Cutting would probably work, so long as we’re clear that we’re not talking about hacksaws. In that case I may as well ask my friends the
aplodontia
to come gnaw it down. This tower is
big
. A grinder wouldn’t work either in this case. There are lots of cell phone and other towers out in the mountains, and so long as you had lookouts, grinders might work out there, but that much noise here in town seems contraindicated.
Oh, hello, officer. What am I doing here? That’s a very good question.
. . . But an acetylene torch might do the trick, although
once again here in town there’s a good chance it would draw some attention. And so far as me doing it, I
have
used acetylene torches, but you don’t
even
want to hear about my experiences in metal shop class (and yes, David, I still remember you from there, too).
Explosives would have the advantage of rendering moot whether anyone notices, because timers are easy enough to make that even I could use them. By the time the tower comes down I could easily be in another state (not quite so dramatic as it sounds since I live about twenty minutes from the border). Additionally, in this case explosives would be safe. Although I’ve been saying that this tower is “behind Safeway,” it’s
way
behind Safeway, in an old abandoned parking lot. The problem, once again, is that I know nothing about explosives. I was certainly a nerd in high school, college, and beyond, but evidently the wrong kind of nerd for the task at hand. While the science geeks were busy seeing what bizarre ways they could combine chemicals to blow things up and dropping M-80s down toilets in (usually unsuccessful) attempts to get school cancelled (though, being geeks, I was never quite sure why they wanted to cancel school), my friends and I were reading books and playing Dungeons & Dragons (and a hell of a lot of good that does me now: if only a +3 Dwarven War Hammer could bring down civilization, I’d be in great shape).
Ah, the pity of a misspent youth.
This all makes me wish I would have joined the Navy Seals and learned how to blow things up (I probably would have learned how to kill people too: strange, isn’t it, how when the system’s soldiers are taught to kill, that’s banal—the final night at boot camp drill instructors sometimes christen their students’ new lives by saying, “You are now trained killers”
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—but when someone who opposes the system even
mentions
the
k
word, it’s met with shock, horror, the fetishization of potential future victims, and the full power of the state manifesting as those who’ve been trained to kill in support of the centralization of power). Or better, it makes me wish I had a friend who was a Navy Seal and who shared my politics.
This brings us to removing the tower’s supports and letting it fall on its own. That may be the easiest, and something even I could handle. The other tower, in the woods to the north, has about twenty guy wires. Everything I’ve read suggests these wires are even more deadly to birds than the towers themselves. Some places you can pick up dead birds by the handful beneath the wires. Their necks are broken, skulls cracked, wings torn, beaks mangled. But I also know what happens when high-tension wires are severed: those opposed to their own decapitation ought to be far away.
But there’s good news in all of this. There are giant bolts surrounding the base of the tower behind Safeway. I’d imagine they’re very tight, but for one of the few times in my life my physics degree might come in handy. Of course you don’t really need a physics degree to understand that if you want to unscrew a tight bolt all you need is a long lever arm on your wrench. Just as Archimedes said, “Give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I can move the world,” I’ll go on record as saying that if you give me a long enough lever arm I can unscrew any bolt in the world—oh, okay, maybe just a lot of bolts that are pretty damn tight. So a huge pipefitters wrench with a long metal pipe over the end to extend your lever arm might be enough to get you the torque you’d need to loosen the base (failing that, you could always cut the bolts instead of the tower itself: remember, always attack the weakest point!). Then walk away and wait for the next windstorm to do the trick.
Emboldened by the realization that this just might be doable, I make my way through the dense forest to the northern tower. I quickly find a path, which opens into a large meadow. The only problem is that this is the wrong meadow: no tower. So it’s back into the woods, this time on a game trail. Note that I didn’t say
big
game. Sometimes I crawl on my belly. I cross a mucky streambed and see prints of (very small) deer. Often I stop to pull Himalayan blackberry thorns from my shirt. A few times from my arms, hands, fingers, face. I realize that somehow a thorn has lodged in my heavy denim pants at the—how do I say this delicately?—very top of the inseam. With every step it scrapes against my, well, let’s just say
extremely
high on my thigh. Finally the path opens out again, and I’m there.
The first thing I do is thank the gods for making turnbuckles (actually that’s the second thing I do after taking the thorn out in my pants). Loosening the wires, and even undoing them, would be simplicity itself. There’s a lot of them, but security would be no problem here: forest surrounds this tower on all sides. Even the tower itself could be easily attacked: it’s made of a spindly grid of metal tubing. I could cut through the thing in an hour or two with a hacksaw. Someone with a torch could do it in minutes.
All this talk of taking down towers makes me wish I was a farmer, not only because the farmers I’ve known have generally been crackerjack mechanics—I was a farmer (commercial beekeeper) in my twenties, and learned to my dismay that most farmers spend far more time with machines than animals—but also because back in the 1970s a group of farmers called the Bolt Weevils were pioneers in the art and science of taking down towers. They specialized in towers with high-tension electrical wires.
It all started when the United Power Association and the Cooperative [
sic
] Power Association decided to put a 400 mile transmission line across Minnesota farmland between coal-fired generating stations in North Dakota and the industry and homes of the Twin Cities.
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As always, the poor would be screwed so the rich could benefit. First, as with water, most of this electricity would not be used to benefit human beings, but industry. Second, the utility corporations chose to put the power lines across lands belonging to politically powerless family farmers rather than across huge corporate farms with political clout.
One of the farmers, Virgil Fuchs, became aware of the plan, and went door-to-door informing his neighbors. He was just in time: representatives from the utility corporations were right behind him trying to get farmers to sign easements. After Virgil’s warning, not one farmer signed.
What follows is a story we’ve heard too many times, of local resistance overwhelmed by distant power, of politicians and bureaucrats who go out of their way to feign community interest while going just as far out of their way to stab these communities in the back. In essence, it’s the story of civilization: of human beings and communities harmed so cities and all they represent may grow.
Local townships passed resolutions disallowing the power lines, and county boards refused permits for construction. The response by the corporations was to ignore local concerns and turn to the state for help. The farmers also turned to the state for help, speaking to their purported representatives. The response by the state government’s Environmental Quality Council was predictable: public hearings were held, people voiced their opinions, and after discovering that opinions ran overwhelmingly against the power lines, the state doctored the transcripts of the meetings (dropping out unfavorable testimony), then went ahead and granted the permits. One county sued, but the case was dismissed.
Government representatives promised they would at least let farmers know when construction would begin, but they lied. Suddenly one day surveyors showed up in Virgil Fuchs’ fields.
Here is why in many ways I respect at least some family farmers more than most environmentalists: Fuchs fought back. He drove his tractor over the surveyors’ equipment, and rammed their pickup truck.
It must be said, however, that Fuchs was in some ways risking less by doing this than if he had committed the same actions as an environmentalist. He was sentenced to community service, and eventually even the record of his arrest and conviction was expunged. You and I both know that any environmentalist who did this to equipment belonging to any extractive corporation would probably
get charged with attempted murder and receive at least fifty years in prison: remember that environmental activist Jeffrey Luers is serving more than twenty-two years for torching three SUVs in the middle of the night when no one was around, and three environmentalists face up to eighty years for allegedly torching an unoccupied logging truck. Similarly, when gun-wielding farmers in the Klamath Valley stood off sheriffs and sabotaged public dams to force water to be diverted away from salmon and toward their (publicly subsidized) potato farms, sheriffs joined the fun and no one was arrested, let alone indicted, let alone prosecuted, let alone sent to prison, let alone shot. And they got the water. If you or I re-sabotage those dams to keep water for salmon (water for fish: what a quaint notion!), and we pull guns on sheriffs as we’re doing so, we, too, wouldn’t go to prison: we would go to the cemetery.
Farmers began gathering at Fuchs’s farm and at others across several counties. They fought the surveyors wherever and however they could. They’d suddenly, for example, gain permission from the county to dig a ditch across a road (to prevent vehicles from driving across them) for this reason or that. One farmer stood next to the surveyors and ran his chainsaw so the workers couldn’t communicate.
Local sheriffs did the right thing, or at least didn’t do the wrong thing. One said, “As sheriff of this county, I became involved when the landowners and other concerned citizens objected to trespasses of their property [by the power companies]. In the meantime the power companies expect my department to use unlimited force, if necessary, to accomplish their survey and ultimately the routing of the power line. In my opinion this is a situation that began with the Environmental Quality Council, at the request of the power companies, and that’s where the problem should be remanded for resolution. I will not point a gun at either the farmer or a surveyor. To point a gun is to be prepared to shoot, and this situation certainly does not justify either. It does justify a review of the conditions that bring about such citizen resistance.”
Where is this sheriff when environmentalists need him? Would that sheriffs would always defend local humans against distant corporations, or at the very least not enforce the ends of these corporations through violence.
The governor also refused to intervene. That’s where things stood when a new governor took office that winter. Things looked good for the farmers: the new governor considered himself a populist. As one farmer said, “He thought of himself as representative of the people, with a capital P, not of the bureaucracy or the bigwigs or the business people, and so he had, I think, a great hope and belief that he could get people together and solve the problems.”
But when politicians present themselves as representatives of regular people it’s time to start packing (either your luggage so you can flee, or a pistol, so you can, well, you know . . . You choose which).
The governor took to slipping off in secret to visit farmers at their homes. He told them he sympathized, and said, “You really got stuck in this case.”
Philip Martin, head of United Power Association, sympathized too. He’d grown up on a farm, and he even knew and loved Virgil’s mother—“She reminded me somewhat of my own mother,” he said—but as from the beginning of civilization the demands of this deathly economic system trumped all human cares, feelings, and needs. Demand for electricity was growing by 10 percent per year, construction of the lines had already begun, and the clock was ticking on interest on a $900 million federal loan. The logic was, “I may love my mother, but if the economic system—and more broadly civilization—demands it (or hell, even hints at it) I’ll screw her over and leave her for dead.”
Martin was clear on the source and solution of the problem: “We built all the way across North Dakota and we had one person protesting it. That was solved when the law enforcement—he did some damage—and the law enforcement there initiated the action to put him in prison, or jail. And pretty soon he said, ‘I’ll be a good boy, I won’t do anything more,’ and they let him out, and we built a transmission line. We didn’t have any problem in North Dakota.”
But, he continued, in Minnesota, “The law enforcement refused to enforce their own laws. We would go out and try to survey, and they would simply pull up all our stakes, they would destroy everything we had out there.
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And there was never anything done. President Norberg, who was president of the cooperative, and I were out there at many meetings. I drove a car with an escort in front of it and back of it with guns going off, sticking out the windows.”
The farmers said the transmission lines would come in over their dead bodies. They filed more lawsuits, which went to the Minnesota Supreme Court. The Supreme Court decided against them. This journey through the courts radicalized many of the farmers, who up to that point had believed in the system. One farmer stated: “I had the feeling that it was all decided. The courts weren’t acting as courts at all, they were just a front. And it was just a terrible, terrible shock to me. I thought, gee, this can’t be.”
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That November, construction started in western Minnesota. When farmers protested, the corporations filed $500,000 lawsuits against them.
The farmers found allies, from former Vietnam War protesters to Quakers to musicians. The corporations, of course, already had allies in the court system, and now the governor, and through him police with guns. For all of his rhetoric,
when push came to shove, the governor, as representative of the state’s economic system, shoved the power lines down the farmer’s throats. He said, “You know, this is a nation of laws. And there are a lot of things that I don’t like, you know, and I’m sure there’s many things that you don’t like, but there’s a process that we can work, it’s a process that’s open. It’s a process that people in November go and they make that mark on that ballot.” Let me translate: “It does not matter whether this or any other particular law or action is good for humans or the landbase. It does not matter whether you like what happens to your landbase, to your children, or to you. It does not matter whether I like it. It does not matter if the laws were designed by and for the rich, and the same is true for the courts and law enforcement. It does not matter if we lie to you and put you through processes of sham public participation. Your participation in processes that affect your life, the lives of your children, and your landbase begins and ends with a checkmark on a ballot in a meaningless election. The only thing that matters is the growth of the economic system. If you don’t like it, we will send in people with guns to put down resistance.”