Bear Mountain Treesit Wednesday, Feb 13th

I woke on February 13th at around 6 AM to the sound of cracking and my brother Carl Stevens yelling, “they're here, the police are here.” I was sleeping a hundred feet in the air on Buttercup's old platform in the branches of a large gentling spiraling Douglas Fir. There were six of us at the treesit that morning, three in the trees and three on the ground.
The RCMP got the ground crew out first, within minutes I could see flashlights darting along the forest floor below, one after another. Soon I saw a group of flashlights appear around a tent near the bottom of my tree and officers illuminated in their lights pulled Jesse out of his tent and led him away in handcuffs. Still dark, I saw a dog lit by flashlight tearing apart a bag of my belongings at the bottom of the tree my platform was in.

As the light began to grow a group of police gathered round the base of the tree, shining flashlights up into my platform. No attempt at communication was made by the police and during this period they tied my rope at the bottom of the tree which disabled me from climbing down under my own power. Soon I saw my brother Kalanu, who had been in the kitchen platform, getting taken away in handcuffs by a group of RCMP officers and me and Luke, who was in the platform closest to Leigh Road, began yelling to each other, “BC Forests under attack, what do we do? We fight back, we fight back!” I found out later that no one but RCMP could hear us; police barricades were keeping media and protesters hundreds of meters from the forest.

As the sun rose, two RCMP agents began to slowly climb the tree towards my platform. The surreality of the moment; bulky crab creatures getting slowly larger on the trunk which was supporting me while sun rays illuminated the branches around me and green birds flitted through the canopy. My first sunrise in the canopy, I lay on my side and watched the light coming towards me. Already there were sounds of a chainsaw and bulldozers below.

This was it, the RCMP were calling and their call was insistent: world! World! This is our world! We will bring transformation to suit the needs of development! Get the fuck out of the way! But in my head I knew that the sunrise would fade but it was enough that I was part of the appreciation which spread through the treetops with the rays of light. Let them come I thought, the world is so deep that it can take SWAT teams, it can take assault rifles and dogs become machines, it can take bulldozers and upturned gravesites. Let moloch throw aggression into the world, charge through and pave it over, and still it will be there, flourishing, resplendent to those who can see. The depth of experience which rushes through us as we encounter the world can never be taken away from us.

As I watched the cops climb closer, hammering spikes into the tree every few feet, I remembered the night before as the treesit camp gathered around our kitchen fire pit and traded stories, laughing and learning from the fire. The mind cannot be controlled and regimented like space , our thoughts and our laughter, this is our strength as humans. And here is where those who love the world will always win, for every police occupation, for every interchange, for every straight line carved into the earth's surface, there is another moment of abundant existence. As developers and bureaucrats encircle our earth with survey tape and surveillance, we can find strength in rallying around the land which calls to us through fear and rootlessness.

After about an hour, the lead climber, Glen, an officer from the mainland specially trained in aerial extraction, reached me and I was belayed down. As I descended towards the forest floor I could see that the tree was surrounded by a couple dozen officers arrayed around the trunk in rings, fanning outwards. At the outside were officers with assault rifles and video cameras, positioned in order to have clear sight of the platform in case I had decided to resist, closer were RCMP with guard dogs and body armour. As I touched the ground I was grabbed by five officers and cuffed against the mossy tree trunk which had held my platform. It was announced that I was being charged with mischief and I was read my rights in the bright light of a video camera and led out of the forest by a half dozen officers.

The tee-pee which had been the communal center of the camp for months was almost gone and a team of workers were carting our belongings away into the backs of giant recycling trucks. I was put in the back of a police cruiser and driven to the Langford police station along Leigh Road, where I could see the true scale of the operation; both sides of the 200 meter long road were packed with logging equipment and the dozens of police cars and a mobile command centre the size of a small bus which were needed to transport the hundreds of officers I later learned were involved in the paramilitary operation. A barricade manned by police at the intersection of Leigh Road and Goldstream Avenue had been set up to restrain the small group of protesters who had gathered and I was lucky enough to see the protesters yelling shame at the police car which sent shivers through my sign as we headed towards the Langford police station.