The Seafold Ledges Tar Sands Alliance was a loose grassroots group that aimed at drawing attention to the toxic and water-wasting nature of tar sands production. They had a website and a Twitter account, an office in a converted storage shed, and an ad hoc staff that conveyed compelling information about the massive amount of water that would be needed to process the tar sands and the scary brew of toxic chemicals that would go into the soil and eventually into the groundwater. They posted photos of the apocalyptic destruction of northern Canadian landscapes wrought by strip-mining the tar sands there. They had demonstrated against the project at several public appearances of Drexxel’s corporate officers but this was their first act of civil disobedience at the tar sands mining site itself.
Luna took three deep breaths to calm herself. She exhaled slowly and checked to see if she had wet her pants. Dry so far. Her confidence returned, she reviewed the reasons she found herself on a dirt road thirty miles from the highway, joined to a chain-link fence with twelve people who shared her noble convictions but at the moment looked like a discarded charm bracelet of disheveled campers.
The Seafold Ledges was a remote landscape of broken cliffs and wide arid valleys that could only be reached by primitive dirt roads. You had to swallow a lot of dust to get there. The dozens of archaeological sites that were scattered across the high desert testified to a time before cows and sheep replaced elk and bison and the ancestors of today’s so-called Pueblo people could hunt and gather there.
After the original human inhabitants left, the Ledges saw few visitors: the occasional cowboy looking for stray cows, a few geologists who found fossils and mapped the tar sands below the Ledges, and a team of Army surveyors looking for a place to blow up bombs and practice war. The Sea Ledges was never adequate for their needs, an also-ran in America’s epic race to exploit its deserts.
A couple of times each fall, van loads of college students visited. They would burst from their dusty vehicles, their knees cramped from the long ride, and blink at the bright sky. Many had never experienced a sky so blue. They would be led by their professor to areas rich with fossils where they could paw and poke at the layers of rocks that were uplifted and exposed like the pages of a book. The ledger of the Ledges told a story punctuated with mollusks, trilobites, walking fish, and dinosaurs, a kind of evolutionary braille embedded in stone. In the winter, ice and wind scraped across the bare pinnacles and made a mournful song unheard by all but antelope and bighorn sheep.
Deserts are generally abused and abandoned or simply ignored. That was true for the Seafold Ledges, too, until humanity’s insatiable appetite for oil meant that even dirty tar mixed into sandstone was valuable. The fossil fuel industry had already picked the low hanging fruit and technology made possible the recovery of oil from even the crappiest scraps in sand. Suddenly, the Seafold Ledges held something that was wanted.
The Drexxel Development Corporation had bet that tar sands were the next big thing. They had been to Canada and the same landscape laid to waste that horrified ardent conservationists was a source of inspiration to the Drexxel team that surveyed the massive strip mines there. The scale was mind-boggling and they speculated that the profit to be made in a world addicted to carbon was limitless. A Drexxel scout told his employer that the Sea Ledges could be “better than Alberta.” They surveyed the empty landscape of the Ledges and dreamed of trucks the size of buildings moving the raw material of the world toward their bank accounts.
Drexxel’s scouts were leasing land and buying mineral rights in places like the Seafold Ledges. Most of it was public land, so leases were cheap. But their plan to dig up thousands of tons of sand and then boil the gooey crude out of it faced major hurdles. One, squeezing oil out of rock is expensive because it is also energy intensive—it would take almost as much fuel to produce the fuel as the fuel produced. Two, they needed a way to get the product out—a pipeline was another big and complicated expense. And finally, there were those crazies with their signs about pollution and global warming who showed up at every public meeting, chanting and yelling and now, damn it, chaining themselves to the mining site gate. Mining had not begun but the big machines were on hand to prepare the site and that cost plenty. Tar sands mining is marginal and risky enough without adding in such unnecessary delays. Something had to be done about those eco-freaks.
One by one the thirteen chained protestors were separated from each other by bolt cutters wielded by Sheriff Taylor’s deputies. They were arrested for trespassing and resisting arrest, read their rights, and carried one by one to vans, the one police van in Boon County and another borrowed from the senior citizen center. A deputy named Eldon Pratt found the entire operation baffling. Who were these crazy people, he wondered, and what are they doing so far from the highway? Why are they so mad? There is nothing wrong with mining, without mining there would be no cars. How do they think they got out here?
Eldon had only been out of Boon County a few times in his life, mostly when his uncle took him cross-country in his truck to deliver shipments of refrigerated meat. They didn’t tarry along the routes they followed and Eldon was left with the impression that the rest of America looked like truck stops, which were pretty much the same from one place to another. His fellow Americans were motorists just like him. The people he saw shuffling in and out of rest rooms or feeding coins into vending machines loaded with Red Bull, Slim Jims, and Snickers appeared to have no history, regional accents, political opinions, food preferences, sexual orientations, and so on. In truck stops, diversity is mostly in one’s imagination and Eldon wasn’t strong in that area. So this bunch of his fellow Americans chained to a gate and chanting incomprehensible slogans struck him as weird.
He whispered to Sheriff Taylor, “Look at that guy over there. He has those dreadlocks you see on TV. Can we cut his hair when we get him to the jail?” Sheriff Taylor frowned at him and turned away. Eldon didn’t suggest it to be cruel, he was just curious.
On the way back to the Boon County jail, the vans became mired in mud twice and sand once. A recent thunderstorm left soupy washes in its wake and while crossing one of them the van borrowed from the senior civic center slogged to a halt and stopped. It wasn’t designed to navigate four-wheel-drive roads and the clearance was too low. The prisoners were ushered out of the van and stood on an adjacent bank watching Taylor and his deputies try to rock and push the van through a fresh bed of sucking silt and clay.
The sheriff and his deputies slipped and swore, grunted, flailed, pushed harder and failed again and again. The arrested protestors watched the show for several minutes and then looked at each other, shrugged, and left their dry perch above the wash to join in and push the van free. Eldon reached for the handle of his revolver but they waded into the mud with such good cheer that he was confused. They pushed together with all their might and the deputies found themselves sorting out a confounding mix of suspicion, surprise, and appreciation. The van broke free and climbed the embankment, a cheer went up, and the prisoners climbed back into the van without being ordered to do so, carefully scraping mud off their shoes and boots first.
After that, the prisoners conversed freely and asked questions. They learned that the wife of one deputy was expecting a baby girl any day now and that Eldon Pratt recently won a trophy at the county fair for roping steers. The deputies learned that their prisoners included a retired professor, a garlic farmer, a concert violinist, a microbiologist, a computer programmer, an electrician, a nurse, and Luna, who described herself as a “budding rainbowologist.” By the time they were delivered to the county jail, Eldon’s confusion was complete. As the prisoners were escorted to the jailhouse door, he stammered, “Good luck,” then blushed and fell silent. He hoped the other deputies didn’t hear that.
The county jail was not designed for more than a handful of occupants. It was mostly a holding pen until the accused could be transported to a larger facility fifty miles away. Sheriff Taylor apologized for the crowded conditions. He and his men had never witnessed a protest or arrested so many people at once. They once busted four people when a fight broke out at the county fair during the demolition derby but that was the previous record.
Police work in Boon County consisted