Up in the air

by Michelle Nijhuis

Currently offering: rent-free co-op housing in upper and middle canopy condos, 150-230 ft. above reality, with suspended sidewalks winding between 500/600/700-year-old Doug fir and hemlock trees.


* from a poster by


Red Cloud Thunder, a group


protesting the Clark Timber Sale


near Eugene, Ore.





It's amazing what gets done in treetops these days. Julia Butterfly, who's spent more than a year and a half in the branches of an old-growth redwood in northern California, has created a one-woman media empire with her well-used cell phone. Now, an Earth First!-related group in Eugene, Ore., Red Cloud Thunder, has published its fourth issue of a 20-page "zine called Expletive deleted. The hand-written and hand-copied pamphlet reports on the 18 months (and counting) that the group's members have spent perched high in the Willamette National Forest. They're protesting the 96-acre Clark Timber Sale, a chunk of old growth that the Forest Service auctioned off in March 1998 under the Northwest Forest Plan. In Expletive deleted, writers who call themselves Squirrel, Wood, Grasshopper and Nettle, tell of their run-ins with Forest Service police, berate the establishment in prose and verse, and contribute musings from their many months spent "above reality." The pamphlet is blurry and overwrought, of course, but it's also got a smarty-pants sense of humor and a dose of creative, low-tech determination.


For a free copy or for more information about Red Cloud Thunder, write to Expletive deleted, P.O. Box 11122, Eugene, OR 97440 (541/684-8977).


* Michelle Nijhuis


© High Country News