I’m on a mailing list--an email list now--from when I was in graduate school at UC Berkeley and went out on strike after the Free Speech Movement arrests [link]. A week or so ago I got a notice of a rally for the tree-sitters in the oak grove between Memorial Stadium and Piedmont Avenue. The university is planning to cut the oaks to build an athletic facility [link] next to a stadium that’s slowly splitting in two because it sits on the Hayward fault. Hello? Recently UC put up a cyclone fence around the grove to “protect” the sitters during football season, and now wants to arrest the tree-sitters. So this becomes a free speech issue as well as a safety and environmental issue. As I noted in my last entry, oaks are dying of Sudden Oak Death. It’s illegal to cut oaks this big in Berkeley, but the university, a state institution, is above local law. So Friday, after walking to the Y for a swim, I walked up through campus to the grove. Good cardiovascular exercise, ‘cause it’s all uphill. lunched on tomato-mozzarella salad at the International House Cafe next to the grove, and then watched people collect for the rally. Saw a guy who looked like Michael Rossman, one of the leaders of the 1964 Free Speech Movement, who was scheduled to talk at the rally, and introduced myself. It was he. He did a good piece on my mother for the Cal alumni magazine back in the day. We talked a bit, and I told him a story I’d heard that morning. I was on the phone with my friend Mara in Syracuse and mentioned the rally. She told me about the time she’d visited her friend Eli (four) and he’d asked her to “play Julia Butterfly Hill.” “How do you play that?” Mara asked. “You help me get up in a tree,” said Eli, “and then you pretend to be a logger coming to cut down the tree." The press and participants continued to trickle in, and then a group of fresh-faced young students arrived in yellow tee-shirts with FREE TREES and FREE SPEECH printed on them in blue (the Cal colors). They settled on the wide steps in front of the cameras, and three of them gave short, eloquent talks about why they were there. A Native American spoke about the eighteen bodies of Indians that had been dug up when the stadium was built, making the grove sacred ground for him. Then the emcee called up one of the original tree-sitters (this has been going on for ten months). She was at first too close to tears to speak. After few minutes, she said, “Trees saved my life.” Then her mouth started trembling again, and after fighting for control, she handed the mike back to the emcee, who introduced Michael Rossman as the students left the steps. He said, “That’s a hard act to follow. Four words, and it was a great speech.” His was good too. He talked about the Free Speech Movement of old but also about being a science teacher. Kris, who meets me Tuesday mornings at Jimmy Bean’s to write, tells me that he was her kids’ science teacher and he was great. While he spoke the students lined up between the police barricades and the fence. Then the emcee started declaiming a poem whose refrain was “We climb the fence” and as she did so, the students started going over the fence. Michael and I were standing side by side at this point. I was close to tears myself; maybe he was too. The students, men and women, some in gloves, most foolishly bare-handed, kept climbing, throwing half-gallon water jugs over as well. The sitters have been supplied with food and water since the fence was built, except for a twelve-hour hiatus, but nobody has been let in to take away wastes and litter. Drummers were drumming, students were dancing inside the fence. I told Michael, and then the emcee, this story: When my mother was a student at Lowell High School in San Francisco in the ‘teens, she circulated a petition asking that the girls be allowed off-campus at lunch, as the boys were. The answer was no, it wasn’t proper for girls to be on the street. The girls asked for fairness--that the boys also be restricted--and were told the boys would just climb the fence. End of discussion. It did my heart good to see the men AND women students going over that fence. I also told the emcee Eli’s story, which she much appreciated. I started to go, needing to get home to my laptop to write this up for y’all. Michael called to me and suggested tea. So we sat on the patio at I-House talking. No big uproar before I left to walk the few miles home. On the way down, the sound track running through my head was All hail, Blue and Gold, Thy colors unfold O’er loyal Californians Whose hearts are strong and bold... Next morning a tiny one-paragraph story in the Chronicle on-line edition: “Build It and They Will Climb It.” Twenty students had been arrested. For illegal pick-up of litter? for trespassing on their own campus? There was a better report later in the Berkeley Daily Planet. When I told my friend Candy Forest all this the next night at dinner, she reminded me about “The Lambeth Children O.”  ”Lambeth Children” ©1966, sung by Malvina http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movementhttp://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/index.cfm?issue=09-21-07
Oakland is losing its oaks too. Here’s a picture of one courtesy of the Oakland Public Library.
Friday, September 21, 2007
FREE TREES, FREE SPEECH