Swamp's Last Day on Earth . . . And Other True Tales of the Anarchist Underground

Swamp heard about RCT while smoking a bowl on a back porch in Eugene. The next day he caught a ride to Fall Creek and joined a road blockade, an extreme form of civil disobedience that involves sitting on something called a monopod, a long pole held upright by a tight web of ropes. No violence is involved, but the sheer danger of manning a monopod appealed to Swamp. There's no way for authorities to remove a protester from a monopod without the possibility of death. Day after day, Swamp would perch on his monopod while U.S. Forest Service agents -- known as Freds -- would try to force him down. Sometimes protesters would tie nooses around their necks, which meant that if the Freds tried to pull them down, their necks would snap. So the Forest Service agents tried other means: They harassed the tree sitters with low-flying helicopters. At night they saturated the forest with ultrabright floodlights, and at all hours of the day they blared country music from their trucks.

"The kids out there stick up for each other," says Terry Bertsch, a federal law-enforcement officer with the Forest Service who has fought the activists at Fall Creek since the beginning. "What they do is insane, but I guess that's part of the anarchist belief."

After a few weeks of standoff with the road blockaders, the Freds brought in cherry pickers, wrestled the protesters down from the monopods and arrested them. When Swamp got out of jail a few days later, he returned to Fall Creek and moved into a tree, where he remained as a part of the campaign for the next eighteen months. Recently, Red Cloud Thunder won a victory of sorts when a federal court ruled that the logging of all trees in the ninety-six-acre Fall Creek area was to be postponed indefinitely, pending environmental-impact surveys. It was while he was living in the tree that Swamp first read the Unabomber manifesto. Until then, he says, his political thoughts had mostly been formed by listening to music: punk rock and speed metal. The Sex Pistols, Metallica and the death-metal band Sepultura were major influences on his political development.

"The most important thing about the manifesto," Swamp says, "is that Ted Kaczynski says 'we.' He says, 'We believe,' 'We are revolutionaries.' The manifesto was written for everyone."

If you go back to the origins of the contemporary anarchist movement in the Northwest," says Michael Dreiling, "there is an inescapable connection with Earth First!" In 1975, Edward Abbey published The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel that fictionalized the real-life exploits of four radical activists who roamed the West sabotaging machinery and property to defend the environment. "Monkey wrenching" entered the lexicon as a verb meaning "to sabotage property." Earth First! was founded in 1980 with the motto "No compromise in defense of Mother Earth." Monkey wrenching has been a contentious issue within Earth First! since the beginning. Today many of the group's activists publicly disavow monkey wrenching, even though a book called Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, written by Earth First! founder Dave Foreman, is still sold on the Earth First! Web site.

Perhaps no one speaks more authoritatively about the nexus of monkey wrenching, radical environmentalism and anarchism than Doug Peacock. An ex-Green Beret medic and a Vietnam vet, Peacock was the model for George Hayduke, the protagonist in The Monkey Wrench Gang. Peacock now calls himself an anarchist and says: "I'm right up there with [today's anarchists] when it comes to throwing bombs at the system. Out of monkey wrenching came Earth First!, and out of Earth First! came anarchy. I see new hope in the upswing of the anarchist movement. I thank those kids for doing what they did in Seattle."

Despite Swamp's determination to hide his pre-anarchist identity, he lets slip innumerable details. He describes wet snow that fell in the small New England town where he was raised in a close-knit Portuguese family. Growing up, he says, he wrecked nine cars, nearly chopped his thumb off with a hatchet, shattered his ankle into 260 bone fragments, popped his kneecap through his skin, burst cartilage in his nose and drove a four-inch screw into his ass cheek by wiping out on a skateboard. Swamp's grandmother gave him the nickname mosca tonta, Portuguese for "dizzy bug."

Not surprisingly, his school years were characterized by rebelliousness, which began when teachers asked him to say the Pledge of Allegiance. "I didn't believe in saluting a piece of cloth," Swamp says. "I may as well salute my pants. ... Pledge of allegiance to the flag. Why? So I'll run into a burning building and pull it out? Fuck no. I'll be the one lighting the flag on fire to start the building burning."

His real education, he says, began after he took twenty-five hits of LSD one afternoon when he was fourteen. "I wouldn't be who I am without acid," he says. "In general, if I take acid, I hallucinate so hard, I don't even know I'm a being anymore." That same year he ran away from home for the first time. He rode his first freight train then and began picking up the rules of the road. He learned that you can buy good hash in the bus terminal in Cleveland, that Chicago cops can be bribed if you offer to pay them your bail in advance, that slinging nuggets is good business everywhere. One time in Nebraska he broke into what turned out to be the back lot of a police station to smoke a joint. Once he walked around for weeks with the impression of a steering wheel bruised into his chest after a drunken car accident.

Eventually he drops enough clues about himself that a twenty-minute Web search yields the phone number of his parents' house. Swamp's father corroborates Swamp's description of him as a Reagan Republican and a gun advocate; he adds that he was a combat engineer in Vietnam. But he has no problem with his son's chosen path.

"I wish that more people had more guts to do a little bit of civil disobedience," he says. "He's happy, he's healthy. He's not filthy. The dreadlocks don't look clean, but that's what he's happy with. He's living in a tree -- who cares what he looks like?"