A group of us conspired to sit in the trees. That was really the entire plan. We thought it would delay the tree cutting until the next Monday night when there could be a council meeting. Not that we had a lot of faith in council meetings, but it’s what we had at the time.
So, in the wee hours of the morning, two women started a catfight outside a bar right next to the parking lot with the trees. It drew all the security guards and allowed the rest of us to get up into the trees. There were fifteen to twenty people who climbed at least four different trees. Most of them were in one huge oak.
At dawn, the police showed up with gas masks on their hips. There had been no confrontation and hardly any communication at this point. The tree with most of the people in it got threatened with pepper spray and they all came down, dragging their feet. Since the police were there with riot gear, the public noticed—people were waking up, word was getting out. Now there are hundreds of people. It’s becoming a big scene and people are getting angry.
They got most of the people out of the trees. This one guy, they got a ladder and used a couple cans of pepper spray on him, mainly focusing on his hands. It’s a skin irritant as well as a lung irritant. Eventually, he chose to come down.
That left me alone in a tree, a sweetgum. I took a firmer stance. I developed a position where I could stand relatively comfortably and then wrap each arm around a different branch until I felt like they couldn’t just pull me off. They tried. They went up I don’t know how many times. Each time the torture got more intense. They were twisting my feet. They were pulling my hair. They were trying pain holds. Eventually they had a fireman in a bucket lift and he grabbed the back of my hair and yanked down like he was working out in the gym. He was snapping my head back like a Pez dispenser, causing a lifelong neck injury. They used over twenty cans of pepper spray on me.
They used up all the pepper spray they could get from Eugene, Lane County, and neighboring Springfield. The pain compliance holds and the pepper spray, nothing worked. It was getting more and more intense and I remained nonviolent.