The Wick Drain Sticher Sit

by Will Parish

The first time I saw one of the Big Blue Towers was on May 17, 2013. I was perched about ninety feet above it in a plywood platform suspended from the crotch of a several-hundred-year-old valley oak tree. This mighty oak stood at the edge of an Oregon ash grove like a sentinel in the path of the California Department of Transportation’s planned six-mile freeway bypass around the town of Willits (pop. 5,000).

As the wetlands mist burned off that morning at about eight thirty, the framework of the wick drain “stitcher” crystallized across the horizon as if in a nightmare. In the previous five months I’d been part of a group who had devoted nearly everything we could to the campaign to block the Willits Bypass construction, with nearly all of our days and countless sleepless nights taken up by meetings, researching and writing, developing videos and press releases, maintaining the Save Our Little Lake Valley website, carrying out direct actions, organizing events, leading educational tours of the Bypass route, fliering, setting up or guarding treesits, and arguing a federal lawsuit.

By acreage, the Caltrans Bypass stands to destroy the largest wetlands area of any Northern California construction project since World War II. The arrival of the wick drain stitcher marked a decisive turning point in the destruction of these wetlands.

The Bypass is to be built on a massive berm an average of 20 feet high and 150 feet wide. To construct this monstrosity across the boggy Little Lake Valley terrain, Caltrans contractors need to compact the fine sediments that comprise the wetlands soil. “Wick draining” greatly accelerates soil compaction and settlement.

Caltrans intended to install 55,000 polypropylene wick drain tubes, which are an average of 80 feet long, spaced in a grid about five feet apart. The drains wick groundwater to the surface so that it evaporates, or else runs off into adjacent waterways. With the coming of the rains, a large amount of the dislocated groundwater would very likely silt up and run directly into nearby waterways.

The wick drain stitcher had evidently entered the field just after dark. It was now lying on the ground with the bottom of its blue, 100-foot-long frame–which resembles a cell phone tower–attached to the arms of a larger Caterpillar hydraulic excavator mounted on giant treads, ideal for rolling across muddy terrain.

For several months, direct action resistance to the Bypass had been defined by treesitting. On January 28, 2013, a Willits goat farmer who went by “The Warbler” hoisted herself 71 feet into a ponderosa pine tree slated for chainsawing by Caltrans, where she remained for 65 days, galvanizing resistance to the project. Four more treesits followed before all five were extracted by a California Highway Patrol SWAT team on April 2. These extractions involved perhaps the first-ever shooting of a treesitter in the United States, when one of the SWAT team members unloaded three bean bag pellets on a treesitter who went by “Celsius.”

Climbing The Wick Drain Stitcher

June 20, nearly one month after the first wick drain stitcher rolled into Little Lake Valley, brought yet another morning of dense mist that hovered above the Little Lake wetlands. Flanked by several comrades who had helped me carry supplies, I tied prusik hitches to the greasy cable of one of the Big Blue Towers (there were two in operation by that point) and gradually hoisted myself about 30 feet up, reaching the lowest bar of the tower’sframework.

I’d wanted to climb higher. I was just above the Bobcat arm steadying the metal column. CHP officers in a small cherry picker could easily have brought me down. But climbing the greasy cable had been more tiring than I expected. And by the time I hauled up my platform, day pack, three gallons of water, metal lockbox, banner, and poop bucket, I was totally gassed. I could climb no more.

Another problem: The Caltrans-contracted construction crew arrived earlier than expected, and the support team was sent scattering before they were able to send me up the bulk of my food supplies.

There I was, embarking on an aerial occupation of a piece of construction machinery with less than a day’s supply of food. To make matters worse, I got distracted an hour into the action and dropped my only jacket, which contained my cell phone.

The California Highway Patrol had been collecting time-and-a-half for months policing the Bypass resistance. On several occasions they had called in over 50 officers to occupy the construction route. In one instance their mobilization came complete with a check-point on one of the valley’s main thoroughfares.

Tensions between the cops and protesters had been mounting. The first of my many dramatic interactions with the fuzz came after I had only been in the wick drain stitcher for about three hours. As I climbed to the top of the tower to tie a drop-line, so that I could haul my platform higher up the stitcher, the cops tried to use a “Grade-All” machine with a cherry picker arm that ascends about 30 feet into the air to come up and hastily snatch my platform. Doing my best Spiderman impression, I practically slid 60 feet down the tower to make it to my platform before the cherry picker, then quickly placed my arms in my lockbox around one of the bars of the tower. The cops gave up.

That night, the project’s equipment operators hauled out a pair of big floodlights mounted on long poles and shined them into the platform. One of the overnight CHP guards intermittently blared loud noises from his squad car, including obnoxious laugh tracks. This sleep deprivation technique was repeated on other nights.

On the second day there was no sign of an extraction attempt, and I managed to raise my platform several rungs up the tower. On the third day I drank my last sip from the single can of lentil soup I’d brought with me and crinkled up my last granola bar wrapper. I called down to my diligent ground supporters, who had gathered in an adjacent field: “I just began a hunger strike, but it’s not a voluntary one.” I had begun schooling myself against any unnecessary energy expenditure, trying to hold on as long as I could despite my growing hunger.

As the sun was setting on the third day—the Summer Solstice—I was lying on my platform staring out and waiting for the full moon to rise when around 40 people strode into the wetlands, entering from the abandoned Northern Pacific Railroad tracks nearby, toting food and water. I quickly lowered my drop line. As one especially determined supporter named Mayhew reached toward the rope and attempted to clip a food bag onto the carabiner at the end of the line, a CHP officer reached out and forcefully yanked the rope away, then slashed it with a knife.

One man desperately flung a pack of granola bars toward me. Most people opted to sit down to demonstrate their intention to remain non-violent, and thereby guard against any violent police outbursts. Feeling livid about the power disparity between these two cops with handguns and tasers mounted on their hips and the people who merely wanted to deliver food and water to someone protecting an endangered ecosystem that the valley’s watershed depends on, I stared directly into a video camera that one member of the support team had brought and yelled, “I would rather starve than let this machine install one more wick drain!”

CHP arrested six people. The remaining people began to shuffle out, many of them turning toward me with plaintive looks across their faces. With the moon at my back, I stood on the narrow platform as the CHP’s squad cars drove away over the parched wetlands, trying not to wonder when I would eat again, or how long my quickly diminishing water supply would hold out.

“Looks like you won’t be getting any of this,” the CHP lieutenant in charge of the operation called up to me as he picked up several jugs of water that lay on the ground.

Unseasonable Rain

When I climbed the stitcher, I brought a small (about 5′x10′) weathered tarp that wore a swath of small holes across one side, which was partly in case it was needed in the event of unseasonal showers, but mainly so I could use it as my bathroom curtain. But on the evening of June 24, a rare California summer storm arrived.

The rain fell in windy bursts throughout the night, coming in at an angle, landing on my sleeping bag and wicking across my platform. My sleeping bag was soaking up water like a sponge, just as the wetlands do, only in this case my hands and legs, arms and feet, and my torso were akin to the hardpan soil beneath that ultimately absorbs and filters the water back into the system.

My frigid body was beginning to shake in uncontrollable spasms. I reckoned I might be on the verge of hypothermia. I lay across my platform and wrapped myself inside my tarp like a burrito in an effort to trap as much heat as I could, but some water continued to seep in through one of the tarp’s holes.

The rain continued into the next day of my occupation, day six. Occasionally a supporter came out to shout some words of encouragement, and I peaked my head out if only to signal that I was still capable of doing so. As my thirst and hunger simultaneously set in deeper, it felt like time itself had become an instrument of punishment, with each second passing slowly and painfully.

In the mid-afternoon of June 26, following two and a half days of rain and cold, I was roused out of a nap by Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman. He offered to take me out to lunch and give me a simple citation if I agreed to climb down from the stitcher. When I refused, he tried a different negotiating tactic.

“Your mom called me and says she is very worried about you,” he called up to me. “I’m going to come back in five minutes, and I’ll have your mom on speaker phone. In the meantime, I really want you to think about what you’re doing.”

By that point, I hadn’t eaten in more than four days. I’d barely had anything to drink. I’d been soaking wet for more than two days, feeling at nearly every conscious moment as though I was staving off hypothermia. With as little strength as I had left, the last thing I needed was to have to explain to my mom—who would surely detect any strain of doubt or weakness in my voice—about the righteousness of what I was doing by starving up in a construction tower out in the rain, all by my lonesome.

Within moments after Mendocino County’s top-ranking law enforcement officer turned and left, I felt the sun’s rays beating down on my neck. Slowly turning toward it, I half expected Gandalf to burst forth with his white staff on his great white horse Shadowfax, with Erkenbrand of the Westfold and his warriors. I knew at that moment that I had prevailed in remaining on the stitcher, even if I didn’t know when my next meal would come.

Next came the surreal experience of having a conversation with my mom via Sheriff Tom Allman’s speaker phone. I tried to explain to my mom that this was the best thing I could be doing to stop this horrible project that’s destroying wetlands. My mom later told me that she had never initiated contact with the police. The CHP’s Lieutenant Commander and the Mendocino County Sheriff had somehow gotten her number and dialed her up.

In any event, Gandalf never showed up. But a real-life wizard did.

The Winged Froglamander Re-Supply

The construction crew had a practice of parking the second wick drain stitcher, the one I wasn’t occupying, about fifty feet from me at the end of every work shift, being that they wanted to keep it under the floodlights in case someone else tried to climb up.

Which someone did.

A man named “Winged Froglamander”—clearly a veteran of forest defense campaigns in the Pacific Northwest—got in behind the police guards and climbed the cable of the second wick drain stitcher, hauling roughly 100 pounds of food, water and other supplies, and climbed about 20 feet up before the cops discovered him. The officers had been preoccupied with the effort to extract one of their vehicles from the deep mud near the site’s entrance, about 100 yards away.

The CHP officers first tried to coax Froglamander into coming down by calling up to him that he might fall. Then they called the machine operator, who drove up in a fury. Slamming the door of his giant pickup truck, he yelled up to Froglamander, “You’re about to go for the ride of your life, asshole!” Fortunately, Froglamander had reached the bottom rung of the crane and attached one or two lanyards to the framework. The operator jostled the wick stitcher up and down, with Froglamander flailing around on it, barely managing to retain his footing. When the operator stopped, Froglamader frantically sent text messages and made phone calls to try to get help. I yelled across phone numbers of people who could call for cameras and witnesses.

The machine operator climbed into the machine a second time and jostled the crane up and down repeatedly. Froglamander maintained his footing well enough to avoid being swung violently against the bars of the crane, or worse. As supporters ran up the railroad tracks carrying cameras, the machine operator left. The CHP officer in charge of the operation, Lt. Anthony Mesa, stood watching the entire life-threatening scene with his arms folded.

Next, Winged Froglamander threw a traverse line to my stitcher, and I pulled across the life-saving supplies he had hauled, which included plentyof Cliff bars and two cell phones. At first light the next morning the mysterious Froglamander called across to my stitcher, “I’m gonna bounce!” He descended down the cable and disappeared into the surrounding forest before the cops could realize what happened. As far as we know, the police have never identified, let alone apprehended, him.

Later that day, the thoroughly humiliated CHP announced a new policy of allowing me one daily delivery of food and water.

I received my appointed food supply deliveries throughout the weekend. Some friends had just returned from a Yurok Nation conference called “Big Doings with Salmon” in northern California, and they delivered me salmon that had been blessed at the conference.

On what was to be my final night in the stitcher, I devoured all of the salmon they had brought me. That night, I dreamed about a dense run of salmon lashing a creek into whiteness before me.

Extraction and Prosecution

On July 1, my twelth day in the wick drain stitcher, the CHP came in full force with two cherry pickers, a six-member SWAT team, and 42 other officers, along with a public relations and medical supply tents. A surveillance chopper circled overhead. The SWAT officers, three of them toting shotguns, cut me out of my lockbox within two hours. The Mendocino County District Attorney filed 16 misdemeanors against me—including two counts of resisting arrest—together carrying a maximum jail sentence of nearly eight years.

Next, Caltrans piled on a claim of $490,002 against me for delaying construction.

It was clear both Caltrans and the District Attorney wanted to make an example out of me to intimidate other activists into abandoning their resistance to this and other projects.

It took seven months for my court proceedings to play out, ending with taking a plea of two misdemeanors (which will become infractions after two years), 100 hours of community service (which I’m conducting at the Mendocino Environmental Center), and a restitution cap of $10,000. A judge will determine the exact amount of restitution, which might be $0, in April.

The Valley of Water Splashing The Toes

As with so many places in the American West that have been struck by the flash-flood of industrial capitalism since the mid-19th century, that which is most absent from the contemporary landscape of Little Lake Valley—aka the Willits Valley—is encapsulated by its name. Long ago, marshy areas formed throughout the valley when the area’s once-lively streams overflowed their banks and scoured the surrounding meadows with moisture and nutrients.

The original people of the area, the Little Lake Pomo, have known it by the evocatively intimate name Mto’m-kai, which closely translates to “Valley of Water Splashing the Toes.”

As Willits’ colonizers set about gridding the land and marketing it to cattle ranchers and timber merchants, they rapidly removed the wetlands. They did the same to the Pomo villagers and wildlife—waterfowl, pelicans, vast herds of tule elk and antelope—who had dwelt among the marshes and springs for so long.

I’d managed to protect these same wetlands—kidneys of the valley that absorb its waters and slowly release them back into the system—for less than twelve days. While my action generated a great deal of attention for the campaign and inspired further acts of resistance against the Bypass, its construction still rolls ahead as of this writing.

Yet, in those moments of halting construction, we have been part of feeding alternative possibilities for the world, one in which we turn away from fear, taking a stand not only with people fighting to protect the earth around the world, but across multiple dimensions of time, with the people of valleys of water splashing the toes and with people not yet born.

The greatest thing that the wick drain stitcher occupation reinforced for me was the importance of defying fear and intimidation in all its guises, in every way possible. When you do, people will join you.

Will Parrish is a journalist and activist who lives in Ukiah, CA. See savelittlelakevalley.org for more on the campaign to stop the Willits Bypass.

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