20
“Knock knock, anybody home?”
Miles and the Hammock Brothers stood outside of what he hoped was the recreation yurt, they’d jumped in to help him scrub down, before hanging up camp in the dark. It was a bit colder here, but nothing they couldn’t handle, though the smoke billowing from the afterparty offered a rather enticing invitation.
“What’s the password?” a muffled voice quizzed through the barely cracked doorway.
“Um... tacos?”
The door slammed shut as the council conferred.
“You’re in,” Yohan accepted as he threw the door open. “Now get in here before you guys let all the fun out.”
There were ten or twelve people spread out around the central woodstove, most of them seemed to be working on some kind of project or another, carving or writing or stitching, and all appeared to have shed their outer layers of armor as they lounged in the comfort of woodfired fellowship.
“Miles! You made it,” exclaimed Selam, as she patched a pair of coveralls. “Everybody, this is Miles, he’s great, and he did the dishes. Why don’t you come over here and sit by me.”
The crowd cheered with introduction. Miles tried to commit the barrage of names as he shared his dish credits with Levi and Paul, once the formalities were completed, the boys filled in the gaps of rotation.
“Whatchya got in that bag?” she asked as he untied his boots.
“Oh yeah, I brought these from down south, a gift from the Earthhouse crew. It’s a bunch of piñon nuts.”
“Ooh, piñons,” an unfamiliar voice approved. “They’re so good.”
“I’ve never had any,” came another.
“I’ve never even heard of them,” admitted Yohan. “And in my line of work, that’s a rarity.”
“They only grow down south, like New Mexico and southern Colorado,” intrigued the unknown fan.
Had it been Stephanie? No, maybe Cindy?
“They’re high in protein, an indigenous staple of the region, plus they’re real tasty. Expensive though, fifty bucks a pound or something, that bags worth five or six hundred dollars, I’d guess.”
“Oh ho, so the man in the dirthouse is secretly atop a nut empire,” poked Selam.
“Better than in the nuthouse over a secret dirt empire,” he poked back. “Which is probably more likely.”
“Ha, I bet you’re right about that one. Hey Chef, you wanna toast these things up since you seem to know so much about them?”
The unidentified piñon nut was Chef? She’d been introduced as something else, Sarah maybe, honestly Miles had expected the unseen chef to end up being Annie’s pizza coach, especially considering tonight’s menu.
“Sure, it’s not like I spent the last six hours in the kitchen or anything,” she grumbled, as she grabbed the cast iron.
“Oh you like it and you know it,” Selam insisted.
“I know,” she smiled back.
The crowd had picked up on something to do with an Earthhouse, which gave the trio the floor as they dug into every detail of picking and tamping, this was definitely the right party to pitch an alternative to the great pyramid scheme. Miles noticed that Ambrose and Tiana weren’t in attendance, maybe not the arts and crafts type, or perhaps there was a more pressing matter of camp security to deal with.
The newbies were anxious to hear intel of how the actions had been going, wanted a heads-up on what they were getting into, before they actually got into it.
“It’s been getting intense lately,” warned Bill. “They’ve been gearing up pretty hardcore the last week or so.”
“They’re technically under a stop work order right now,” added Selam. “A circuit court judge ruled that they can’t proceed without a proper ecological review of the project, but we’ve all been here before, some other crony’s gonna overturn it and it’ll be business as usual.”
“Plus, it’s not like they ever even stopped,” said Bill. “Me and Ambrose snuck in there a few days ago and filmed them moving right along, they just shift their focus to a less obvious section of their unmonitored destruction site.”
“Can’t you report that to somebody?” Miles asked. “Especially since you have it on video?”
“Like who?” challenged Bill. “The cops? The EPA? The press? The governor? The president? They’re all in on it. Everyone gets their cut, so nobody’s willing to rock the boat. The best we can hope for is to get it online and encourage more people to get involved with the movement. But there’s just so much of it, new infractions every day, and more abuse towards us, eventually it piles up into a clusterfuck of indecency that viewers at home put on ignore.”
“What kind of tactics have they been using against you guys?” inquired Levi.
“A lot of the same old stuff,” Bill responded. “teargas, pepper spray, plastic coated bullets, Yohan got hit in the thigh with a high-velocity sandbag.”
“Yeah, check this out dude,” he pulled his under layer down enough to reveal an eight inch welt, deep purples and blacks swirled across his leg, it hurt to look at, and not just because of the tighty-whities.
“No ice cannons yet at least, maybe they learned their lesson on that one.”
“Or they’re only waiting for the last of the frost to melt, that way your camera just makes it look like a refreshing waterpark attraction,” hypothesized Yohan.
“Or that,” considered Bill. “But it’s not all been defensive maneuvers, we’ve been hitting them pretty hard where it hurts too.”
“Like how do you mean?” Levi wondered. “Locking down machinery and the like?”
“Yeah, some of that. We’re slowing them down from all sorts of angles really.”
“We’re kind of organized into groups with different plans of attack,” explained Selam. “Helps us to stay focused. And this way, even if an informant makes it into camp, they’ll still be a few cards shy of a full deck.”
“We still keep up with everything that’s going on,” Bill elaborated. “That’s crucial for it all working together, otherwise we’d be stepping on each other’s toes out there. And then some of the actions are about getting as many bodies in the way as possible, infiltrators or not, we need you.”
The warmed up audience seemed to enjoy the blanket invitation.
“It’s not the deep cover spies you gotta worry about,” informed Selam. “It’s the frontline agitators. Out there with the express intention of stirring up chaos, in a bad way, just trying to give the other side an excuse to shoot at us.
So this compartmentalized system keeps everyone accountable to a localized group of peers. If anything starts to get out of hand, they know how to put each other in check, and if a lone wolf shows up to cause trouble, they’re easily identified and outed as an agitator.”
“I say we hand them over to the other side,” suggested Jordan. “That’s who they work for anyway, itn’t.”
“Or just make them stand in front when they come at us,” offered Bill. “But somehow, they always disappear right before the assault.”
“Alright, enough of this infiltrator mess,” swept up Selam. “We don’t need to sow too much paranoia into these guys on their first night. Besides, we still don’t know for sure that they’re not spies themselves.”
She shot a wink towards Paul and Levi as she turned to smile at Miles, the rest of the room was in tears.
“Smell their boots,” someone shouted. “If they smell like oil then they’re definitely DAPL.”
“You mean Fossils?” another corrected.
“Nope, DAPL, every bad guy from there on out will be DAPL to me. DAPL’s not a pipeline, it’s a way of life, and it must be vanquished from the face of the Earth.”
“Aho,” agreed Bill as he turned to Levi. “We’ve been setting up some treesits lately too, right in the way of their proposed path.”
“Not as many trees out here as back East,” he observed.
“No, but enough, and we’ve got a standalone monopod too. Plus there’s a smaller camp over in the national forest. Can you fucking believe they’re trying to clearcut through a national forest? And they’re doing it, and with government approval. At least that one judge thought it was a obscene as we do, we’ll see how long he gets to stick around.”
“The world’s changing though,” encouraged Selam. “People are waking up all over and demanding a better way of life. We may be behind the times here in America, still under the covers of corporate media and political ill will, but we’re about to reach a turning point that no one can hold back. Countries are already defossilizing, and we’ll eventually get a Green New Deal or something like it passed, even China’s pushing towards solar while our president passes energy legislature without even reading it, admittedly. We’ll get there though, it’s already out front of our collective consciousness, we just gotta stall them until then, and maybe cost them a few billion in late fees.”
“Me and Paul helped out with a treesit in Virginia last fall.”
“Mountain Valley?” guessed Yohan.
“Yeah. We didn’t go up or anything, just helped with the support team.”
“It takes an army.”
“Yuck,” spewed Selam. “How about, it takes a family?”
“Yeah, that’s better,” agreed Yohan. “I helped get some supplies out there, a few kayaks even, they seem like they run a pretty tight ship.”
“For sure, a fairly small camp though, we had to get vetted before we even found out where it was, gave references and everything.”
“Well that’s one way to keep down infiltration,” acknowledged Bill. “Sounds about like any of our teams, you gotta earn the trust of the crew before they’ll be willing to put their life in your hands.”
“But you can do dishes anytime you want buddy,” nudged Selam as she elbowed Miles.
“Thanks for that. Was kinda hoping to get into some real work tomorrow though.”
“Hey now, dishes are as real of work as it gets,” defended Chef. Was it Becca? Yeah, it was definitely Becca. Maybe. “I could use a hand in the kitchen if that’s not too softcore for you.”
“Shiiit,” stretched Selam. “You’ll have him breathing heavy by lunch.”
“Shhh, don’t tell him that. I’ve got a bunch of heavy stuff to move around,” Becca turned to Miles as if the entire room hadn’t heard her ulterior motives. “It’s pretty easy work really, you’ll be fine.”
“Challenge accepted.”
Miles built a house out of dirt, how hard could cutting a few onions possibly be?
“Piñons are ready,” announced Becca. “Here Miles, you better grab a handful, you’re gonna need the extra protein come tomorrow.”