Three days later Lou flopped down on the sofa, left things unpacked, and called Jax.
“Hey, I’m home.”
“Louie! When did you get back?”
“Just now. I wanted you to know I’m okay.” Also to hear her voice.
“Did you stay out of trouble? I read that a lot of people were arrested. Did you go to jail?”
“Nah, hardly.” He kicked the sneakers from his feet.
“What do you mean ‘hardly’? Tell me about it.”
“Well…” and Lou told his tale of the first occupation of an operating nuclear plant in the United States.
“Friday night we all crashed in Portland. I think a lot of us were too jittery to get much sleep, ya know? Then Saturday everyone gathered for a long meeting. Then we had a slow lunch, and finally headed to Apollo that afternoon. That’s, like, an hour away. We all went to this staging area maybe a half-mile from the Apollo plant.”
“How many people were there?”
Lou got to his feet and began to pace around the living room as he spoke. “At the staging area? Someone said five or six hundred. But not everyone was going in. A lot of people were doing support work. Some came to sort of cheer us on, or just to see what was happening. Which was a good thing. We were able to educate some folks who had only heard the PGE propaganda. And when the time came, around a hundred of us marched up the road.”
“Didn’t the police try to stop you?”
“Not yet. There were state troopers keeping an eye on us. And a few guys in dark suits took photographs. But nobody stopped us. We walked right up to PGE property. Man, that cooling tower is huge. It’s hard to describe how massive it is.”
Nobody came into the living room, noted how Lou was circling in front of the sofa, and took a seat at the table to observe the show.
“Anyway, PGE put this fence up all around the plant with one main gate and three other gates for the access roads. So we split up into four groups to block each gate. We just unpacked our gear and set up tents. There wasn’t really any response. Not at first.”
“What about people who worked there? What did they do?”
“I guess on the weekend there’s not that much activity. I heard the next day they brought some workers in by boat on the Columbia River. But no one went through the blockade. Not at the one I was at.”
“This was Saturday?”
“Saturday afternoon, yeah.”
“Was that all, Louie? How long did you stay?”
“Well, that was the first day. Some people came by just to talk, ya know? To ask why we were there. And the media came by, thinking they were covering some kind of civil unrest. I think we stayed on message, though. We talked about the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear waste. That’s how the day went. We camped there overnight, and the next day was pretty much the same. But on Monday morning things changed.
“Some guy from PGE woke us up with a loudspeaker. This was really early. Before dawn. He ordered all of us off the property. And when nobody went along with that, well, that’s when the state troopers did their thing.”
“What thing? What did they do?”
“Their job, or their orders, I guess, was to get us out of there. But we wanted to stay put. So we all locked arms in front of the gate. Someone started singing ‘We Shall Not Be Moved,’ and everyone joined in. It was a good feeling, the way we were all connected. Of course, it didn’t really change the outcome. The troopers started arresting us one-by-one and taking us away. Some of us were willing to walk out with them and some went limp. They didn’t resist the cops, but they didn’t want to help them, either. So the cops had to drag them out.”
“Picture eighty people talking one-at-a-time about whether they wanted to eat chicken, or if we should accept their food, or what to do for vegetarians, and on and on.”
Tomoko had come through the front door carrying four baguettes. She skirted by Lou and sat at the table with Nobody.
“What did you do, Louie? Did you make them drag you?”
“Nah. I figured I’d end up in the same place either way, so I walked. But they did cuff me.”
“They put you in handcuffs?”
“Yeah, those plastic things. What’s weird is they only cuffed men. Some of the women were pissed off about that. Anyway, they loaded us onto buses and took us away. Over eighty people got arrested.”
“So you did go to jail!”
“No, we didn’t really go to jail. I mean, they tried. They took us to the county jail, but there were too many of us. So they bussed us around from jail to jail, but none of them had the space. So they finally took us to some fairgrounds where they had a pavilion where they hold horse shows and flea markets and stuff. They put us all in there and then cut off our plastic handcuffs. And through it all we were singing songs. But once we were in the pavilion, which was basically a big room with a concrete floor, no one was certain what was gonna happen. We didn’t know and I don’t think the cops knew either. None of them had experience arresting so many people at once. Hang on a second.” Lou stopped pacing and turned to his roommates. “Do you need to use the phone?”
Nobody and Tomoko shook their heads.
Tomoko asked, “How much longer is the show? I can make popcorn.”
“Uh, I don’t think that long.”
“Okay.” Instead of popcorn, Tomoko extended a baguette to Nobody. Nobody tore off the heel and bit into it.
Back on the phone. “Where was I?”
“You were in a pavilion,” said Jax.
“Yeah. We’re all just hanging out. Then someone bunched their sweatshirt up and tied the sleeves around it to make kind of a floppy ball. And we were tossing this ball back and forth when a few people stood up and stretched their arms out like they were a net and we played this game where we knocked the ball over the net.”
“Like volleyball.”
“Kinda. We called it sweatball. So we did that for a while. Meanwhile, the cops who were guarding us kept giving us weird looks, like we didn’t know how to behave like criminals. Which was pretty much true. By then it was around lunch time. One of the troopers told us they had to provide our meals while we were in custody. We said we wanted the food that our support people had for us, but they wouldn’t allow that. Instead they offered boxed chicken dinners. Oh, man. That led to a meeting that lasted so long. Picture eighty people talking one-at-a-time about whether they wanted to eat chicken, or if we should accept their food, or what to do for vegetarians, and did we all have to eat the same thing, and on and on.”
“So what did you end up doing?”
“It turned out that they got tired of waiting for an answer. They just brought in these chicken dinners and we could take ‘em or leave ‘em. It turned out that in my affinity group—and there were just the three of us—one person was vegetarian. So he gave the other two his chicken and we gave him our coleslaw.”
“How long did they keep you in there?”
“Well, the whole time we had a legal team negotiating with the county. There were questions about bail, and how arraignment would go, and how long they could hold us. I didn’t understand all the legalese. We kept having questions, and the lawyers had to go back and forth between the DA and us. I think what it came down to was waiting for these two judges to arrive. And when they finally did, they didn’t want to hear any of this. They just decided to take ten people at a time into a separate room, enter pleas of not guilty, and kick us out. And they set a mass bail, which basically used up the money in our bail fund.”
“And then they just let you go?”
“They didn’t just let us go. They forced us to go. We wanted to return to the main room and wait in solidarity until everyone was released. But they wouldn’t let us back in. So, really, they kicked us out of jail.”
“Kicked you out? I never heard of that before.”
“I know, right? It was pretty bizarre. We were all charged with criminal trespass, released on our own recognizance, and booted out. We’ll have to appear in court if there’s a trial.”
“What about the nuclear plant? What happens now?”
“Now we need to build on the media attention. A lot of people are hearing about nuclear issues for the first time. We’re getting more calls from reporters. There’s more talk about nuclear waste and alternative energy. PGE says they want to build even more plants, but now they’re gonna face more questions. We’re already planning our next occupation. These are going on all over the country. All over the world.”
“Louie, I know this is important to you. I want you to know I’m glad you’re home.”
“Yeah, me too. I’m pretty tired. We can talk more later.”
“Okay. Let’s talk soon.”
“Bye.”
“Bye-bye.”
Lou finally stopped his pacing and hung up the phone. He sat down and looked toward Nobody and Tomoko. They were quietly savaging a baguette the whole time. Three more loaves remained, protruding from a paper sack.
“Are you going to eat all of those baguettes?” asked Lou.
Tomoko stared back. “Don’t be silly, Lou. Why would we eat so many?”
“Then, what are they for?”
She shrugged. “Sculpture.” Tomoko turned to Nobody and shook her head in wonder.
And Lou thought, it’s good to be home.
Interesting blend of elements of the 3 occupation actions in August 1977, November 1977, and summer of 1978.
The first occupation, over “Hiroshima Day” weekend in August ‘77, actually involved minimal prep time. For me (who turned out to be the very first person arrested, on the Monday following the long weekend occupation) there was less than a week’s involvement, having attended a nonviolence training only days before in Eugene. There was no TDA (ADA) in Eugene at the time; only in Portland. (Eugene TDA got started by me, Tom Lynch and Michael Caldwell upon our release and return to Eugene.)
The fairgrounds scenario(s) occurred, if memory serves, after the subsequent actions in 11/77 and 8/78. (Authorities learned during the first “Trojan 96” — not 80— arrests, and as Lou says to Jax, bussing the arrestees around 3 different counties and 4 jails trying to find space to hold us … that trying to use regular jails for those kinds of numbers was absurd.)
I had to lapse on reading the middle of your excellent and engaging tale due to vision challenges stemming from a brain accident, but have jumped back in on these recent chapters due to personal interest! Am very pleased that you chose these events and settings as the anchors for your story; an era deserving of some kind of enshrinement.
I have loved the inclusion of so many hallowed hippie/Eugene institutions. It was some years after the TDA era that antinukers settled into the Growers Market building; first TDA office was diagonal to WOW Hall on W 8th, next door to the 2nd-hand clothing store named Boogie Blues. The original NV trainers in Eugene for the hastily thrown-together prep before the first occupation were members of the group that had successfully opposed siting a nuke just west of Eugene: ECO, as I recall, which stood for Eugene ____ ____?
All in all, a fabulous synthesis of what were very heady times indeed (your tag line referencing — I forget now— something like “love, sex and nuclear power— and oh yeah, ___” {sorry!} — anyway, it’s catchy and right on!)