by Richard Bach
"What if we were psychics," I said to her once, "and we knew how and when the director is going to die? If we knew he's got two days to live-day after tomorrow, a ton of logs is going to roll from a truck and smash him? Does that make any difference, how we think about him now?"
"No," she said.
The money that IRS refused to accept turned into commissioned studies: A Preliminary Water Quality Survey of the Grouse Creek, Waters Gulch, Mule Creek and Hanley Gulch Drainages of the Little Applegate River and Beaver Creek Watersheds of Jackson County, Oregon; A Report on the Anticipated Effects of the Scheduled Timber Harvest Activities Within the Proposed Grouse Creek Timber Sale Area on Anadromous Fish and Habitat; Economic Review of the Grouse Creek Timber Sale. Eight others, with equally catchy titles.
Once in a while we'd stand on our little hilltop and look at the forest. Unkillable as the mountains, we used to think. Now we saw it as a fragile family of plants and animals
living together in blended harmony, balanced on a chain-saw-blade, tilting toward extinction from foolish logging.
"Hang on, trees," we'd shout to the forest. "Hang on! Don't worry! We're going to stop them, we promise!"
Other times, when the going was hard, we'd just glance out the window from our computers. "We're doing our best, trees," we'd mumble.
The Apples were to us as Colts to gunfighters. The BLM allows the public thirty days to prepare a timber-sale protest before the wheels turn and a forest is destroyed. It expects to receive between two and ten impassioned pages from citizens pleading for environmental mercy. From us, from our organization and its home computers it got six hundred pages of fact documented up one side down the other, incidents and examples for proof, bound in three volumes. Copies to senators and representatives and the press.
It was constant, full-time battle for twenty months, fighting the Bureau of Land Management.
All my airplanes were sold. For the first time in my adult life, weeks passed, then months without a single airplane flight, without once being off the ground. Instead of looking down from the lovely free machines, I was looking up at them, remembering how much it had meant to me, to fly. So this is what it feels like to be a groundling, I thought. Grf!
Then one Wednesday, to Leslie's grim certainty and to my utter astonishment, the government withdrew the timber sale.
"The sale involves enough improprieties in BLM rules and procedures that it can't be legally awarded," the assistant state director of the Oregon BLM told the press. "In
order to comply with our own procedures we had no choice but to withdraw the sale and reject all bids."
The local BLM director was not crushed to death under logs. He and his area manager were transferred out of state, to other parts of the bureaucracy.
Our victory celebration was two sentences long.
"Please don't forget this," Leslie told me, her computer cooling for the first time since the struggle began. "You can't fight City Hall is government propaganda. When the people decide to fight City Hall, just a few little people against something huge that's wrong, there's nothing-nothing!- can stop them from winning!"
Then she fell on the bed and slept three days.
forty-one
OOMEWHERE IN the midst of the BLM fight, the IRS clock struck midnight unheard. Internal Revenue had languished nearly four years without a decision, a year past the time I'd had the option to dissolve the million-dollar debt in bankruptcy.
While the BLM battle raged, we couldn't spare a moment to consider bankruptcy; when it was done, we could think of little else.
"It wouldn't be fun, little wook," I said, plowing manfully into my fourth attempt to bake a lemon pie the way her mother did. "Everything would be gone. I'd be starting over from nothing."
She set the table for dinner. "No you wouldn't," she said. "The bankruptcy book says they let you have 'tools required for your trade.' And there's a bare minimum you can keep, so you don't starve too fast."
"Really? Keep the house? A place to live?" I rolled the piedough thin, draped it over the pan, calling on the pie-crust-deva for help.
"Not the house. Not even the trailer."
"We could go live in the trees."
"It wouldn't be that bad. Mary Moviestar has her savings, don't forget; she wouldn't go broke. But how would you feel -the rights to your books/-you'd lose them! How would you feel, somebody buying the rights and not caring, somebody making junk-films out of your beautiful books?"
I slipped the crust into the oven. "I'd survive."
"You didn't answer my question," she said. "Don't bother. No matter what you say, I know how you'd feel. We'd have to live very carefully, save every cent and hope we could buy them back."
The loss of the book rights haunted us both, like putting our children up for auction to the highest bidder. Yet lost they would be, and auction there would be, if I filed for bankruptcy.
"If I file, the government gets thirty or forty cents for every dollar I owed it, when it could have been paid in full. The BLM trying to push through outlaw timber sales, failing at it, that cost the government another fortune. If this is happening to us, wookie, if we're just seeing our little part of it, how many millions are they wasting everywhere else? How can government be so successful at doing so much so wrong?"
"I've wondered that too," she said, "for a long time I've thought about that. I finally came up with the only possible answer."
"What's that?"
"Practice," she said. "Tireless, unrelenting practice."
We flew to Los Angeles, met with attorneys and accountants in a last-ditch attempt at settlement.
"I'm sorry," said John Marquart, "we can't get past their computer. There's not a human being we can reach to answer letters, return a phone call. The computer sends forms. Not long ago, we got a notice that a new agent has the case, a Ms. Faumpire. She's the twelfth. Want to bet she's going to ask for a financial statement?''
So clear, I thought. They are forcing me into bankruptcy. Still, I'm sure there's no such thing as injustice; I know lifetimes are for our learning and entertainment. We bring our problems to us to test our powers on them ... if I didn't have these problems, there would have been others equally challenging. Nobody gets through school without tests. But tests often have unexpected answers, and once in a while an extreme answer is the only right choice there is.
One of the consultants frowned. "I worked for IRS in Washington when the law you want to use, when the bill about discharging Federal tax debts in bankruptcy came up for a vote in Congress," he said. "IRS hated that bill, and when it passed into law we swore that if anybody tried to use it, we'd make them sorry!"
"But if it's the law," Leslie said, "how can they keep people from using ..."
He shook his head. "I'm giving you fair warning. Law or no law, the IRS is going to be after you; they're going to harass you every chance they get."
"But they want me to go bankrupt," I said, "so there's no blame for any of them!"
"That's probably true."
I looked at Leslie, at the strain showing in her face. "To hell with the IRS," I said.
She nodded. "Four wasted years is enough. Let's get our lives back."
To the bankruptcy attorney we brought lists of everything I owned: house, truck and trailer, bank accounts, computer, clothes, car-copyrights to every book I had written. I would lose them all.
The attorney read the list in silence, then said, "The court will not be interested in how many socks he has, Leslie."
"My bankruptcy book said to list everything," she said.
"It didn't mean list socks," he said.
Strung in limbo by the turgid Cyclops of the IRS on one hand, attacked on the other by the saw-swinging Bureau of Land Management, we had fought one monster or both-at-once for four years, nonstop.
No stories, no books, no screenplays, no films, no television, no acting, no production-nothing of the lives we'd lived before battle-with-government became our full-time occupation.<
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Through it all, through the most stressful difficult times either of us had known, the oddest thing ... we kept growing happier than ever with each other.
Having survived the test of the trailer, we had lived easily together in the little house we had built on the hill. Not once were we separated for more than the time it took to drive to town for groceries.
I knew she knew, but I found myself telling her more and
more that I loved her. We walked arm in arm like sweethearts along town sidewalks, hand and hand in the forest. Would I have believed, years before, that I'd be unhappy to walk with her without touching?
It was as if our marriage were working in reverse-instead of becoming cooler and more distant, we were growing closer and warmer.
"You promised ennui," she'd pout, from time to time.
"Where's my loss-of-respect?" I demanded.
"Soon the boredom will set in," we told each other. What once were solemn fears had turned into silly jokes that tickled us till we laughed.
Day by day we knew each other more, and our wonder and joy at being together grew.
We had been morally married since our experiment in exclusivity began, four years before, when we gambled that we were soulmates.
Legally, however, we were single adults. No legal marriage until you settle with the IRS, Marquart had warned us. No marriage, please. Keep Leslie clear, or she'll be caught with you in the quicksand.
Bankruptcy filed, IRS cut away, we were free to be married legally at last.
The wedding-office I found listed in the telephone book between Weaving and Welding, and the event took its place on our To Do list for one last Saturday in Los Angeles: 9:00: Pack and check out
10:00: Drugstore-sunglasses, notebooks, pencils
10:30: Wedding
In a seedy storefront, we answered questions the minister asked. When she heard Leslie's name, she looked up, squinted.
"Leslie Parrish. That's a familiar name. Are you somebody?"
"No," said Leslie.
The lady squinted again, shrugged, typed the name onto a form.
To the carriage of her hand-powered typewriter was taped a sign: Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven. Nailed to the wall, another sign: THIS IS A SMOKING AREA. The office reeked of cigarettes, ashes spilled on the desk and floor.
I glanced at Leslie, then quickly to the ceiling and sighed. There was no warning on the phone, I told her, not using words, that the place would be quite this tacky.
"Now, we have the plain marriage certificate," said the minister; "that's three dollars. Or the special, with the gold lettering that's six dollars. Or the deluxe, with gold letters and the sparkly stuff on it that's twelve dollars which do you want." There was a sample of each, pinned to a cork bulletin-board.
We looked at each other, and instead of folding up laughing we nodded solemnly. This was a legally important step we were taking.
We mouthed the word to each other at the same instant: PLAIN.
"The plain will be fine," I said. The woman didn't care. She rolled the humble certificate into the typewriter, bashed away at the keys, signed it, shouted across the hall for witnesses, turned to us.
"Now if you two will sign right here ..."
We signed.
"The photographer will be fifteen dollars. ..."
"We can skip that," I said. "We don't need photographs."
"The chapel fee is fifteen dollars. . . ."
"We'd just as soon not have a ceremony. Of any kind."
"No ceremony?" She looked questions at us, which we didn't answer, and she shrugged. "OK. I pronounce you man and wife."
She added figures under her breath. "Witness fee ... fee for the county . . . registration fee ... comes to thirty-eight dollars, Mister Bach. And here's an envelope for any donation you'd like to make."
Leslie took the cash from her purse, thirty-eight dollars and five dollars for the envelope. She gave it to me and I handed it to the marriage-lady. Signings finished, certificate in hand, my wife and I, we got out of there as fast as we could.
In city traffic, we handed each other wedding rings, opened the windows to blow the smoke from our clothes. There was laughter for the first minute-and-a-half of our formal married life.
Her first words as my legal wife: "You sure know how to sweep a girl off her feet!"
"Look at it this way, Ms. Parrish-Bach," I said. "It was memorable, wasn't it? Are we likely to forget our wedding-day?"
"Unfortunately, no," she laughed. "Oh, Richard, you are the most romantic ..."
"Forty-three dollars does not buy romance, my dear. Romance you get with the deluxe; that's the sparkly stuff you have to pay extra for. You know we have to watch our pennies."
I looked at her for a second as I drove. "Does it feel any different to you now? Do you feel any more married?"
"No. Do you?"
"A little. Something's different. What we did in that smoke-house a minute ago, that is what our society recognizes as the Real Thing. What we've been doing till now hasn't made any difference, the joys and tears together, it's signing the paper that matters! Maybe it feels to me as if there is one area less where government can mess with us. You know what? The more I learn, wook, the less I like governments. Or is it just our government?"
"Join the crowd, my sweetie. I used to get tears in my eyes at the sight of the Flag, I loved my country so. I'm lucky to live here, I thought, I mustn't take it for granted, I must do something-work in elections, participate in the democratic process!
"I studied a lot and slowly came to realize that things were not quite the way we learned them in school: Americans were,not always the good guys; our government wasn't always on the side of liberty and justice!
"The Vietnam War was just heating up, and the more I studied-I couldn't believe . . . the United States, suppressing elections in someone else's country because we knew we wouldn't like the outcome; America supporting a puppet dictator; an American president on record that we were there not because we wanted justice in Vietnam, but because we wanted its tin and tungsten!
"I'm free to protest, I thought. So I joined a peace march, a legal, nonviolent demonstration. We weren't crazies, we weren't looters throwing firebombs, we were the super-straights of Los Angeles: lawyers, doctors, parents, teachers, business-people.
"The police came after us like we were mad dogs, they clubbed us bloody. I saw them beat mothers holding babies, I saw them knock a man out of his wheelchair with those
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clubs, blood running on the sidewalk! And this is Century City, Los Angeles!
"I kept thinking, this can't be happening! We're Americans, and we're being attacked by our own police! I was running away when they hit me, and I don't remember much else. Some friends took me home."
Glad I wasn't there, I thought. The violent me, so carefully under guard within, would have gone blind with fury.
"I used to think, whenever I saw a picture in the newspaper of someone taking a beating from the police, that they'd done something terrible to deserve it," she said. "That evening I learned that, even here, the only terrible thing you need to do is to disagree with the government. They wanted the war, we didn't. So they beat the hell out of us!"
I was tense and trembling, I could feel it in my hands on the wheel. "You were a huge threat to them," I said, "thousands of law-abiding citizens saying no to a war."
"War. We spend so much money on killing and destruction! We justify it by calling it Defense, by spreading fear and hatred of other people, countries we don't like. If they try a government we don't approve of, and if they're weak enough, we smash them. Self-determination's for us, not them.
"What kind of example is that? How much do we reach out in kindness and understanding to other people? How much do we spend on peace?"
"Half of what we spend on war?" I said.
"Don't we wish! It's our sanctimonious God-and-Country mentality that gets in the way. It's the obstacle to peace in the world.
It sets people against each other! God-and-Country, Law-and-Order is what clubbed us in Century City. If there were any other country in the world to go to, I used to
think, I'd go," she said. "But, bully that it is, scared as it is, it's the best country I know. I decided to stay to try to help it grow up."
And you love it still, I wanted to say.
"Do you know what I miss most?" she said.
"What?"
"Looking at the flag and being proud of it."
She slid over next to me on the seat of the car, determined to change the subject.
"Now that we have government out of the way, what else do you want to talk .about on your wedding day, Mister Bach?"
"Anything," I said. "I want to be with you." But part of me would never forget. They had clubbed this lovely woman, when she was running away!
Legal marriage was another long step away from the person I used to be. The Richard who hated obligations was legally obligated. The one who despised the bonds of matrimony was legally bound.
I tried those labels on myself, labels that four years ago would have fit like a collar of spikes and a hat of ashes. You are a Husband, Richard. You are Married. You will spend the rest of your life with one woman only, this one at your side. No longer can you live your life exactly as you please. You have given up your independence. You have given up your freedom. You are legally Married. How does that feel?
Any one of those would have been a holly-stake in my heart, any one a steel arrow point-blank through my armor. Beginning today, they were true, every one, and it felt like an attack of sweet butter-creams.
We drove to my parents' house in the suburbs, the place I had lived from the time I was a kid until the day I ran away to fly. I slowed, parked the car on the one driveway that was familiar to me-thens as far back as I could remember.
Here the same dusk-green cloud of eucalyptus overhead; here the lawn I used to mow as little as humanly possible. Here the flat-topped garage where I set my first homemade telescope toward the moon, here the ivy on the wall around the yard, here the same white smoothwooden gate, with its eyeholes bored for a dog long dead.
