This is liberally based on a true story. Names of people and organizations have been changed. Quotes are not direct and are sometimes entirely made up. Some details may have been left out or changed to protect privacy and confidence of those who were involved in the actual story that inspired this one. Literary techniques have been applied within the framework of actual events. This is 9 pages.
Oslow
On November 2nd I voted for the midterm. It was sunny but cold. At noon I took the train a few stops up to Northern Westchester. Oslow was on it but he came from the city. I asked the conductor, “Have you seen a guy with picket signs?”
“Not in my section.”
He was leaning against the wall at the station in a green skullcap, holding giant picket signs in a garbage bag. He took it off to show me. They were blue water droplets that said, “OUR ECONOMY” and “OUR HEALTH” on them.
“I couldn’t bring my drum,” he said.
“That’s too bad.”
“I only slept two hours.”
“Oh yea? Worked late?”
“Oh yea. I might have used my bus ticket otherwise.”
“How do you know these guys?”
“From the Green Fist! Rendezvous in Maine,” he said.
“Oh, right. Is Clarisse coming?”
“She’s taking a bus. She’s been really busy with the whole vote-for-Schneiderman thing.”
“I know,” I said.
“Are you still working with Jenna?” he asked.
“Not so much lately. I’ve been reaching out to students. Last night, interestingly, I talked to a school club. They seemed to reflect this general view amongst student environmentalists all over the country, that protesting doesn’t work.”
“I think it’s worth creating a network,” he said.
The car came, an old blue car. There were three guys, younger than me, still basically in college. Tim, James and Stone. Tim had a very Italian, big-jawed face and black earrings. James wore a jacket with an anarchy symbol on it and had long dreadlocks. Stone shook my hand enthusiastically and smiled. He was tall; had long strait hair and glasses.
Tim drove, and Stone was up front. I sat in between James and Oslow, who tried to sleep against the window. Billy Holiday music played on the stereo as we took off on the seven-hour trip from New York across New Jersey and all the length of Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh. James had a pile of Fracking literature, which I read. An old, swingy Tarzan TV show song from the fifties or so came on, something like, “A modern life, ain’t no life for me.”
“Seems so appropriate,” said Stone
In Pennsylvania we entered a gas station store. Both Oslow and I marveled at the ingredients on all the food. The purest was classic, salted nuts. I got them in a cardboard tube because it wouldn’t be as toxic as a plastic bag.
Outside, Stone and James were talking to a woman. Stone said, “We’re going to Pittsburgh to protest Hydrofracking.”
The woman said, “Oh, great! It’s terrible what they’re doing. I wish I could do something about it.”
“Come to Pittsburgh,” said Stone. “It’s noon tomorrow.”
“Maybe I will.”
I said, “Are there any groups fighting it in your town?”
“There’s just one guy who follows the trucks at night and writes in the local paper.”
Stone gave her a Green Fist! flyer.
I asked if they were into the Education Movement. They were.
“I was supposed to get full financial aid,” said Stone, “but they said I missed a form and now I owe an astronomical load and my dad was laid off at the time, and hence I’m not in school.”
He said he was trying to get into a certain school in the city anyway, to which I responded, “Really?! You’re going to be around?”
“Plan to.”
“You have an apartment ready and everything?”
“I’ve got a floor for a few weeks.”
“Do you know Sam Garab and Kitty Gin?”
“I think I know Kitty,” said Stone. “How do you know her?”
“We were arrested together at Appalachia Rising.”
“Yea, I know her.”
James said, “Sam goes to school in Westchester right?”
“Yea,” I said.
“I know Sam. She’s cool.”
“Yea. We all need to get together and organize.”
We rolled into Pittsburgh at eight-thirty. A social had started at six at a bar. Outside a familiar guy asked me my name right away. He was wearing a tight, pink shirt. There were about thirty people inside, five to ten of who were at least vaguely familiar. Right away, Andy, the guy with the goatee who first gave me notice of the protest at Appalachia Rising, talked to Oslow and I. We also met him at the Green Fist! gathering in June where I met Oslow and Clarisse. He was in our first little circle when we planned the press conferences at the DEC offices.
He said to us at the bar something like, “The companies are disposing Frack Fluid in the Alleghany River where Pittsburgh gets its drinking water.”
He talked more to Oslow directly while I faded out, having one of those moments where I was really ten years old experiencing meaninglessness and flash forward to I’m twenty-three talking to someone like this.
Oslow went to fetch one of his own beers while Tim, James and Stone got food and drinks from the bar. A guy came around with the open mike list so I put myself on number seven. I needed a guitar and spotted a young guy with a hipster hat, sitting alone at a table with his guitar against the wall.
I sat down with him. “Hey, are you performing?”
“Yea.”
“Could I borrow your guitar for a song?”
“Sure. In standard?”
“Yea.”
“Put the capo on the second fret.”
“Oh, okay. Thanks. Are you coming to the protest?”
“I just heard of it when I walked in.”
“What’s your general conception of it?”
“This region of the country is on bedrock called the Marcellus Shale, which has gas in it so companies are drilling with poisonous water to fracture the rock.”
“Right, so they go into rural towns and offer people money for their property rights, prying on their poverty often and they talk about terrorism and foreign oil. These people are the first to get poisoned. It creates internal conflict in the towns since everyone shares the water. It’s an Environmental Injustice.”
“So why don’t they just use regular drilling?”
“Well it seems like Shale or the Middle East right now. Clearly we need Renewable Energy, right?”
“Yea, but it seems like jobs or the environment,” he said very genuinely.
“These companies could easily create Green Jobs. They can’t plunder the Earth forever. We need people to build and operate Solar Powered Public Trains.”
“See, I think what you guys are doing is great but we also need people to be innovators. I want to be an entrepreneur. I feel
there aren’t enough young entrepreneurs.”
“Yea, totally. I hang around that crowd sometimes, students aching to invent something. And sometimes I get the excitement. You seem like an artist though.”
“Well I write spiritual music. Spirituality makes you want to do everything creative.”
It felt as though I was experiencing the Midwest. It felt as though I were shaking, talking fast and that I seemed to him thwarted from a political-intellectual madhouse in Manhattan while he had stars and dreams in his eyes, a whole different view of the world, and was perhaps wary of me all together.
“You’re in school?” I asked.
“University of Pittsburgh.”
“There activism groups there?”
“It’s not a very progressive student body. I mean, we have a socialist club.”
“Oh really? Cool. We had one at my school and we didn’t have a very progressive student body either. In fact, most of my
friends in the city are socialists and most of my friends outside of the city are anarchists.”
“What are you?”
“I like to think I have a lot in common with all these people.”
James came over and said they were all heading out. The guy wrote his musician name on a napkin so I could find him on You Tube and I did likewise.
After crossing my name off the mike list, I saw Kristin, the blonde girl that I square danced with at Appalachia Rising and talked about America. While we talked I noticed she had an open notebook in her hand so I asked, “Are you going to recite a poem?”
“Maybe. These are all recent poems. I don’t know what’s good. Are you?”
“I would but we’re leaving.”
“Would it have been about Fracking?”
“Yea, actually, part of it.”
“Can I share it on my website?”
“Okay.”
She gave me her book and I wrote some lines in it.
“Thanks,” she said. “Guess I’ll see you at Alleghany Landing.”
Wire
We rode through an ally onto a dense, hilly street with houses at the sidewalk. The three guys were going to stay with their friends and we were going to stay with Oslow’s friends. Oslow and I took out our things and went through a narrow side of the house. There was a tiny backyard with food growing in it and 3D art pieces. “They said we could just go in,” he said. We entered the little, dark kitchen and flicked a light. There was a Pittsburgh Pirates sign on the wall and pictures of people on the fridge. It was cold. There was no heat. We entered the living room. There was a book-shelf at one wall, four big hooks on another wall and two couches at the other two walls with a big copy machine in between them in the corner. Oslow lied on the small couch with his jacket and boots on. I sat on the large couch.
“Is no one else crashing here?” I asked.
“Clarisse but she has a sleeping bag and there’s that mat on the floor.”
The door opened and a young woman and man came in with bikes. They told us the bathroom was upstairs and that it was a Gray Water system. They put their bikes on the hooks.
“That’s what those are for,” said Oslow. “How many people live here?”
“Four bikes, four people,” said the woman.
“Are you coming to the protest?”
“Of course.”
In the kitchen I filled my water bottle from their Pennsylvania faucet with my tongue in my cheek and put it in the fridge.
While Oslow slept hard in the morning, Clarisse on the floor, a guy played radio music in the kitchen anyway. I didn’t feel like sleeping. He was tall, bearded, had a friendly-face and wore brown rugged over-alls and a bandana around his neck. “I’m Pluto,” he said.
“Pink.”
“Help yourself. The apples in the fridge are from my friend’s organic farm. We also have almond milk and muesli.”
“What’s muesli?”
“Granola, dried fruit and nuts.” It was in a loose, plastic bag tied in a knot, obviously without a company seal on it.
I sat down to eat and I was joined by a shorter, young woman, maybe my age with oddly cut, red hair, big glasses and two feathers in her hair.
“Morning. I’m Wire.” She had a southern accent.
“Pink. Do you live here?”
“No. I’m one of the organizers.”
“Cool. Were you an environmentalist before the Fracking?”
“I’m from North Carolina. I used to fight Mountaintop Removal.”
“Were you at Appalachia Rising?”
“Too busy organizing this. Were you?”
“Yea, in Solidarity.”
“Did you get arrested?” she asked.
“Yea.”
“Court?”
“No.”
“I had to go to court when I was arrested for strapping myself to an MTR site. I didn’t have to pay the charges but the lawyer cost six hundred.”
“That sucks.”
“Yea. What were you doing before the Fracking phenomenon?”
“Climate Justice mainly.”
Oslow, Clarisse and I didn’t have bikes so we walked to the bus. It was beautiful, the sunshine and the city. There were art
murals on the walls, it was quiet and there weren’t any ads anywhere. We caught a bus.
“I saw so many Frack trucks on the way here,” said Clarisse.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“I’ve seen so many pictures of them.” She explained specifically what differentiated Fracking trucks from others. Then she
asked, “What have you been doing Pink?”
“Trying to get into school. Also I’ve been trying to get students involved in this.”
When we got off the bus on an empty street I felt like we were walking in slow motion like in Reservoir Dogs and Clarisse probably felt it too because she looked at me funny. There was an abstract statue made of machine parts. “Pittsburgh is the Steal Belt,” said Clarisse.” A guy on a bike rode towards us from the bridge ahead of us. There was the Alleghany River on which several other bridges crossed in our sight and then tall buildings on the other side. There was a picture of Andy Warhol on the bridge.
“Why is there a picture of Andy Warhol?” said Oslow.
“This is the Andy Warhol Bridge,” said Clarisse.
“What did Any Warhol have to do with Pittsburgh?”
“He loved Pittsburgh. The Andy Warhol Museum is right over there.”
The grass was dewy at Alleghany Landing, a ceremonial space looking over the Rachel Carson Bridge. There were only ten people at first. Pluto and Wire came with a giant farmer puppet that had a big, turquoise, power-fist.
People were setting up microphones. I sat down with two young women. One was from Portland but moved to Pennsylvania. She had a patchy, purple hoody. I asked if she was already an environmentalist before moving. She said she did all sorts of campaigns in Portland. The other girl had to move back in with her parents in Pennsylvania because of her staggering Student Debt. She decided, without enthusiasm to then master in library science.
As more people emerged I filmed with my little camera the slumber of people waiting to act and signs like “Benzine Causes Cancer,” while that old song played on the speakers. “Oh, oh it is to go oh, but you don’t know what you’ve got til’ it’s gone. Pave paradise just to put up a parking lot…” There were clean-cut youth in green t-shirts that said, “Frack That!” on the back, taking a picture together with their Pennsylvania environmental student club banner.
I walked down to the small dock area that lined the landing. It was a sight I had never seen in New York City; right in the downtown of a city I could touch the river. I sat on a small, wooden pole and enjoyed tranquility.
Soon there were two or three hundred people and a rock band playing and speakers. I sat on the grass filming everyone sitting around.
In between speakers, Andy walked across the grass wearing a white suit-shirt, tight underwear and sunglasses like Tom Cruise in Risky Business, holding a sign that said, “Fracking is Risky Business.”
An old time rock n roller played an upbeat song as we marched out with our signs by the river. Someone gave me a small tombstone-sign that said, “RIP: Sasquahanna River.” People cheered, “No Fracking Way! No Fracking Way!” I filmed from a bench as the marching band came by playing a fierce number. Their sound became funeral-like as the mob squeezed onto the narrow staircase to the Rachel Carson Bridge. I ran ahead on the bridge to get a good shot. They played more fun, fierce music while I stood high on a ledge filming. Oslow came by with a drum after all and he seemed happy. His giant water droplet signs were in different parts of the crowd. Pluto walked on running stilts holding a long sign of a broken gas-rig and a black power-fist above it. The giant puppet followed behind everyone.
After running farther down the bridge to catch up, I found Kristin leading a chant at the front with a megaphone. “It’s Our Water, It’s Our Right! It’s our Water, We Will Fight!” It was good to see her leading as such. As we entered a busier part of the city, people chanted, “The Water, The Water, The Water’s On Fire! We don’t No Profits, Let The Corporations Burn!” but Kristin cut out the second part on the megaphone.
As the march went on, two people struggled to throw a rope over an arching lamp to hang a banner but couldn’t get it over sufficiently and gave up to catch up with the march.
Tim, James and Stone
We rallied outside of the Drilling Unconventionally for Gas convention. I filmed above the crowd from atop a concrete pillar three feet high. Wire gave a speech. She said, “From the Coal Mines in Pennyslvania and on Indigenous land, to the blasted Mountains of Southern Appalachia, to the Coal Plants in Chicago, Offshore Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, to the Tar Sand Pipelines in Indigenous Canada, to the rivers and taps of the Marcellus and other Shales, and the list goes on and on and on, the problem is systemic.”
Afterwards I waited on line at the Food Not Bombs table and got bean soup and a chocolate muffin. It was all young people sitting on the street eating. First I walked over to Wire and said I loved her speech; that it was exactly how I was feeling too. Then I walked over to Tim, James and Stone. They were standing by a banner that said, “Natural Gas is a DIRTY Fossil Fuel.” I said, “So someone was saying in their speech we need to use Civil Disobedience. What do you guys think?”
Stone nodded at a guy facing the other direction ten feet away wearing a brown suit, as if he’d come from the convention.
I nodded and said, “Right, right.”
He whispered to me, “Tomorrow, at noon, there’s going to be an action at a Frack disposal site.”
As the rally dispersed I used a port-a-potty and the three guys, and Oslow and I headed to the Green Fist! meet-up. James and Stone carried the Natural Gas banner with them, hoping to hang it somewhere and Oslow and I carried the giant water droplet signs on our shoulders.
“What were you all protesting?” said a middle-aged black woman standing next to a school bus.
“Fracking,” said James.
“Frack, what now?”
We talked to her for some time. The woman said, “Were there a lot of college students at this protest?”
“Probably half of them were college students,” I said.
“That’s good,” she said. “When I was in college, I was the rallying type.”
“There’s going to be an action tomorrow,” said Stone, giving her a flyer.
As we came to the bridge, James said, “Look. A highway goes under this side of the bridge. Let’s hang it here.” He and Stone tied it to the side of the bridge over the highway. I filmed it and we moved on.
The Green Fist! meeting was on some grass by the river near a corporate-looking building. There were some forty people sitting in the circle. We could hardly hear each other over a street cleaner going around in the nearby parking lot. Someone shouted, “Why didn’t we take more serious action?” The moderator didn’t hear him. “I said, ‘Why didn’t we take more serious action?’”
Someone responded, “This event was organized by a coalition of groups in
Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. They agreed on what was appropriate. This was not a Green Fist! action.”
“What?”
“This was not a Green Fist! action.”
Elena Blue, who I also met at the Green Fist! gathering in June, was there. When the moderator announced the two breakouts, Elena said, “I’d like to facilitate stretching over here if anyone wants to stretch.” She didn’t seem like a typical member of Green Fist! and it occurred to me that since June she had become a member. Like many of us, we got involved with a radical group because there was an environmental and health emergency, amongst many in the nation, and we knew we could count on the group to make things happen when other groups were too passive or focusing on Climate Change instead.
As the meeting broke into a few bunches of groups, Oslow said to me, “I’m going to use my bus ticket after all. I have work tomorrow and I won’t be able to sleep in the car.”
“Do you want to talk strategy real fast?”
“I have to catch the bus.”
We hugged and he took off as I rendezvoused with Elena, who was with a bearded guy in a wizard hat.
“Are you from Rochester too?” I asked.
He nodded, smiling.
“We have an action next week in Rochester,” Elena said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“We’re going to dress up like corporate gas executives and hold a Dump-In.”
“What’s a dump-in?”
“We’re going to pretend like we’re dumping Frack Fluid in this public reservoir.”
“Are you going to film it?”
“We’ll have independent media.”
“Okay. Good. Maybe we could talk about a day of action to happen before the moratorium ends, you know, if it passes the senate or whatever.”
“So in April or so?”
“Yea. There are two gigantic student conferences in February in which we could recruit people and then have it on Earth Day. Actually, come to think of it, when did the Horizon break in the Gulf?” Elena reminded me of the Gulf Oil Catastrophe because she so badly wanted to use the Gulf to draw attention to Fracking in June, and we did.
“You know it’s crazy but it happened two days before Earth Day.”
“So let’s do it on April 20th; day of action to ban hydrofracking everywhere.”
Tim, James and Stone came over and sat down with us. I introduced everyone and filled the guys in with what we were talking about and asked, “What should we do on that day?”
“We’ll send millions of messages to their internet servers all day,” said Stone.
“What?” I said, taking notes. “I was thinking like a public demonstration, you know?”
“I just always wanted to do that,” he said.
“Let’s do something with hula hoops,” said Elena, “symbolic of the Haliburton Loophole.”
“Let’s drink fake Fracked water and have a die-in,” said James.
“Or walk around like zombies that drank Fracked water,” said Stone.
“Let’s have a die-in and then be zombies,” I said.
“We should set up mini drilling rigs,” said Elena, “and sit in them in public places.”
“I like that one,” I said.
The people that the guys stayed with the night before worked in a punk pizza and sandwich place so we went there for “hoagies” before leaving Pittsburgh. James and I needed a restroom so we went next door to an independent bookstore. It was really small but dense with books and one woman worked there. She said, “It’s in the basement. You can’t miss it.”
James went down and I saw a flyer by the register for the protest.
“We were here for the protest,” I said.
“Oh great. I was there.”
“Really?”
“Oh yea. I just learned about Fracking a couple weeks ago. It really scares me, you know? How could this be happening?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where did you all come from?”
“We came from the New York City area, just past the Shale’s border. There weren’t many people here from New York City
but there’s a substantial Anti-Fracking movement there.”
“Are they doing it in New York?”
“They haven’t been able to start. They hit Penn first and they leased up Western New York but there’s sort of a moratorium
until May.”
“Well it’s terrible. Here. On this bookmark is a coupon for a free cup of coffee at Renegade Coffee, which is in Pittsburgh.”
“Thanks.”
We left the punk pizza place with hoagies in paper bags and walked through the twilight singing.
“James,” I said in the back of the car as we left Pittsburgh. “How the hell are we going to get all these Green students involved in Environmental Justice?”
“I don’t know. How did you get involved in it?”
“It started with Climate Change.”
“Well everyone’s into Climate Change.”
At midnight we stopped at a gas station where I followed Tim to the coffee counter. He told me, “Sorry I’ve been kind of quiet. It’s just a girl in my mind.”
“Oh.” He reminded me of something in and out of my own mind. “Sometimes I think about nonpolitical things,” I said.
“Could have fooled me,” he said.
James and Stone were looking at a big map of Pennsylvania on the wall. It showed that we were two thirds through.
We walked past a group of teenagers that were standing around outside the gas station. I said, “Let’s ask those kids what they think about Fracking.” We walked back over to them and I said, “Hey there. Hey. We just drove all the way to Pittsburgh from New York City to protest Hydrofracking and we were wondering what you all thought about it.”
“What’s hydrofracking?” said a girl.
James said, “An intense, dangerous form of Gas Drilling.”
“I just worked on a pad yesterday,” said a guy that was apparently older than them and was smoking a cigarette. “I don’t know if it was hydrofracking.”
“Well just be wary of it,” I said. “Lots of home tap water is being poisoned where they do it.”
They all turned their heads from us and continued to talk to each other. We walked back to the car speechlessly.
When we got in the car we belted up and took off. When we got on the road, Stone turned around and said, “That’s what’s wrong with this fucking country!”
“How do they not know about it?” said James.
“Hey, they know about it now,” I said.
“That actually took my mind off that stupid girl,” said Tim.
“What’s the deal with that anyway?” I asked. “Who is this girl?”
Stone said, “He’s just mad because he left this intense message on her phone last night and she hasn’t called back.”
Tim turned the music on.
James said, “This song reminds me of the IMF protest.”
“What was that like?” I asked.
They told me funny stories about the protest and made me laugh all the way to New York, where by the time we road in, it
was lightly raining. They dropped me off at my home at 2AM.
After jogging around in the drizzling rain for fresh air I couldn’t sleep so I uploaded my footage and looked for my poem on Kristin’s blog. It was there. While my eyelids grew heavy I read nearly all the many posts on her blog. On it was a video of her getting arrested protesting the G20. Most of her posts were about Environmental Justice. At four o’clock I went to sleep.
