Greenpeace Invades
Rachel Weaver Greenpeace had arrived in Alaska. And they were after us. We had to be prepared and on alert. The Forest Supervisor paced slowly at the front of the meeting room in her heavy heels and heavier green pants. In my time in small town Alaska, I’d learned that The Sierra Club and Greenpeace were not universally accepted as good. There were some other people in that room who, like me, thought maybe the trees should be left standing, but they didn’t speak up either. I sat on my hard plastic chair with the rest of the seasonal field workers anxious to catch our flights or gas up the boat for a day hiking streams, tagging trees, or in my case, looking for a goshawk who didn’t want to be found. The Rainbow Warrior, the Forest Supervisor went on to explain, was the Greenpeace battleship headed our way. They’d been shunned in ports to the south of us, refused fuel and water. Their response: Free beer to anyone who would come aboard. Thirty minutes later, Natalie, my field partner that summer, and I were loading up in the Cessna. Jake, one of two pilots in town the Forest Service contracted with, was thirty something and a fan of aviator glasses even though it was cloudy three hundred days a year. He’d heard I was writing a novel based in Southeast Alaska, which was true, and had decided it was a romance, which was not true. “Come clean,” Jake was saying through the headset as I clipped the seat belt across my waist in the back seat of the Cessna. “Just