By Beth Bosk – New Settler Interview, Issue #51, August 1990
It is the vignette passed most between us as women. The woman counter-demonstrating at the demo in Santa Rosa (or Ukiah or Calpella), the woman with the handmade sign: DON’T TAKE A WAY MY HUSBAND’S JOB OR HE’LL TAKE IT OUT ON ME…Forests Forever is a feminist issue, as much as forests forever is a feminist issue.
Family. Shoes for the kids, their college educations, the roofs over their head—the yellow ribbon issues. I think of the yellow ribbon issues having lunch this afternoon across from Roanne Withers, co-organizer of the Redwood Summer Georgia Pacific Mill rally. It is a press conference, where they are handing out a thirty page yellow document on Redwood Summer which manages, obliquely, to trash Judi on page one. This is the document that says Earth First! doesn’t own Redwood Summer. I peruse it. “Question: Why is the industry over-harvesting their lands? The answer is simple. Forests don’t grow fast enough.” This is not Roanne’s document. Everybody is doing their own thing. Roanne’s is doing a rally that will end at the G-P mill which she will deed to the workers and community of Fort Bragg. This is Roanne’s umpteenth rally. Her first through the eyes of a pregnancy. Her first pregnancy. I am thinking of the yellow ribbon issues.
“Pregnancy is the best drug,” she says.
By Roanne Withers, co-organizer Redwood Summer Georgia-Pacific mill rally:
Pregnancy is the most wonderful high I’ve ever had in my life. All that other organizing I did in such a frazzle and I’m floating through this one in such calm. I immediately felt a total connectedness to this earth, more than I’ve ever felt in this life. And a direct relationship with every living and non-living thing.
The giant cosmos said you’re going to have a child now. After my father died, I stopped ovulating. That is, I was told by doctors that I wasn’t ovulating, except then I started gaining weight and I thought I was getting fat and I didn’t know if it was a stress reaction to my father’s death, and then my grandmothers. I saw it as compensating for that loss.
Then I tried a home pregnancy test, thinking that was a possibility, and it came negative. I became frightened because I thought something was wrong and it was out of my control I convinced myself I had a tumor, and went into a state of denial, and then when my skin started to change color, my freckles and nipples darkened, I thought I was in a precancerous state.
Finally I went to see a doctor in Santa Rosa to have it diagnosed. I went by myself, and he walked in the room, took one look at me and told me “you’re pregnant”. Six and a half months pregnant. That moment was so joyous.
When you don’t know what is ahead, naturally, you expect the worst.
I’ve been a union organizer in the past, and I organized anti-nuclear rallies. What is different about this is how I feel inside. What I feel inside is a calm inner peace of life and its cycles; the acceptance of the life cycles of birth and death. And because of accepting what life is on this planet, I view everything with a calmness, and I can see how all things can work—all of the variety of opinions of what is going on this summer, all going towards the same goal of preserving life on this planet and continuing it.
Part of organizing is having control over a situation and deciding what works and doesn’t work and being the final word. And this particular rally, since it is Earth First!, which has no hierarchy, in order to organize this particular Redwood Summer rally at the Georgia Pacific mill, I see it including everything and not being controlling, but letting go of control, including trying to control what the Yellow Ribbon People will or will not do. I don’t see it as necessary.
I was in San Diego to see this doctor, thinking that I had a tumor, and I was reading the April issue of the Smithsonian in his waiting room, and there is an interview with Darryl and Judi, and I was laughing—it was some of the best of Judi and Darryl’s verbal pranks—and I looked up and CNN news was on television. and I saw Judi being loaded into an ambulance, and I stood up and screamed and cried and then I called Gary and Betty and said I’m coming home, and at that moment I made the decision to take on a task. I didn’t know what it was at that time, but I was coming home to help.
I was only going to stick my toe into Redwood Summer when Judi was around organizing it. So I contributed money, but I wasn’t going to take an active stance other than supportive. Then Tom Cahill called me to say there was an Earth First! Redwood Summer organizing meeting at Anna Marie’s house, and by the time it was over, I became one of the main organizers of the Fort Bragg rally at the G-P mill.
The point of this rally is to say that the interests of the working community and the environmental community are one and the same. It’s the same message I’ve been saying over and over, that a sustained forest means sustaining life on this planet and sustaining jobs.
Women give birth, and as much as I would share this with the men that I love in my life—Ron, my brother—I can’t give them this experience; it is only an experience another women can understand. What I can share with men is the joy that I feel, and the compassion and the love that pours from my heart about it all.