us by the Swiss Bastardsâ private detectives. There was nothing subtle about the tail, they were just trying to intimidate. Tanya, our other Boston participant, was driving the car and Debbie was lying down in the back seat. Tanya led the tail onto a twisting road that wasnât sympathetic to the Lincoln Town Car following them. She thrashed the Omni for five minutes or so, putting half a mile between herself and the private dicks, then threw a 180 in the middle of the roadâa skill sheâd learned on snowy Maine roads last February while we were driving up to Montreal to get some French fries. Debbie jumped out and crouched in the ditch. Tanya took off and soon passed the Lincoln going the other way. The private dicks in the Lincoln were forced to make an eleven-point turn across the road, then peeled out trying to catch up with her.
Debbie walked a couple hundred yards and located the all-terrain bicycle weâd stashed there previously. It was loaded with half a dozen Kryptonite bicycle locks, the big U-shaped, impervious things. Sherode a couple of miles, partly on the road and partly cross-country, until she came to a heavy gate across a private access road. On the other side of the gate was a toxic waste dump owned by the Swiss Bastards, a soggy piece of ground that ran downhill into an estuary that in turn ran two miles out to the Atlantic. The entire dump was surrounded by two layers of chainlink fence, and this gate was a big, heavy, metal sucker, locked by means of a chain and padlock. Debbie locked two of the Kryptonites in the middle, augmenting the Swiss Bastardsâ chain system, then put two on each hinge, locking the gates to the gateposts. In the unlikely event that an emergency took place on the dump site, she stuck around with the keys so that she could open the gates for ambulances or fire trucks. We arenât careless fanatics and we donât like to look as though we are.
I was on the
Blowfish
, explaining this gig to the crew. Jim, the skipper, and hence their boss, was hanging around in the background.
Jim does this for a living. He lives on the boat and sails back and forth between Texas and Duluth; along the Gulf Coast, around Florida, up the Atlantic Coast, down the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes, and west from there. Then back. Wherever he goes, hell breaks loose. When GEE wants an especially large amount of hell to break loose, theyâll bring in professional irritants, like me.
Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking. They anchor in prominent places and hang banners from the masts. They dump fluorescent green dye into industrial outfalls so that news choppers can hover overhead and get spectacular footage of how pollution spreads. They blockade nuclear submarines. They do a lot of that antinuclear stuff. Their goal is to be loud and visible.
Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. Thatâs partly because Iâm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals. Thereâs no direct action you can take to stop nuclear proliferation, and direct action to save mammals is just too fucking nasty. I donât want to get beat up over a baby seal. But there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals.You just plug the pipes. Doing that requires coordinated actions, what the media like to describe as âmilitary precision.â
This crew doesnât like anything military. In the Sixties, they would have been stuffing flowers into gun barrels while I was designing bombs in a basement somewhere. None of them has any technical background, not because theyâre dumb but because they hate rigid, disciplined thinking. On the other hand, they had sailed this crate tens of thousands of miles in all kinds of weather. Theyâd survived a dismasting off Tierra del Fuego, blocked explosive harpoons with their Zodiacs, lived for months at a time in
Debbie walked a couple hundred yards and located the all-terrain bicycle weâd stashed there previously. It was loaded with half a dozen Kryptonite bicycle locks, the big U-shaped, impervious things. Sherode a couple of miles, partly on the road and partly cross-country, until she came to a heavy gate across a private access road. On the other side of the gate was a toxic waste dump owned by the Swiss Bastards, a soggy piece of ground that ran downhill into an estuary that in turn ran two miles out to the Atlantic. The entire dump was surrounded by two layers of chainlink fence, and this gate was a big, heavy, metal sucker, locked by means of a chain and padlock. Debbie locked two of the Kryptonites in the middle, augmenting the Swiss Bastardsâ chain system, then put two on each hinge, locking the gates to the gateposts. In the unlikely event that an emergency took place on the dump site, she stuck around with the keys so that she could open the gates for ambulances or fire trucks. We arenât careless fanatics and we donât like to look as though we are.
I was on the
Blowfish
, explaining this gig to the crew. Jim, the skipper, and hence their boss, was hanging around in the background.
Jim does this for a living. He lives on the boat and sails back and forth between Texas and Duluth; along the Gulf Coast, around Florida, up the Atlantic Coast, down the St. Lawrence Seaway into the Great Lakes, and west from there. Then back. Wherever he goes, hell breaks loose. When GEE wants an especially large amount of hell to break loose, theyâll bring in professional irritants, like me.
Jim and his crew of a dozen or so specialize in loud, sloppy publicity seeking. They anchor in prominent places and hang banners from the masts. They dump fluorescent green dye into industrial outfalls so that news choppers can hover overhead and get spectacular footage of how pollution spreads. They blockade nuclear submarines. They do a lot of that antinuclear stuff. Their goal is to be loud and visible.
Myself, I like the stiletto-in-the-night approach. Thatâs partly because Iâm younger, a post-Sixties type, and partly because my thing is toxics, not nukes or mammals. Thereâs no direct action you can take to stop nuclear proliferation, and direct action to save mammals is just too fucking nasty. I donât want to get beat up over a baby seal. But there are all kinds of direct, simple ways to go after toxic criminals.You just plug the pipes. Doing that requires coordinated actions, what the media like to describe as âmilitary precision.â
This crew doesnât like anything military. In the Sixties, they would have been stuffing flowers into gun barrels while I was designing bombs in a basement somewhere. None of them has any technical background, not because theyâre dumb but because they hate rigid, disciplined thinking. On the other hand, they had sailed this crate tens of thousands of miles in all kinds of weather. Theyâd survived a dismasting off Tierra del Fuego, blocked explosive harpoons with their Zodiacs, lived for months at a time in
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