I hadn’t planned to report on the Langford Tree-Sit/tent-city/tarped ewok-village blocking highway expansion near Victoria since April 2007. I’d planned to report on the Right to Sleep Charter Challenge, but, as fate would have it, the BC Supreme Court Case was put off yet again, this time until June. So, in the hopes that the trip wouldn’t be a total loss, I headed to Langford one wet January evening, and, as fate would have it, the next day I was to witness one of seven times that campers blocked work on the highway. The #50 bus turns on Goldstream Road and I get off into a heavy rain. Two blocks east, past the Spencer Middle School, is Leigh road, a quiet cul-de-sac of homes built on rock beds sporting Gerry Oak and Arbutus trees. At the end of Leigh Road I see I’m in the right place: a barricade rises out of the ditch. Strange objects are piled there: an assortment of tonka toys, Tibetan prayer flags, a TV set and a sign in red spray-paint: “The Sprawl Ends Here!” A muddy path around the barricade enters the forest through multi-coloured string woven into a dream-catcher fence and a platform built above the gate. A huge tee-pee/wig-wam of tarps is lit from within by a fire. Circling around the tee-pee, I find the entrance when someone pokes out, introduces himself as Luke, and invites me in. Another camper sleeps in a nest of blankets. Luke and I speak for hours, listening to the camp’s tiny stereo. Luke quotes from “Homage To Catalonia,” drawing parallels between the camp and the Spanish Civil War. Jean-Jaques Rousseau, he says, came up with the idea of the social contract, a contract in which people agree to remain subjects of a state so long as the state improves their lifestyle. Thomas Payne and John Locke popularized it in America. Thoreau came across it and decided to test it, moving into the bush, and he thinks, “Hey, you know what? This is pretty good.” Luke returns to his post fifty feet up in the canopy. I gather several sleeping bags, put another log on the fire, and curl up on a small sofa. In the morning I meet Dan, a young guy with a big beard. He shows me to the kitchen area where “everyone hangs out.” A big table is covered with foods either salvaged or donated. Matt makes pancakes while talking of cooking and skinning roadkill from the highway. “Squirrel’s good. You want to get a squirrel. And crow’s good, it’s a really dark meat. Sea gull’s maybe not so good. Raccoon is good. I guess it’s in the bear family so it’s a really fatty meat. People condensed it down and had it on toast.” I tell him about writing this article. “Don’t write that there are only three people here!” Then he becomes serious suddenly about how children had been forced out of the camp: “’Unfit environment’ is all they have to say to take kids away. My dream is to dumpster-dive a baby and raise it.” The last camper, Matt, is an environmental sciences student at UVic taking a semester off to “learn to walk the walk if I’m going to talk the talk.” At the camp only two weeks, he says everyone he’s met are “awesome, a lot of them making big personal sacrifices, not out for money, not even out to get laid.” At 10 AM, Surveyors are seen working on the highway. Three of us go up there. A young guy working in the rain says, “We’re not supposed to talk to you.” We stand in front of the equipment. An older guy in the truck makes a phone call. “You get a break from work in the rain,” I joke. “I never work in the rain!” he says. “We’re going for a walk and then we’ll bugger off.” Minutes after they leave two Langford By-Law Enforcement officers arrive, officers well known at the camp as the cries ring out, “Fuck you! Simulated Bacon Bit, come back when you’re a real cop, bitch!” Officers Wayne Brown and Williams, I think; they wouldn’t identify themselves: “Luke knows who we are.” They poke around the tents and Luke yells at them holding a video camera and Brown says “Woah, smoke too much meth last night?” The officers look in Matt’s tent and find his name on a prescription. We follow them up to the tent of a squatter, a camper living independently from the camp with his little cat. He gives his name and they walk on. Luke returns to camp and I follow the officers to an abandoned tent near the pond. Brown extends his club and pokes through the belongings. He unearths a vein of porno mags, spreading them out to take a photo. “You might be able to find some dry ones,” he says, “I don’t care who you are, you’ve got to whack off.” Brown swings his baton, gesturing as he talks, and Williams says “Will you put that thing away? You’re making him nervous. You’re making me nervous.” Brown continues swinging his baton, saying how he doesn’t understand the campers: Way bigger developments are going on all around that area, huge clear cuts, and the tree-sit is here in some second-growth bush. The cave is protected. The pond is protected. “You’re supposed to be stewards of the land?” says Brown. “These logs you’re burning are a natural part of the forest floor.” “I love nailing dumpers,” says Williams, “not only do we slap them with a fine, we make them clean it up.” As they leave, Williams says he agrees with me on one thing: they don’t get paid enough to do what they do. I crawl into the entrance to the cave, a little hole that opens up into a very small chamber. A pitch black stretch of crawl space two feet wide opens into a bigger chamber with little rooms of its own. Another hole, partially submerged, opens into meters of lakes, the water high from the rain. Drops dripping are the only sound. It feels secure in the earth; I partly want to stay. As I leave the camp a rally of supporters start arriving, heading out into the community in teams of two with a petition against the town going $30 million in debt for the road expansion. More than two thousand signatures were submitted to the City days before police raid the camp on February 13th at 6 AM. Campers on the ground awake to attack dogs, firearms and handcuffs. Sixty or more officers with assault rifles and other weaponry storm the site. RCMP, Saanich Police, Victoria Police, Vancouver Police, and more. Police climb the trees, taking people down. Luke evades them until nearly 3 PM by climbing from tree to tree. As soon as he is out, machines start taking down trees. Nearly all the belongings went straight to the dump. Welders sealed the cave shut with bars. Demonstrators continue to block trucks, sometimes getting arrested. Youths climb into three Gerry Oaks before they could be cut down. Several local First Nations leaders express their outrage at the desecration of their sacred site and of the graves there. The sound of blasting rings out in other valleys as other groups demonstrate against BC’s frenzy of logging, development, and highway expansion
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