Excerpt From
Legacy of Luna:

Fierce winds ripped huge branches off the thousand-year-old redwood, sending them crashing to the ground two hundred feet below. The upper platform, where I lived, rested in branches about one hundred eighty feet in the air, twenty feet below the very top of the tree, and it was completely exposed to the storm. There was no ridge to shelter it, no trees to protect it. There was nothing.

As the tree branches whipped around, they shredded the tarp that served as my shelter. Sleet and hail sliced through the tattered pieces of what used to be my roof and walls. Every new gust flipped the platform up into the air, threatening to hurl me over the edge.

I was scared. I take that back. I was terrified. As a child, I experienced a tornado. That time I was scared. But that was a walk in the park on a sunny Sunday afternoon compared to this. The awesome power of Mother Nature had reduced me to a groveling half-wit fighting fear with a paper fork.

Rigid with terror, I couldn’t imagine how clinging to a tiny wooden platform for dear life could possibly be part of the answer to the prayer I had sent to Creation that day on the Lost Coast. I had asked for guidance on what to do with my life. I had asked for purpose. I had asked to be of service. But I certainly never figured that the revelation I sought would involve taking up residence in a tree that was being torn apart by nature’s fury.

Strangely enough, though, that’s how it turned out. As I write this at the age of twenty-five, I’ve been living for more than two years in a two-hundred-foot-tall ancient redwood located on Pacific Lumber property. I have survived storms, harassment, loneliness, and doubt. I have seen the magnificence and the devastation of a forest older than almost any on Earth. I live in a tree called Luna. I am trying to save her life.

Believe me, this is not what I intended to do with my own.

I suppose if I look back (or down, as the case may be), my being here isn’t all that accidental.

From the start, the Luna action had been ragtag. A haphazard support team and a media office that moved from place to place made outreach difficult. Almond had done a good job for the little he had to work with, but as soon as the press got interested, the usual spokespeople for Earth First! jumped in. And they wanted to do it their way. They wanted their image portrayed in a specific way, and they weren’t sure I was the best person to do that. In their minds, it was their movement. I was just some new upstart who couldn’t possibly know what to say and how to act.

So Almond and I were supposed to do what everyone else was telling us to do and the way they wanted us to do it. With all the media attention after the hundredth-day rally, it got to be too much for Almond. He would get attacked repeatedly for not writing a press release the way they wanted. He was hanging in, but I could see that it was wearing him down. He would climb up in the tree, and I could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice: his spirit was dying. I felt really bad for him.

Things began to get overwhelming. I decided to fast and pray. When you cleanse your body, you also cleanse yourself mentally and spiritually. So I fasted and prayed, because this tree-sit needed some divine intervention.

“Please send someone,” I asked. “Almond needs a break, Almond needs to heal. We need someone with skills to help pull this all together.”

Four days into the fast, I got a call from Robert Parker, a six-four, broad-shouldered, broad-hipped river guide and forest activist with a bit off a beer belly, a crooked bump on his nose where he’d broken it one too many times, and a lot of media savvy.

“Julia, I see that you guys need a central base point, a media center,” he stated.

He had already prepared a list of his goals for the action and the time line he needed to accomplish them. A few days later he was on board.

Robert brought everything together in a cohesive way. He did outreach to the press. He helped establish a Web site. He set up an office where the press could call and actually find a human. He turned it into a well-oiled, international outreach machine.

The resulting media interest gave me an expanded purpose and a new life in Luna. When I climbed this ancient redwood tree, I never could have imagined that I was going to have my ear to a cell phone, my hand to a pager, and my other hand on a planner. But tree-sits have three purposes: to protect the tree and hopefully a few around it, to slow down the logging while the people who work within the legal system do their work, and to bring about broad-based public awareness. And that latter goal requires sophisticated technology.

In Luna, that has meant a radio phone powered by solar panels that are connected to two motorcycle batteries, an emergency cell phone, a hand-powered radio, a tape recorder, a digital camera, a video camera, walkie-talkies, and a pager that functions as my answering machine and controls my life. All this equipment was slowly brought in over time—one thing here, another there—all hiked up the grueling hill by a wonderful support team. Solar panels now hung from Luna’s limbs, collecting precious sun and recharging batteries.

I didn’t really like being at the mercy of electronic devices. My head spun all day and into the night. As long as my phone and pager were turned on, there were a hundred demands for my time. The fact that my pager number had been given out in a press release, and my phone number posted on a Web site, didn’t help. Calls came in at every hour of the day and night. At some subconscious level I must have been feeling the need for a break, because right at the height of the media assault I accidentally dropped my pager. For months I had paid no penance to the gods of gravity, but now the pager fell one hundred eighty feet and shattered. Truth be told, I relished the few days of reprieve that it brought.

I believe that ultimately we’re all going to have to wean ourselves from this dependency on technology. We can do it now by choice, or we can do it later when we no longer have a choice. All our growth is coming at the expense of the Earth, which gives us life. We have to live in a balanced, sustainable way. So I tried my best to keep balanced, but it was difficult. In order to get the message out, I had to keep my technology turned on. Up in Luna, I was living on the world’s most amazing radio tower, which receives and transmits all the beautiful and powerful truths of our universe, and I had been blessed to be at the microphone on that tower.

Of course, towers do tend to attract energy from nature as well as humans. Luna was no exception. She had already been struck by lightning many, many years ago. With the other large trees around her cut down, and the metal solar panels at the top of her, Luna became a lightning strike waiting to happen.

One night I watched a storm, with its lightning and thunder, skip from one ridge to the next, moving nearer and nearer.

“I’ve really got to think about coming down,” I said to myself when it drew near. As much as I was willing to die for what I believed in, I didn’t want to die for the sheer stupidity of sitting on top of a lightning rod in the middle of a lightning storm.

The storm got so close that the hair on my head and my arms was beginning to stand up.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s time to come down now.”

I put on my harness and prepared to descend to where the ropes were so I could rappel down the rest of the way. Then the lightning hit, jumping and slamming all around me. “Bam! Crack!”

“I waited too long,” I thought with dread. Then I felt the beaded medicine pouch that I’d been wearing since a woman named Sonya made and sent it to me and in which I keep objects that are sacred to me as well as sage and other herbs.

I don’t know why or how, but the pouch started to heat up. It was like a message. So I responded.

“Great Spirit!” I hollered into the storm, “protect us!”

And wham! Lightning struck in the mud slide, right next to Luna. Everything shook. The sky turned a funky neon color from all the electrons running around, and my hair rose straight up in the air. I jumped and screamed. Maybe this was it!

But nothing else happened. The lightning suddenly jumped three ridges back and disappeared. I started laughing.

Once again, the power of prayer was working miracles in my life. Now, we needed a miracle for Luna.