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Treehuggers
 Editor’s
Note: The series continues. Who
ever said we don't take care you, dear reader. We bring you
more chapters, free of charge, from your Uncle Ramon’s upcoming book
Treehuggers, a lively
chronicle of The DILLIGAF By Uncle Ramon
In
the most central part of
central There are a couple of people considered to be yellow who run the only Chinese restaurant. The people who are considered to be red live on the reservation nearby and pretty much keep to themselves. That’s the one thing about Grangeville that stands out; everybody pretty much keeps to themselves. Taken in small doses, one-on-one, say, the residents are kind and generous and they get annoyed when they suspect that outsiders think of them as a bunch of inbred rednecks. Odd, then, that even the locals laughingly refer to their town as “Strangeville.”  The jail is a busy
place
(see “domestic abuse” above) and the bail bondsman is a busy man. He
also is
somewhat of a cynic, having cut his legal teeth as a United States
Immigration
Officer on the Texas/Mexican border. He retired with a small pension,
wandered
into Grangeville, took one look around, and set up shop as the DILLIGAF
Bail
Bonds Company. The owner of the other bonding company had recently
retired so
he was the only game in town. He prospered.
When he
heard that
treehuggers were setting up camp in the forest nearby, he figured to
prosper
even more. After all, these people who advocated going to jail for
trees must
have significant financial backing, mustn’t they? One of their
organizers, a
retired life insurance salesman, even was rumored to be paying them
$200 per
week in addition to providing all their food and supplies. Unfortunately,
he soon found
out that they were penniless, that this was some kind of “idealism
thing.” Two
more things were certain: A.
They were clogging up the jail and B. Some of them wouldn’t mind getting out. So he
reached back to his
memories of the ‘60’s, back to peace and love and all those things he’d
believed, back to a time that seemed never to have come to Grangeville
at all,
and decided to release them on their signature, on their word that they
would
show up for their court appearances. He was right every time; they
always did.
After all, wasn’t going on trial the whole idea of getting busted in
the first
place? Wasn’t’ the courtroom, with the resultant media coverage, the
place to
expose the practices of the United States Forest Service? (making
breathtaking
clearcuts.) A bail bondsman, in case you don’t know, is an Officer of The Court. He doesn’t exactly work for a judge, like a bailiff or a court clerk, but there is a pecking order and the bondsman isn’t at the top of it. One has to watch one’s P’s and Q’s. Then again, the two questions went to the very heart of why he named his company what he did. And he still had his U.S. Immigration Service pension, didn’t he? Weren’t those treehuggers standing up for what they believed in? Whatever the consequences? He stood up straighter and looked the judge in the eye. Business is just fine, your honor, thanks for caring. And DILLIGAF is an acronym. It stands for “Do I Look Like I Give A Fuck?” Grand
Theft
What do you do when the Forest Service just doesn’t listen? Throughout the summer of 1993, treehuggers had been putting it on the line, getting busted, and doing jail time. The Big-Time Media was starting to pay attention and the Media Affinity Group was happy at last.  Not that
it makes any
difference. The last thing you need, dear reader, is more TV. Remember
flash
cards from grammar school? That’s what you need. Repeat after me… TREES GOOD; STUMPS BAD TREES
GOOD; STUMPS BAD TREES GOOD; STUMPS BAD Keep at it
for awhile. What;
do you have something better to do? Here’s another…
NO MORE ROADS
NO MORE ROADS NO MORE ROADS Now let’s switch to something more specific:
COVE/MALLARD COVE/MALLARD COVE/MALLARD
RAH! Ok, you can stop now, but I want you to repeat the exercise every morning while you’re brushing your hair. Uncle Ramon sez. Anyway, in
spite of
increasing public outcry, the road-building project kept rolling along.
People
stood up in their way and lay down in their way. Some chained
themselves to
gates, others to individual trees, others to automobile bumpers and
logging
truck axles. But he road advanced, a tenth of a mile at a time. Jake
Jagoff is not his real
name but you have to admit it’s an odd nickname. You’d think he’d be
called
“Jay-Jay” but he isn’t. Then again, he’s a 6’3” 220-pound rugby player
so I
guess he can call himself anything he wants. (His team is the Missoula
Maggots
who have only one rule of off-the-field behavior: if you throw up on
the team
bus they shave your head.) Maybe we
need to be in the road, Jake mused. That’d make ‘em
take notice. So they
did. Buried
themselves. Up to their necks. In the middle of the road. Jake and
Billi Jo and
Counterfeit Bill and Peggy Sue M____ and two more who don’t want their
names in
print. The
Freddies were off
somewhere in Here’s
what the arresting
officers dreamed up: A.
Stopping a worker from earning a living, even for a day, was the same
as
stealing, and B.
Stealing was a major crime (a felony), and C.
There were six defendants buried in the same road at the same time so
they must
have planned it together, and D.
Therefore they could charge the with “Grand Theft – Felony Conspiracy
To Why not?
It made sense, in a
warped cop-think way. The best part was if they could get a convictin
they
could put a half-dozen treehuggers behind bars for a couple of years
rather
than a few months. It would be a big victory for law ‘n’ order. But it
turned out to be just
another scam. The prosecuting attorney dropped the felony charge in
return for
a guilty plea for disturbing the peace. The six were ordered to pay
$3,300
restitution to the road-building company. Then the guy who owns the
road-building company sued them for $12,000,000. He named
me and 18 other
treehuggers in the suit too, just for the hell of it. It worked
out OK, though.
The Grangeville jury only awarded him $1,000,000. Now that’s
Grand Theft. Uncle
Ramon still drives a bus, types his copy on a
typewriter named “Smitty,” and avoids e-mail. |
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