The Foremothers of Monkeywrench

By C. Katherine Grimes

There is in the politics of the American environmental revolution a tendency toward male prophets. Every revolution, like every religion, needs a visionary, and typically, these are men—loudly outspoken—they are the messiahs. “Follow me,” they proclaim.

I think of this phenomenon again today as I pull up another orange survey flag—a bright plastic color that pales still in comparison to small-flower paintbrush or scarlet globe mallow. I make a mental note as I bend the wire and tuck it away to call Lolly and see if she’s been picking flowers yet this season, these particular blossoms that pop up as soon as a government agency can drive their bureaucracy up the now snow free mountain roads to a protected park.

I’ve heard the male monkey wrenching stories told loudly and laughingly over beers, “This is what I did,” they say.

I’m not insinuating their efforts are of any less merit for their presentation.  I’m saying for many women it is different. For us, the stories don’t come until you open your white-haired neighbor’s garden shed for a rake and see the signs: “No Trespassing” or “Keep Out” along with yards of logging chain cut from gates that once censored some unknown wilderness.  Not until you say, “Um, Aunt? Where’d these come from?” do you get the bark of a laugh and the wave of a hand. “Oh that. Remember the year they decided to build….” We of the delicate sex are not without our vanities, of course. Why else keep the spoils of a night’s work stashed in a garden shed for six years?

Throughout my time in mountain communities, I’ve learned that as these lands were “discovered” by developers, the librarian or the sheriff’s wife or the special ed. teacher or the artist quietly made their stands. I knew the “frail” white haired lady who with the local sheriff’s wife worked to cut through log-chained trails—opened to local hikers for generations—that had suddenly been strangulated by unwelcoming new property owners. Or the crazy little librarian who could be found at 1 a.m. digging native flowers—recently transplanted from the forest—from the yards of trophy homes and and stealthed them back to the wildwoods. Or the summer the quiet, relatively unknown girl who wandered upon the federal survey marker in soft worn sneakers, and with her strong back and browned arms removed the offending spike. Some projects these women stop, or slow, but often they are merely making the statement: No. No Mark. No Trace. No Road. No Logging. NO.

Of course we believe in following the bureaucratic procedure. We write our congress members; we write the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management; we create petitions and attend meetings and make phone calls.  We also continue to watch public lands opened to destruction from 4-wheel drives, logging, over-grazing and ski area development. So while the bureaucracy for democracy moves its cogs in the process of change, women silently rebel, and it’s never until the forgotten orange flags are pulled from a borrowed jacket or the door to a garden shed is opened, do we know.  The acts of disobedience are not rallied at the local pub with raucous good nature. The billboards, the chains or the flags just disappear.

I don’t know how men feel when they make a stand for nature. I am not male; I cannot speak for them. But I know the hearts of these women. I know the feeling of walking through a forest of golden aspen whose leaves have fallen like gold coins on a dark, earthen path lost in a silence so deep you are certain you have entered a realm that would allow a sprite to step from behind a tree, when lost in the euphoria of the moment you walk upon a gate and bright orange flags demarking the “New Falcon Ridge Condos” that will abut the Forest Service Land so glaringly. I know the fury, then the heartbreak, and it is nothing to jump the gate and remove all signs of progress, praying all the while that you don’t meet a bulldozer or hardhat moving up the new dirt road on the other side. It is nothing.  

In the face of multi-million dollar enterprises, it appears futile to do such things, but perhaps it will cost them money and time and be enough for the larger movement of the prophets to declare a court order or file a lawsuit. So follow those proselytizing messiah’s on their missions from the Goddess. But know, too, that behind each one, there is a woman in worn boots and a backpack stepping quietly and purposefully along the forest floor.