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.”