Julia Butterfly Hill - The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods

JULIA BUTTERFLY HILL

This book is dedicated to the essence of Luna:
strength, endurance, commitment,
and love.

Also, to the magic of the Earth under our feet,
and the power of individuals committed
to living their truth.

CONTENTS

M ike ONeal woke early in the morning of December 31, 1996, to hushed silence. Thank goodness the rain has stopped, he thought.

Californias Humboldt County, located in the northernmost part of the state, traditionally gets a lot of precipitation. Locals joke that the area has three seasons: July, August, and rain. Even by those standards, however, the years deluge had been impressive. So the night before, Mike, a mustached, well-fed, mobile-home mover and single parent, had made sure to check the creek that runs below his house in the tiny town of Stafford. Any debris washed down from the mountain directly behind clogs up the culvert, which backs up the creek and washes out his foundation.

Suddenly, Mike heard a series of sharp, snapping cracks that shattered the morning stillness. He could tell they were coming from up the hill. He ran to his nine-year-old daughters bedroom window on the second floor of his house, only to see huge redwood and Douglas fir trees breaking off one after another and slamming down to the ground. In an instant Mike realized what was happening: the mountain above his house had been loosened by the heavy rains and was now sliding down, breaking off all the trees in its path.

Mike ran out of the house, checking the culvert. It was now bone dry. That could mean only one thing: something was damming the waterand that something was a giant wall of trees, rocks, and stumps the width of a football field and twenty feet high. And it was headed straight for his home.

Mike spun around and ran to rouse his sleeping daughter and neighbors. From the looks of things, the flow was going to hit his neighbors house first, then his, before reaching the homes closer to the freeway.

The mountains sliding, he yelled to Kim and Jennie Rollins, who lived next door with their son, Russell (then nine years old), and mother-in-law, Viola Withlow. What the hell? asked Kim, still half asleep, struggling to get one leg into his pants when he opened the door. Look! Mike responded, pointing up the hill.

Kim whirled back to the house to get his family out. Mike took off in the other direction, grabbed his daughter, then banged on the door of the mobile home parked in front of his house. Assuming those families farther away would be able to recognize the danger in time, Mike and his neighbors bundled into their cars and fled.

The massive, lavalike flow bounced off the corner of Mikes house, then hit the Rollinss home dead-on, lifting it off its foundation and filling it with stumps, trees, and rocks before steamrolling on toward the remaining six houses to the north and hurling a pickup truck into one of them.

Miraculously, no one was hurt by the slide, which would fill the entire basin where their homes were located with eight to seventeen feet of mud and debris. Those dispossessed by the slide spent New Yearsand the subsequent weeks and monthsin friends or relatives houses or in motels. One unlucky soul, with no better option, was forced to live in his car. Some residents, unable to bear the sense of impending doom, relocated altogether. Those unable to afford rent or hotel charges on top of their mortgage payments stayed. They had no choice.

But with a newly liquefied mountain teetering above, even those Stafford residents whose homes had been spared were deeply worried. They knew that since one valley was filled, any additional surge of water would mean that more mud and debris would roll off sideways, possibly taking out their homes. A wall of mud hung over the town, just waiting for the next rain to bring it down.

Stafford residents blamed the slide on the fact that the steep slope above them had been clear-cut by the Pacific Lumber Company. These were people who lived in logging country. They knew that when a hillside was stripped of trees, nothing was left to hold the dirt and rocks in the heavy rains. Still, people were reluctant to sue Pacific Lumber. It had been pretty much the only business in the area for a hundred fifty years. Almost everyone had an intricate family tie to the companya grandfather worked in the sawmill, a brother in the woods, an uncle on a logging truck. Challenging the hand that fed them was difficult at best.

To say Pacific Lumber was bad is just as close as you could get to saying that God was bad. Nobody goes up against God, said a frustrated Mike ONeal, trying to rustle up support for a lawsuit.

The fact that God owned ScotiaAmericas only remaining company town, lying immediately to the north of Staffordonly made matters worse.

Three days after the slide, Governor Pete Wilson flew over Stafford. After viewing the devastation firsthand, he appointed a professor of civil and environmental engineering from the University of Michigan named Donald H. Gray to investigate the cause of the mud slide.

Pacific Lumber hoped that Professor Gray would agree with its position that the slide had been an act of God, a manifestation of a natural process precipitated by Decembers intense storms. Professor Gray disagreed, however, and in a letter dated January 8, 1997, he detailed the role vegetation plays in dispersing and absorbing excess moisture as well as the adverse effects of logging roads, skid trails, and landings on the mountains structural stability. Both surface and subsurface flow can be diverted, concentrated, and otherwise modified in ways that can have profound consequences, he wrote, pointing to the many studies that have shown that timber harvest sites have a disproportionately high incidence of slope failures compared to natural, undisturbed areas.

Or, in Mike ONeals significantly less scientific words: Act of God, my ass. This was clear-cutting. Only clear-cutting could have caused this.

Immediately following Professor Grays opinion, the California Department of Forestry approved a plan to clear-cut the slope directly next to the slide where a treesoon to be named Lunaand a woman named Julia Butterfly Hill would change the environmental movement forever.

F ierce winds ripped huge branches off the thousand-year-old redwood, sending them crashing to the ground two hundred feet below. The upper platform, where I lived, rested in branches about one hundred eighty feet in the air, twenty feet below the very top of the tree, and it was completely exposed to the storm. There was no ridge to shelter it, no trees to protect it. There was nothing.

As the tree branches whipped around, they shredded the tarp that served as my shelter. Sleet and hail sliced through the tattered pieces of what used to be my roof and walls. Every new gust flipped the platform up into the air, threatening to hurl me over the edge.

I was scared. I take that back. I was terrified. As a child, I experienced a tornado. That time I was scared. But that was a walk in the park on a sunny Sunday afternoon compared to this. The awesome power of Mother Nature had reduced me to a groveling half-wit fighting fear with a paper fork.

Rigid with terror, I couldnt imagine how clinging to a tiny wooden platform for dear life could possibly be part of the answer to the prayer I had sent to Creation that day on the Lost Coast. I had asked for guidance on what to do with my life. I had asked for purpose. I had asked to be of service. But I certainly never figured that the revelation I sought would involve taking up residence in a tree that was being torn apart by natures fury.