Speak to the Earth (16 page)

When information about the hush money came to light, Hobbs could not be reached for comment.

LINK PROBED BETWEEN MFI AND NPFA

V
ANCOUVER
— The North Pacific Forestry Alliance, which styles itself a moderate environmental organization dedicated to “taking a middle ground between extremist preservationists and the unfortunate practices of the forestry industry in the past, and promoting sustainable growth through preservation of the land base,” is entirely funded by the forestry industry, the Dispatch has learned.

Set up in Vancouver five years ago, the Alliance’s board of directors is drawn from Vancouver-area municipal politicians, academics and businesspeople — many of whom have ties to the industry.

In a move to counter a negative image that extended far beyond the borders of Canada into the U.S. and Europe, key players in the forestry industry hired the public relations firm Equivoc, which has made its reputation acting for multinational corporations at the root of ecological disasters ranging from oil spills off Alaska to chemical explosions as far away as India. Equivoc set up NPFA, and the chairperson of the board of
NPFA
, Nathan Epstein, is an Equivoc employee. Other key members of the board are hand-picked by Mackenzie Forest Industries.

Established to win the support of urban voters
for the industry,
NPFA
has produced two television documentaries, “The Forests and You” and “North Pacific, Land of Plenty,” both of which defend clear-cut logging while at the same time arguing that the industry has changed its ways.

Epstein, when queried about the source of funding for
NPFA
,
stated, “We operate at arm’s length from the industry. Our view is entirely objective. The fact that the Alliance was set up by a public relations firm is entirely irrelevant.” Asked about the recent arrest of Kyle Canning and Oliver McCann, both
NPFA
employees, and subsequent revelations about hush money paid to them by Mackenzie Forest Industries, Epstein said, “I’ve never heard of those men, and allegations of hush money are ridiculous.”

ENVIRONMENTALISTS CRITICIZE MFI “SWEET-HEART DEAL”

V
ANCOUVER
— CanNews — Environmentalists all across Canada are outraged that the British Columbia government has bought a large block of shares in Mackenzie Forest Industries.

The purchase came to light weeks before the government’s April announcement of the Orca Sound Ecological Preservation Plan, which allows
MFI to log two-thirds of the temperate rainforest around Orca Sound. Critics point out that the remaining one-third of the area is either beaches and swamps or was already preserved in parks.

Minister of Finance Charles Riker has said that the buy reflects “sound fiscal practice to which the government is dedicated and which was a major plank in the election platform.”

“How can the government oversee a safe ecological use of our natural resources,” Save Orca Sound spokesperson Iris Troupe asked, “when it profits from the misuse of our forests? How can the government police the company when the government is the company?”

Troupe spoke from the minimum-security jail in Nanaimo, where she is serving a 90-day sentence for contempt of court.

F
or the third time, and with a curse even louder than on the first two tries, Elias dropped his hamburger. The halves of the bun parted and rolled onto the café table, leaving the mustard-slathered pattie and a limp slice of tomato resting on a bed of soggy fries-and-gravy.

“Dammit!” Elias hissed, earning a few stares from nearby diners.

“You said that already,” Bryan pointed out, laying down a folded newspaper and biting into his chicken burger.

“Sure, make fun of an invalid, why don’t you.” Elias took up a fork in one heavily bandaged hand and, with an awkward stab, vengefully skewered the burger. Both arms were swathed in white from elbow to fingertips.

“You’re not an invalid. An invalid would be home in bed. You’re here, so that would make you, if anything, a valid.”

“Valid, my butt. Ever since Ellen got you reading you’ve turned into a word snob. What’s with the newspapers, anyway? How desperate are you for something to do?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been sort of following the protests and stuff. Learned a lot, too.”

“Next thing I know you’ll want to move to the big city back east and ride the subway to work with a briefcase in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Ouch!” Elias cried as he picked up his glass of root beer with his fingertips.

Bryan tapped the newspaper. “You and Walter are famous, now, eh? Zeke, too.”

“Did they really quote your mother?”

“Yep.”

“She’s all right, your mom.”

Bryan was beginning to think so, too.

“That was a great thing you did, Elias. Helping Walter like that.”

“Yeah, well.” Elias shrugged. “The cops didn’t think so. They only decided yesterday, Zeke told me, not to charge Walter and me with contempt. And I wasn’t even on the bridge. Or is it ‘Walter and I’?” he added, smiling and shoving a french fry into his mouth.

Around them the midday crowd in Captain Ned’s — a restaurant done up with nets that swooped from the ceiling and old broken crab traps hung on cedar-panelled walls — buzzed with conversation.

“I got a leave from my job at the park, did I tell you?”

“That’s great. You know, it’s funny,” Bryan said. “You got hurt at the protest and your boss gave you a leave — which he should. Mom gets arrested, comes back to work the next day and gets fired. The whole town is split down
the middle by all this.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I’m glad Zeke is back on the job,” Bryan said.

“He got the news this morning. He said they reinstated him but they gave him an official reprimand for investigating your former guests without permission. He may not stay too long, though. Zeke isn’t so sure any more that he’s cut out for cop work.”

“He’s one of the best ones we’ve got, if you ask me,” Bryan said. “He’s good at his work. What he did in Vancouver — on his days off — proved that. Even if it was unauthorized. They should praise him, not hassle him.”

Outside, a summer storm darkened the sky and whipped up whitecaps on Gray’s Passage.

“I don’t know, Bry. Zeke says that what’s happened since the spring has been pretty hard on him. He said he joined the force to catch bad guys, not throw his friends in jail.”

During the weeks after the fire-bomb incident, Bryan had spent most of his time in an empty house. He talked to Ellen every day or so on the phone, but their conversations made him feel no better. He felt lonelier when he hung up than he had been before they began to talk. Iris phoned most mornings to ask him how he was getting along. “Fine,” he’d report. “How about you?” “Fine,” she’d answer. From there they had nothing to talk about.

Jimmy had quit his job at SAVE. “I just didn’t feel right,” he had told Bryan the night he moved back in. “I
felt like a prostitute or something. Or a crooked used-car salesman. Calling people up and trying to get them to come to meetings. I’m not a telephone guy. I belong in the bush.” Now he spent his mornings job-hunting in an empty landscape between those who hated loggers and those who supported an industry that had no work for him because he could not cut trees. His afternoons he passed in the Rainbow Room, honing the edge of his bitterness with cigarettes and beer.

Bryan’s uncle was no longer the jovial childlike companion of Bryan’s youth. Bryan’s mother was still in jail, his girlfriend still in parent-imposed exile. Bandages and pain had rendered his friends helpless and suffering.

Not since the death of his father had Bryan felt so numb, as if he had been injected with a toxic drug that dulled his nerves and neutralized his emotions. Paralyzed, he floated like a ghost from room to room of the silent house, turning on the TV and clicking it off again almost immediately, leafing through magazines, reading over and over his books on whales, poring through the album of family photos from the days in Drumheller.

He took most of his meals with Walter, after preparing them on his neighbour’s hotplate. Walter ate sitting in his broken rocker, wrapped in a shabby Hudson’s Bay blanket, and soon after succumbed to the medication he was taking against the pain and infection of his burns. Bryan helped him to bed, fed Dog and returned home.

One day Walter commented over their breakfast coffee,
“Guess them traps are pretty full by now,” and for the first time Bryan took out the crab boat alone. He pulled up the traps, throwing the catch into wooden boxes and stacking the traps on the stern rather than bait and set them again. Then he returned the boat to Walter’s slip and prepared it for a long period of disuse. With the money from the catch he bought groceries and put them away in the small cupboards in Walter’s trailer.

That Sunday, Jimmy and Bryan drove to Nanaimo to see Iris, Sunday being the only day she was allowed visitors. Bryan had been looking forward to the trip, planning to visit Ellen for a few hours — until she told him over the phone that her parents were taking her to Vancouver that same day to see a play.

“They’ve had the tickets for ages, Bry. I can’t get out of this!”

Iris appeared full of high spirits but, do what she would, she was unable to drag a smile to her son’s lips. Misinterpreting Bryan’s moroseness for anger at her, she tried to explain to him once again why she had allowed herself to be arrested the second time. The more she talked, the more pained the look on his face, so she gave up and said with false cheer, “I’ll be home soon!”

“What home?” Bryan mumbled.

He could not tell her, because he could not put into words, that everything he loved and wanted was gone, and worse, it was not his mother who had deeply disappointed him.

“Y
ou’re too hard on yourself, Bry.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think so.”

“Well, you are, but I’m not going to argue about it long-distance. So, what are you going to do today?”

“I don’t know. Maybe sit out in the yard, catch some rays and read.”

“Still devouring the newspapers, eh?”

“Yeah. Elias thinks I’ve gone mental. But I’m sort of hooked. The more I find out about this logging thing, the more I see that it’s … well, bigger than the fight about Orca Sound. Mom and Walter are right, Ellen. But lovers shouldn’t talk politics, right?”

“Right. Hey, how do you get four dinosaurs in a Honda Civic?”

“Dinosaurs are extinct. They’ve been gone for —”

“Okay, how do you get four extinct dinosaurs into an extinct Honda Civic?”

“Two in the front and two in the back.”

“Aw, you’ve heard it.”

“Yeah, Ellen, I fell out of my cradle laughing at that joke. I’ve heard every dinosaur joke in the book. I was born in the famous ditch, remember?”

“Want to have an obscene phone call, then?”

“Are you kidding? This is a law-abiding family. Didn’t you know?”

“Right, right. Guess I forgot.”

“I wish you were here, Ellen.”

“Me, too, Bry. Something tells me you could use a hug.”

“A hug, yeah. And —”

“You said you were law-abiding. I’m hanging up before you corrupt my ears. Talk to you tomorrow.”

Saturday morning, after he had eaten breakfast with Walter, washed the dishes, fed Dog and tied him up outside, Bryan threw a couple of bottles of juice and three granola bars in his backpack and set off along the shoulder of the highway.

So that he would not encounter activists and demonstrators he had waited until Saturday to retrieve his bike, which, he hoped, was where he had left it on the embankment near the river. The logging trucks did not roll on the weekends, so the demonstrators used the time to rest up.

The sun was high when he reached the logging road that led to the Big Bear River. It was barricaded by a red-and-white log resting on two oil drums. An RCMP cruiser
was parked on the shoulder of the highway. Bryan did not recognize the two cops who sat inside, smoking and talking. Probably got the air conditioning on, he thought, wiping the sweat from his brow and shifting the pack on his back. He hesitated for a moment, took a deep breath, and ducked under the barricade.

“Hey! Where do you think you’re going?”

One of the cops was getting out of the car.

“I’m going to get my bike,” Bryan said. “It’s down by the river.”

The cop shook his head. “This is a restricted area. The road’s closed.”

Bryan jammed his trembling hands into his pockets. “I thought this was a public road.”

“I said it’s closed,” the cop answered firmly. “The premier is coming out here in a couple of days and we don’t want any more trouble.”

“I just want to get my bike. I’m not going to cause any trouble.”

The cop pushed his cap back on his head and hitched up his belt, shifting his gun on his hip. “Sorry, son, you can’t pass.”

Bryan swallowed. “But this is public land. I can go where I want.”

The cop waved a thick finger in Bryan’s face. “Look, sonny, move off before you get into trouble.”

Bryan’s laugh brought a rush of scarlet to the big man’s face. He gripped Bryan by the shoulder, turned him toward the cruiser and shoved. Bryan stumbled and
grabbed the barrier. He ducked under the log and began to walk back along the highway.

“Trouble?” he mumbled to himself as he walked. As if he could give me more trouble than I’ve already got. I suppose the cops are going to throw people into the slammer for walking down the wrong road on a Saturday afternoon. Just because the premier’s coming. Big deal.

On his way home, Bryan stopped at a milk store and bought a newspaper. He read the lead story as he walked.

PREMIER TO CUT RIBBON