise Soldier. Hopefully someone will visit me while I still have a copy and then they could type it up and tag it with: “Prison,” “Fracking,” “Hearing,” “Delaware River,” “Eco-Justice,” “Burnt Letter,” “Contact,” “Upstater,” and “Eco-Terrorist.”