The Phoenix of 702

The wind was howling through the treetops and my perch in the uppermost branches of the tall, slender gum tree was swinging as much as two metres from its usual upright position. This movement was not in an orderly back and forth movement with the wind as you would expect, but rather the tree seemed to fling itself randomly in different directions with little apparent regard for any force of nature that now lashed it.

The platform to which I clung had been tied into the trees as part of an environmental protest to try to save this beautiful old forest from being destroyed by the logging industry for conversion into woodchip before shipping it off to Japan. The platform hung from a branch about two metres above its flimsy plywood surface, with seatbelt webbing out to the far corners whilst the other side of the platform had been lashed firmly to the trunk of the tree; the end result was a living area about the same size as a door. With supplies, equipment and a shit bucket suspended below on ropes and other day to day necessities like: water, torch, radio and a small pack of books hung from the branches and rigging above; the area of the platform was almost all living space and so wasn’t too bad once you got used to it and the confinement of the climbing harness and safety line permanently attached. At times the higher branches provided an escape from the mundane sameness of sitting on a surface the size of a door thirty metres above the forest floor day in day out.

I’d done the same as all the sitters before me and brought up lots of books and things to do; like all the sitters before me I’d found the same inner peace after two or three days and been able to still my normally hectic mind and spend hours in contemplation of the beauty that surrounded my new home. Hours were spent at the very topmost branches playing my flute to the trees, the birds or serenading the entire forest.

Each morning my reverie was broken by the arrival of the police who came, followed about half an hour later by the Forest Commission. The ritual was the same every morning; they drove slowly into the logging coupe where our three platforms were hung. Their car slowly circled the coupe before they came to a stop within centimetres of the same spot each morning and the occupants got out and stretched their legs.

Finally, as if they had just noticed the platforms hanging above them and connected together by banner festooned ropes, they would look up and call "Hello, is there anybody up there?" It always seemed like a strange question, but maybe they were hoping that we’d do their job for them by coming down during the night.

After this initial call a genuine conversation would begin; there was always camaraderie between the sitters, the police and the Forest Commission. The same small talk that develops between workmates was repeated daily and always reminded me of a cartoon series that used to be on TV where the wolf and sheepdog exchanged pleasantries as they clocked on to start the day with their respective protagonistic roles in the life of the flock.

"G’day. How’d you sleep?"

Oh OK. It was pretty warm last night."

Yeah, there’s s’posed to be some rain coming though."

"Oh well, we’ll deal with that when it gets here."

"Yeah, Guess so. Have you had brekkie yet."

"Yeah, been up since five."

"So have we, it’s a bloody long drive out here you know."

"Yeah well, at least you get paid for it."

"OK well we’ll see ya t’morra. I s’pose you’ll still be here"

"Yeah, got no real plans to go anywhere. See ya."

This conversation, with minor variations, was played out twice a day; first with the police and then again with the Forestry blokes. For two months now the platforms had been up, seven days a week for that entire time, this ritual had been performed as regularly as clockwork. Except for yesterday there had been a bit of a worried edge to the conversation with the police yesterday. Added to the end of the usual ritual pleasantries they had begun to ask questions about the strength and safety of the platforms if strong winds came in.

"There’s a big storm coming in off Bass Strait," the Sergeant said. Anyone who knows Bass Strait, the notoriously dangerous stretch of water between Tasmania and mainland Australia, knows that a storm coming from that direction can quickly develop into a serious problem. "There’s a high wind warning, and all the fishing boats are coming into the Bay for safety" the middle aged Sergeant continued. "Thanks for the warning" I called back down "What time is it expected to get here?" I asked. "Bout midnight. Watch yourselves OK. I don’t want to come out here tomorrow and clean your dead bodies off the ground" came his reply. "Yeah, no worries. See you in the morning and thanks for the warning." I yelled over my shoulder as I started the climb up to the thin uppermost branches of my tree to gaze out to the southwest where the storm would come from.

From my perch at the top of my tree I had an uninterrupted panoramic view from about east/southeast through south and on to west; for almost 180 degrees of my horizon my view was interrupted only by the curve of the earth and that strange haze that sometimes develops at the edge of sight. The entire sky was now blue; it was like clouds didn’t even exist.

I knew that the blue sky meant nothing though; when storms blew in from the Strait the weather could do a complete turnabout within an hour and on a pleasant winters day people could suddenly be caught out in blinding rain and gale force winds. In this part of the country, if the weather forecast predicted a storm you always took them seriously. I resolved to spend the day tidying up my platform, checking the rigging and watching the sky.

It was a long day for all three of us in the platforms; we all knew that if we came down then the trees which we occupied would probably be felled to prevent us reoccupying them. Every hour, on the hour, I made the journey up to the top of my tree; it was about two in the afternoon when I first saw it. A thin bluish-black line stretching up from the south; slowly creeping towards the west. By five O’clock the thin line of cloud had become a deep, surging mass of black and greys that had moved up until it covered the horizon from South to past west. The wind had picked up a bit and as I sat in the highest branches of my tree and looked out over the forest I was swaying gently on the top of an ocean of constantly rippling green.

By dusk it was almost pitch black; cloud covered the whole sky except for a thin, dark blue line quickly vanishing far off to the east. As the premature night enveloped us I knew that, even without the coming night, this thin blue line had finally been swallowed by the cloud. There had been intermittent rain since the cloud cover had reached us but now a soaking, constant rain began to fall; the drumming on my parka hood and the timber platform obliterated all other sound. Thunder started to rumble in from the Southwest and the sudden flashes of illumination shooting through the clouds added an ominous feel to the whole atmosphere. When the lightning started to get closer I decided to brave one last trip to the top of my tree to see Gaia’s lightshow. Once I turned off the headtorch I had climbed with, an impenetrable blackness enveloped my world; the darkness was broken only by flash after flash of lightning off to the west which lit up the underbelly of a thick mat of cloud surging like water boiling in a billy. The tendrils of lightning probed through the clouds in every direction like Medusa’s snakes in search of a victim; almost immediately the thunderclap hit my ears like the sound of some massive explosion followed by the rolling of an orchestra of kettledrums.

Next lightning strike I counted off the seconds between lightning and thunder; at about two and a half seconds elapsed between the flash and the arrival of the thunder, meaning that the strike must have been within about three k’s of my perch. I decided that discretion was the better part of valour and retreated to the relative safety of my platform. Suddenly the wind picked up; what had been a stiff breeze became a strong wind and the gentle swaying of my tree became a violent tossing. My cup and a book I had been reading before the light failed disappeared over the side of my platform and I watched them plummet into the darkness below. I sat with my back against the tree trunk, its firmness and strength had a reassuring feel to them, but the bucking of the platform gave me the promise of a long and sleepless night.

Torches flashed from below and I heard the voices of Col and Greggg calling up from below "Are you OK up there? Is there anything we can do for you?" I decided that my platform would be safer without all the paraphernalia I used for daily living and, after a short shouted conversation, I proceeded to lower my pack and sleeping bag, stuffed full of gear, down for the ground crew to carry away and stash; the other two sitters soon followed suite. It would be an uncomfortable night without any sleeping gear but several small articles had already disappeared over the edge and in this wind equipment hanging off the platform could swing about and become dangerous.

Once our platforms were stripped of everything except their rigging and our ropes, we hunkered down to ride it out. Ride it out was an accurate description; the wind bent the trees over until they groaned in complaint, then they whipped back like gigantic springs, the only respite was during the short periods when the tree had bent to its maximum flex and was about to catapult itself back to an upright position. There was no rhythm or order to their movement; each tree bent and sprang back individually and at different speeds and even in different directions so that without warning a treetop that had been metres from you suddenly appeared centimetres in front of your face and just a suddenly disappeared again.

Even though I was sitting with my back to the trunk and my hands gripping the rigging tape on either side of me (so that I was sitting stationary in the middle of my platform) the beam from my headtorch danced wildly through the surrounding trees as my tree whipped about to its own tune. This movement gave me a wildly surreal window into the maelstrom that surrounded us.

I released the grip of my right hand long enough to reach over and press the light on my watch; it was just ten minutes past midnight and this storm showed no signs of letting up; before I got my right hand back to resume its grip on the rigging tape the violent lashing of my tree almost threw me from my platform. I knew that I could not last the night in this and doubted that either of the other two sitters were fairing any better.

It was when the wind started to lift the platforms that things really started to go badly; the rigging had been done to prevent the platforms falling and we were all confident of their strength in this direction. No one had ever envisaged that the platforms could be blown upwards, but that was what was happening now; with one side lashed to the tree my platform started to hinge up from this point every time the trees movement was away from the wind, then when it swung back into the wind the force changed from underneath to above and the platform slammed back down onto the now slack rigging tape. The result of this new dimension in movement dramatically increased the bucking motion of the platform and I found myself wondering how long the rigging tape could withstand the battering. The platforms were held up with the same tape used in car seatbelts and was designed to withstand shock, but not repeated shock after shock like it was getting now; sooner or later anything would break under this continuously repeated strain. The strain on sitter, rigging and platform was immense; something had to give.

After about half an hour of this incessant hammering I‘d had enough and called to the other sitters at the top of my lungs; a barely audible response came back over the wind from each of them. "I’m getting out of here!" I screamed into the darkness and was relieved to hear "Me too!" come faintly back from both of my compatriots.

I’d set my rope over the branch above me so that I could use a technique called ‘double roping’ and descend on both ends; this technique leaves the rope free so that it could be pulled down after I’d left the tree if needed to; I had connected the figure of eight descending device, with both strands of rope threaded through it, to my harness before the storm got too bad, as a safety precaution and backup for the safety line that was always connected to my harness. This wasn’t going to be textbook abseiling; descending into darkness from a tree thrashing in the wind was bad enough, but first I had to get off the platform. It was impossible to stand on the edge and lower myself backwards like I usually did; instead I paid out about two metres of slack, wrapped the rope around my thigh to act as a brake and rolled off the edge of the platform.

The freefall until the slack was taken up and the rope jerked taut was only a bit over a metre, but in the darkness, with fear gnawing at my belly, it seemed to go on forever. I fought the urge to reach out and grab the rope above me and trusted the figure eight and my grip on the rope below it. Below where I gripped the rope it was still wrapped around my leg to act as a brake and I came to a halt with a painful tightening of the coils around my thigh. Hanging just below the edge of the platform the swing didn’t seem too bad and I had time to take stock of how things were going; I quickly checked over my harness again to reassure myself that nothing had come undone or shifted with the shock. The beam of my headtorch didn’t reach the ground and the rope disappeared into the darkness below, whipped around in the wind; it was only gravity that let me know which direction the lay ground. Maintaining my grip on the rope behind my buttocks I started to kick my leg to unwind the rope from around my thigh; as the last coil dropped from my leg I felt the weight of my body transfer to the hand holding the rope.

Cautiously, I paid the wet rope through my cold fingers so that I slid slowly down the rope, it was a fairly smooth descent until I got about three metres below the platform. The further I lowered the more violently I was tossed around. I was like a pendulum on some old Grandfather clock that had gone mad; the longer the rope, the further the pendulum swung. Combined with the stretch in the dynamic climbing rope this erratic motion meant I was thrown about like the missile from a shanghai. "Get out of here!" my mind screamed; I let the rope slide through my fingers as fast as I could without getting rope burn. If the friction from the rope running through my hand was too much I would get rope burn and have to let go of the rope; letting go would mean freefall and even a fall of a couple of metres onto the rocky, uneven ground below could result in serious injury.

Still, with the faster descent the sudden, jerky pendulum movements continued and twice I collided with the trunk of my tree; hanging on a rope, away from anything solid, means that you have no control over which direction you face. The first time I hit the tree I was able to take most of the force with my legs; on the second collision I wasn’t so lucky and took the full force of the blow on my left shoulder and back. I knew I’d be sore in the morning but all that mattered to me at that moment was the rope I held and the ground I wanted to reach. I knew that my ride would have been a lot rougher if it wasn’t for Col and Gregg holding the end of my rope, but they could only help a bit because if they held the rope too tight my figure eight would lock up and leave me dangling somewhere in space.

Even though the journey to the bottom of my tree took no more than a minute it seemed to go on for ages; finally the ground below became visible in the beam of my torch. I came to an unceremonious landing on my butt and was pleased to feel the squishing of the mud under my cheeks. I let go of the rope so that the movement of the tree simply pulled the last of the rope out of my figure of eight rather than pull me around the base of the tree, almost instantly the rope tore from my descender, its ends flailing wildly in the wind. I left Col and Gregg jumping about trying to catch the wildly flicking rope ends and went to see how the other two sitters were progressing with their retreat from the trees.

It was at least half an hour before all of us were on the ground and our ropes down and coiled ready for our trek to the support camp. The two k hike through the bush, in total darkness and pouring rain wasn’t easy but we finally reached the safety of the camp; the three small tents hidden in a gully were normally home to the small group of people who provided physical support for the treesitters. Tonight the support crew would share their homes and limited comforts with those same sitters. Within minutes the warmth of the cup of tea I cradled in my hands started to melt the feeling of defeat that had seeped over me like a black cloud. We were lucky; there were only three people living at the camp that night so with the three sitters that only meant two to a tent, otherwise there would have been a shortage of sleeping space and bedding. Our gear from the platforms was still stashed up near the coupe because none of us had felt like doing the trip with full packs.

The dawn broke clear over the forest and we were up with the birds; there is nothing more beautiful than dawn in the forest just after a good rain. We didn’t have time to appreciate the dawn that day, we were eager to get up to the coupe before the morning police visit, to see if we could reoccupy the platforms. We heard the chainsaw when we were still a k from the coupe; by the time we got there all was quiet as a graveyard. As we walked through the semi-cleared coupe to the stumps of the three trees we had shared our lives with there was complete silence; the two police and the lone Forestry worker stood in a huddle near the police car, scuffing the ground in front of themselves with their toes like errant boys caught out in an act of petty vandalism.

Finally, our grief spent, we left the coupe in ones and twos to gather as a group just inside the forest on the opposite side of the coupe to the police car; I still don’t know who said "Let’s go" but those two words seemed to start the group moving in a shocked silence. As one we walked away from a scene each of us saw as some kind of brutal, unnecessary murder.

We were back down at the support camp before people started to find their voices; anger, guilt, sorrow and disbelief mingled in the group of hushed voices. Anyone who visited the camp at that time and didn’t know the circumstances would have thought that one of our number had died; to us, three of our group had just been killed.

It was Gregg, from the ground crew, who first changed the topic from the past to the future; "Well Stuff ‘em, let’s put up some more!" he said to nobody in particular. Within seconds the talk changed from mourning our loss to planning; where should we put the new platforms, how could we make them better and how soon could we get them up were all discussed and different opinions given and debated.

After lunch we packed up the support camp and headed back to Base Camp; they still wouldn’t know about the loss of the platforms and we all needed some rest time. Everyone agreed that we all deserved a week of good food, good sleep and lots of planning. It turned out that the police had come out early because they were worried about us; when they found the platforms empty, they called the Forest Commission and the trees were felled long before the police would have usually arrived for their morning visit.

By the end of the second week since our beloved trees had been felled three new platforms hung majestically over coupe 702; these new platforms were closer to the main road as if to protect the original site from further desecration. They were rigged to prevent a lot of the upward movement that had caused the first platforms to be lost and they were staying as long as they were helping to protect this beautiful old forest from the men and machines that threatened it.

Into The Sky