Chapter 4

Quan Lake

Mid-November, 2011

After the unplanned night in Santa Rita jail, I flew back to Seattle, and drove 250 miles to Pagan Place, my North Cascades mountain home. I had no intention of returning to the Bay Area anytime soon. However fascinating and illuminating, I didn’t think I’d ever need to experience that level of involvement with Occupy Oakland again. While still an ardent supporter of the movement, my brief but painful loss of liberty satisfied any curiosity I may have had about police brutality and incarceration in general. I slowed to a crawl on the dirt road to spot Buddy, Dancer, and Rosie, our fat quarter horses, looking up lazily from their hay bins, mouths full, as I passed the corral. Oh, to be home in rural Central Washington State again! No tear gas, no midnight fights, no flashbang grenades, no nightly disruptions, no crack, no meth, and best of all—no cops.

I burst into the door and embraced my family with the urgency of a returning soldier fresh from the battlefield. Our nine-year-old daughter, Kristy, leapt into my arms and didn’t move a muscle, until I squeezed her so long she finally pushed away and asked if I was okay. Later I tumbled into bed and peered out my curtainless window at the array of twinkling stars in the dark country sky, before falling deeply asleep for thirteen hours straight. The next day I rose slowly, took a good look around and contemplated how fortunate I was to be comfortable and secure—surrounded by life and beauty. Outside, the sun shone brightly on the Ponderosa pines across the way on Cook Mountain. The odor of trash and sewage gave way to the fragrant aroma of Ceanothus and fir. Honking geese and rustling leaves replaced the abrasive sounds of sirens and street hustles. Home was where we produced our own electricity, drank pure water from a spring, and grew ancient varieties of vegetables that we ate fresh out of the garden all summer and canned in the fall. Home was where I fished for trout all four seasons, then brined it up and smoked it for future consumption. I could ski from my back door all the way to Canada if I wanted, sometimes crossing paths with hungry moose foraging for food. The sun beating on my face was the alarm clock that told me when to get up and go to work. Some days the work was hunting mushrooms and wild asparagus for a savory soup while others it was repairing a section of downed fence or pulling weeds. When I got back from Oakland, I wanted to prostrate myself and kiss the fecund earth to give praise that nothing in my world was anything like the Alameda County jail. No more acutely aware of that was I than those first days back at Pagan Place in early November when I was eager to catch up on my duties. In my absence, the garden had been neglected and a banner crop of heirloom tomatoes had gone uncanned before the freeze and plump onions lay unharvested before they were buried in snow. I threw myself into my chores, enjoying even the most mundane tasks—be it washing dishes, cleaning the cat box, or gathering firewood. I became hyper aware of how strife-free and rewarding life on Buck Mountain was.

Appreciative as I was for the gifts fate had bestowed upon me, I still found myself logging on to the Internet every few hours to see what was happening with Occupy Oakland and elsewhere. As soon as my work day was done, I’d check to see who was livestreaming around the country, but especially in Oakland. The Oakland Occupation was like none other for rawness and unbridled passion. The insanity of Oscar Grant Plaza made an indelible impression on me with its unique culture of raging souls and quixotic warriors. Soon again, I was anxious to return to her streets and reunite with my comrades on the front lines, but I knew that shirking my responsibilities at home would be unpopular, so I tried to contain my restlessness.

Then, I stumbled onto a teach-in that Spencer (Oakfosho) was broadcasting live from OGP, a short distance from where I’d been arrested. I missed the beginning, but soon understood that I was watching a renowned scientist from Cal Berkeley, sitting on the steps of City Hall imparting her vast environmental knowledge to a group of Occupiers that encircled her. I’m sure that university students paid a handsome fee to attend her lectures on the same material she was doling out for free that day, to people ranging from homeless drug addicts to would-be scholars, who, for the want of tuition, may never have had a chance to hear her speak. What they all had in common though, was that they were listening intently, straining to hear every word being said. She was in the midst of discussing climate change and the dire necessity to act now in order to have any chance of saving our ailing planet from a terrifying, human-caused demise. She delivered a brilliant, unamplified, unrehearsed speech which asked that even those who didn’t particularly support the Occupy Movement, or understand the message, please come out and protest what was being done to the earth by corporations and the fossil fuel industry. What really got to me though, was when she met the eyes of nearly every one of the fifty or sixty people sitting before her and said, “If you can’t do it for yourselves, please do it for the Florida panther that is on the brink of extinction. The Florida panther needs you to come out here and Occupy. The evening grosbeak needs you. The Canadian lynx needs you. The honeybees need you. The manatee needs you. The whooping crane needs you. The monarch butterfly needs you and the gray wolf needs you. They can’t buy lobbyists or Occupy for themselves so they need you to do it for them. The wild prairie grasses need you, the California condor needs you.” She listed one endangered species after another that would not be here in another fifteen years if we didn’t do something drastic right away to stop the wholesale destruction of habitat. She told her listeners that our insatiable appetite for more than we need was unsustainable and could not be allowed to continue. If unchecked, the damage our consumption had caused might be irreparable and fatal to nearly all living things. She ended on a positive note, however, by telling us that the technologies exist today that would allow us to thrive and prosper without depleting the Earth’s natural resources. She cautioned though, that the window of opportunity was rapidly closing and “we must wean ourselves now from our addiction to oil in order to have any chance of reversing the cataclysmic path we are on.” She divulged that there was systematic suppression of vital information by multinational corporations that controlled local, state, and national governments. These entities, she said, colluded to deny most of us access to simple, sustainable, sound practices that could feed, house, clothe, and provide electricity for every man, woman, and child on earth. Her last words were that if we did not immediately organize and radically oppose these powerful structures, life on earth was doomed. I booked my ticket back to Oakland that night and broke the unwelcome news to my family that I was leaving again.

My plane landed in the afternoon of November 13, and I was back in Oscar Grant Plaza by three o’clock. My friends Anne Irving, Laura Koch and her wife, Lori Delay met me with an old tent that they were willing to lend me for the cause, since I’d donated my previous one to a couple that needed it at the end of my last visit. They seemed uneasy about my staying there that night as we watched two young, visibly high women wildly screaming at each other over some chicken wings that had somehow been paid for by one of them and never delivered by the other. One was threatening to pull out her knife and cut the other, while their male companions alternated between laughing and half-heartedly pulling them apart. “Bitch, I will cut yo’ ass. You think I’m playin’? You think I’m gon’ let you come in here and get all up in my grill, lyin’ in my face after you done took my wing money and got yo’ black ass high with it??” Clearly the fellas were enjoying the entertainment the ladies were dishing up. When one woman tried clumsily and off balance to reach for something in her pocket, the men separated them in earnest and told them to “hush up and stop actin’ crazy before the motherfuckin’ po-pos come.” Amazingly the girls obeyed the edict from they mens and almost instantly quieted down. Since it was my second time camping at OGP and still daylight, I wasn’t overly concerned by the dust up, but my friends seemed reluctant to leave me there, offering me unlimited lodging in their homes and reminding me that it was okay to call any time of the night to ask for a ride out.

Shortly after we set up my tent, we were joined by more friends and Occupy supporters, Penny Rosenwasser, Lisa Vogel, and Terry Lynn Delk, who I knew from having performed at the Michigan Womyn’s Festival. We decided to go out for a meal in the hood before the General Assembly got underway. Just as we were leaving for the restaurant we ran into a trio of police officers who were handing out eviction notices to us which said, NOTICE OF VIOLATIONS AND DEMAND TO CEASE VIOLATIONS. Underneath that headline it said that Occupy Oakland was creating a health hazard and obstructing free use of the park by others and that we were to discontinue camping there. I paid it little mind as I’d seen these warnings before and knew there was a good chance nothing at all would happen to us anytime soon. After dinner, my friends left and I got in on the tail end of the General Assembly, or “GA,” which was to conclude with an address from an Ohlone Elder. She was standing regally before me on the City Hall Plaza stage in her ceremonial dress. I felt the weight of her distinguished bearing which commanded attention and respect. Her beautifully decorated robes conveyed her status within the Ohlone Indian community. I stood in awe of her—the sheer otherworldliness of her ageless, timeless voice undulating like ryegrass on the windblown plain. She had come, she said, to “deliver a message from [her] people,” whose land was stolen over a hundred years ago by whites who had colonized it and occupied it ever since. The gravity of the moment gripped me as she raised an eagle feather before beginning her speech. I waited in breathless anticipation, enduring an interminable pause as the eldress leaned away from the microphone and into the shoulder of another Ohlone at her side, who whispered gravely into her ear. An eternity elapsed before she returned her focus to us and uttered, “A silver Toyota Rav 4 with Oregon license plates left its lights on in the Plaza and is also illegally parked and about to get towed.” Uproarious laughter rippled throughout the crowd before the speaker realized we had mistaken the car announcement for the solemn message we were expecting. Even though she recovered quickly and returned to her original script about how her “long-suffering people stood in solidarity with Occupy Oakland and wished to bless us on this perilous journey,” I took it as a sign to retreat early to my chamber and try to get through the night unscathed. Sleep came easily as it was relatively still in the Plaza and I thought of the Florida panther as I drifted off into slumber.

“They comin’ y’all. It’s a raid! Git up. Grab yer shit—go! They on their way,” came the frenzied call around four o’clock in the morning. I heard groans and swearing issuing from tents as groggy campers tried to come to their senses quickly and wrestle gear into nylon sacks and plastic bags. Bleary-eyed, I switched on my LED light and started stuffing my sleeping bag and other possessions into a rolling travel suitcase. Some Occupiers began preparing for the onslaught by beating out tribal rhythms on makeshift drums and metal cookware. Some women were ululating and whistles were being blown in addition to all the yelling. Within ten minutes I was ready to go and unzipped my tent flap as I emerged, with suitcase, into the foggy Bay Area night. The sound of cursing voices intertwined with rasping zippers began to fill the air as I dragged my suitcase on the damp earth toward Fourteenth and Broadway where others were already gathering. I propped my tired frame against a streetlight across from a Rite Aid and waited for the riot squad to arrive. Forty-five minutes later they got there and surrounded us as we marched in circles chanting, “The System Has Got to Die/Hella Hella Occupy”, and “One, We are The People, Two, We Are United, Three, This Occupation Is Not Leaving.”

Just before dawn the police began projecting their monotonous order to disperse. This time I phoned my local community radio station back home—KTRT, in tiny Winthrop, Washington, hoping to be put on the air live as part of the morning commute. Technically, I guess it could be called, “drive time radio,” but in our town of two thousand residents, it was not a big enough deal to warrant such a title. I called them on the chance that Deputy Don, my friend, DJ, and station manager, might get a kick out of exposing the Methow Valley (which is comprised of rednecks and progressives alike) to the real-life drama of a police raid on a political protest while it was happening. I tried to deliver pithy observations about the Occupy Movement itself, while the cops were surrounding us on all sides and pressing against us with interlocking metal barricades.

The temporary structures served not only to compact us, but also to keep us out of Oscar Grant Plaza as they slashed tents and made off with our stuff. Not only was it reassuring to know that as long as I stayed on the air with Don, there would be audio witnesses if the cops went berserk, it was also interesting to imagine what my friends and neighbors were thinking as one of their own stood in a pre-dawn confrontation with the law, a thousand miles away, in a big metropolitan city with actual traffic lights. It amused me to consider that some of my homies may have been actively hoping I’d be thrashed for taking a political stance they disagreed with. On this occasion, in contrast to others, the Oakland Police Department orchestrated an orderly, nonviolent operation with no arrests. There had certainly been moments of anxiety, but on the whole, the OPD had shown professionalism and restraint while they dismantled the place where we had eaten, taught, provided daycare, clothed, and housed hundreds of Oakland’s poorest citizens for nearly three weeks. And just like that, it was over. The magical, miserable, wonderful, terrifying, Occupy Oakland Commune ended. The fantastic grand experiment that had decreased crime in Oakland by nearly 20% was over.

Later that day, I toted my bags to the nearest library, where a GA was scheduled so that we could regroup and discuss our next moves. I slept on the grass in the sun for an hour before the assembly began. Over a thousand people showed up from all over Oakland to mourn the loss of our tent city and to voice their continuing support for Occupy Oakland. Speakers reiterated the ongoing urgency of stopping corporate greed and putting an end to bank abuses. Some of the displaced campers spoke of the need to retake OGP, or find another location to set up shop. Overall it was a nice pep rally and a good way to process what had just happened to us, but I felt in my heart that it was over at OGP and that the experience of a lifetime, that I will forever cherish, would never be replicated. On the advice of others who had scoped out a new spot, I relocated to Snow Park where others said they might be heading. The new location was close to OGP, but larger and grassier. Lake Merritt was close by too, which was another plus, but it lacked the sense of community and purpose we shared at City Hall. Lots of Occupy activists who had homes in town went back to them. They had been at OGP for political reasons, not for lack of options. The Snow Park encampment was much less populated and more strung out—mostly made up of people who were there by necessity, not choice. Some refugees were milling about aimlessly, while others checked to see if there were any plans afoot to build a kitchen or serve meals. This place was depressing and had none of the gritty, explosive, history-in-the-making feel that City Hall exuded. This time my lifesaver was Terry Lynn Delk, who showed up with another donated tent, (the third so far) but the rainfly was missing, so I replaced it with an enormous blue tarp someone else had abandoned at the park. The tarp was so large I had to double it up under my tent and extend it out over the top to make it work. It began raining as soon as I finished, so I was immensely grateful for the find that was keeping my new home dry. I lay there in the dark listening to the raindrops plip plop soothingly on my roof, as I tried to fall asleep and hoped other activists would arrive soon and set up house. I wasn’t liking my new residence, but I didn’t want to turn tail and run to a friend’s house to sleep. My cell phone battery was dying which made me feel vulnerable, so I decided to leave the park for awhile and take the BART over to San Francisco, where I saw on Twitter that there was speculation about an impending predawn raid at the Occupy encampment there. I got off at the Embarcadero stop, a few hundred feet from Occupy San Francisco, where I saw that hundreds of activists had created a bustling community for themselves as well. It was fun to note the differences and similarities from across the bay in Oakland. There was much more of a hippie vibe in San Francisco and I noticed a greater variety of incense permeating the air, along with more types of dogs, mostly wearing bandanas. Also, a higher percentage of the Occupiers were white. The camp had become so crowded that the overflow spilled across the street and onto the wide sidewalk in front of the Federal Reserve Building, where some managed to cram their tents between the walkway and the newspaper vending machines. The place was abuzz with talk of last night’s Oakland raid, as well as strategies for surviving the same plans for theirs. I had only been there a short while before OSF members monitoring police scanners began announcing that there would be no raid that night after all, which relieved me, since I was finally starting to get sleepy. Off I went, back to the BART station and back to the East Bay where my Snow Park home lay waiting.

After I lay down in my sleeping bag, I discovered that in my brief absence, a homeless man had pulled loose my excess tarp and rolled it over himself for shelter. He slept inches away from me, with nothing between us but the nylon fabric of the tent. Perhaps he thought I’d moved out when I left for San Francisco, but not being certain, he’d not completely moved in … just yet. He had, however, made it cozier for himself by pulling some cardboard over to cushion his underside, along with some abandoned bedding to keep him warm as he slept and probably wished I’d been gone for good. The only reason I noticed him there was because I thought I detected an odd, previously absent bulge in the back of the tent as I approached it in semidarkness. After I entered it, I lay there awkwardly, trying to decide what to do. It was too late for me to feel good about calling anybody to come get me, so I stayed, prostrate—stiff as a board—until I began to hear the man breathing softly, as if in deep slumber. I must have dozed off momentarily while pondering my dilemma, but awakened shortly to the sound of the guy flicking a nearly empty Bic lighter about six inches away from my head. Then I smelled something, unpleasant and toxic, burning very close to me. I didn’t relish the idea of forcing the poor lout into the rain, but come on man—really? You can’t just give it up for a few hours so we can get through this fucking nightmare without killing each other? I fumed silently beside the man (figuratively) while he fumed audibly beside me (literally)—our backs touching. He didn’t imbibe for long, and soon returned to his soft breathing pattern. I began to wonder if it might not be heroin he was smoking, instead of crack, which I’d previously assumed was his weakness; but didn’t crack make you jumpy and heroin make you sleepy? Then I began to lament the inefficiency and wastefulness of smoking the heroin, versus shooting it, if indeed that was what he’d been up to. Because from everything I’d ever read, the best way to enjoy it was to inject it, and since I assumed this man wasn’t well-to-do, I began mentally berating him for being lazy and not making the effort to prepare it properly, in order to get the most bang for his buck. Then I started chastising myself for having such a callous attitude toward my destitute brother. After all, I had the luxury of being homeless by choice, him—not so much. I did not want to be insensitive to my fellow man, but neither did I like sleeping with an inconsiderate drug addict guy that I didn’t even know. I’d given that up in the eighties, and I wasn’t about to go back at fifty-one. Worse still, when the space invader drifted off this second time, he wedged himself even tighter against me, dead to the world, as he fell into squawk snoring—accompanied by long pauses that gave me concern for his health—followed by apneatic gasps which bolted me upright as they punctuated the night and scared me shitless.

Though I’d gotten precious little shuteye, I arose the next morning and walked over to OGP, hoping to join up with other demoralized Occupiers. I detected a small group and wandered over to stand among them and commiserate. There was a foul-smelling muddy pit where our vibrant revolutionary community had stood days before. We loitered, dolefully watching the sprinkler system drowning all remaining life in the plaza. We surmised that Mayor Quan had really, really not wanted us to come back, since she’d put tons of little flags and signs everywhere on the lawn saying, KEEP OFF THE GRASS, and RESTORATION IN PROGRESS. She also had twenty or more cops doing nothing but walking up and down the sidewalks, yelling at anyone who even looked like they were thinking about stepping off the concrete—much less pitching a tent. By the third day the sprinklers were still running full blast and the grounds in front of city hall were inundated with three inches of standing water. The historic oak tree, whose well-being the mayor had originally cited as the main reason she objected to the encampment, was now swimming in the pool she created. We named the new body of water, “Quan Lake.”

On November 15, instead of spending another evening at Snow Park with the lazy, inefficient drug waster, I decided to support fellow Occupiers on the campus of Cal Berkeley. They too had their tent city violently dismantled by campus police, days before. The students of Occupy Cal were hopping mad at the excessive force campus cops had used on them during a November 9 protest. After that encounter, many of them uploaded YouTube videos showing police shoving, pushing, pepper spraying, baton thumping, tent-slashing, and kicking students as they linked arms and tried to resist them. Their campus Occupation was largely a response to planned tuition hikes, as well as growing anger and discontentment with their situation as college students in the new economy—unable to afford tuition without going tens and even hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, unable to find adequate jobs, unable to move out of their parent’s homes. Many complained that they now found themselves attending a university with little ethnic diversity and a decreasing quality of education. I went there that day hoping to support their Occupation as well as to ease my depression over the deteriorating state of Occupy Oakland.

I boarded a campus-bound city bus on that bright, sunny day, opting out of the miles long solidarity march I heard that Occupy Oaklanders had planned to make from OGP. The bus driver let me off three blocks before my scheduled stop because another driver had radioed to tell her the demonstration was much larger than expected and that if she drove all the way in she’d be trapped for hours. I liked hearing that so I hopped off and looked around for the parade.

Half an hour later I’d still not seen them and walked dejectedly to Sproul Hall, legendary home of the Free Speech Movement. In 1964, Mario Savio had caused a commotion by leaping atop a police car that held Jack Weinberg, a former UC student who’d moments earlier been sitting at a table he’d set up with materials from CORE (Congress on Racial Equality) to support the Civil Rights Movement. The cops had come to shut the table down and arrest Jack Weinberg and Mario had jumped up on top of the car and just sat there, in order to stop them from hauling Jack away. Then he’d made a rousing speech to the gathering crowd of Cal students which began a thirty-two-hour sit-in that began the Free Speech Movement. Later that same year, on the steps of Sproul Hall, Savio gave his now famous speech where he said, “We’re human beings! There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” Reading about Mario and the sacred ground I stood on jumpstarted my heart, and even though I couldn’t find any Occupiers to share it with, I was way into being there.

Ninety minutes later, just as I was turning to leave, I looked to the left and saw a snaking line of thousands, chanting, waving flags, and wielding signs as they poured into the plaza. People started running out from the student union and surrounding buildings to greet them by sending up a resounding cheer for the returning heroes. I yelled myself hoarse as humanity kept streaming in until there was someone occupying every nook and cranny as far as the eye could see. The jubilant crowd swelled to over ten thousand as a speaker’s podium was erected at the top of the steps in front of the door to Sproul Hall. Hope and expectation were palpable as former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, Robert Reich, approached the microphone. He’d already been scheduled to speak in a campus auditorium for a paid event, but decided that the overwhelming presence of the Occupiers afforded him a unique opportunity to express his support for the Movement, so he took it.

The audience gave him rapt attention as he delivered a startling analysis of income inequality and co-opted government, which struck a nerve with the crowd that hung on his every word. He gave a clear, concise timeline that described the journey that lead us to this point in history where banks and corporations run everything and ordinary people are left with nothing. His spontaneous speech wasn’t long, but hit a crescendo of boisterous, cheering, applause as he concluded that we all needed to get out into the streets and “raise a ruckus,” to stop what’s being done to us each day we do nothing to oppose it.

A few seconds after his departure the sound of seventies disco music blasted into the airspace and instantly we rose to our feet for an impromptu disco party. “I Will Survive,” was assaulting my receptive eardrums when I saw the first fully erected dome tents being lifted overhead onto the plaza in front of the Hall. “This is AWESOME!!!!!” was all I could think as I decided right then and there to spend the night and help defend the resurrection of the village at Cal. Maybe fifteen or twenty structures went up as the music kept thumping and the party raged on.

About 1:00 a.m. the PA system got packed up, while those of us planning to stay began hunkering down for real to brave the cold, damp air and hold down the fort all night. I hoped to get in a few Z’s before boarding a 9:00 a.m. bus with students, bound for a big demonstration against University Regents in the financial district of San Francisco. Not coincidentally, many of those regents, who regularly voted in recent years to increase tuition, also had offices there, where they served on the boards of major financial institutions such as Wells Fargo, Chase, and Bank of America. Before then, I didn’t know this obvious conflict of interest was common practice at state universities all over America. The largest banks in the world, which had caused the collapse of the American financial system by gambling with the bad loans they made, were now enjoying even greater profits by manipulating the exploding cost of getting a college degree. I already held considerable dislike for big banks, but this additional bit of information pushed me over the edge and I was completely down for this action, which I hoped would reap some concrete benefits for the planners and participants. Because my own tent was still at Snow Park, I dragged over some loose cardboard I’d found in the soggy grass, curled up in a ball, closed my eyes against the drizzle, and tried to go to sleep.

I was still awake when a dozen campus officers sauntered over, palming their billy clubs, and parked themselves in front of our remaining group of thirty-eight Occupiers. I was the oldest person there, save for an elderly man, whose ready smile endeared him to me each time I noticed him chatting avuncularly with students or showing them card tricks he’d learned over the years. One of the policemen put a superfluous bullhorn to his lips to advise us that we were in violation of a campus law prohibiting camping, and would be subject to arrest if we didn’t leave. In response, the students called an emergency GA, where it was determined that we should pull the tents closer together in case we needed to link arms and physically defend them later. Not wanting to be snatched from the fringes and again hauled off to jail, I relocated my cardboard home in the midst of the tents and shivered there for awhile, still listening to the repetitious drone of the dispersal order. I conjured up the privation endured by Lewis and Clark, along with (new mom) Sacagawea, her worthless husband, Charbonneau, and the rest of the Corp of Discovery, whose journals I’d read years ago, to put my own discomfort into perspective as I mentally whined for my down comforter and memory foam mattress. The impending raid did not allow me to drift off for even a moment as I checked the time, (4:30 a.m.) and waited.

Just as I thought I might freeze to death in the wet predawn air, the first streak of light finally pierced the sky, signalling that our defiance of orders had been successful. Stiff as a corpse, I clung to tent poles to stand upright. Limping the soreness away, I hobbled out from Sproul Hall and entered the closest coffee shop, across the street from the square. I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated a heated building quite so much as I did then. Since I was the first customer of the day, I selected a warm spot, plugged my phone in, and ordered a latte with a pastry. Moments later, one of my former Santa Rita cellmates, Andrea, a Cal student who had also spent the night outside, walked in and sat with me. She, a high-performing, hard-working postgraduate student, underemployed, living with her parents and drowning in debt, was a perfect example of why the student body of UC Berkeley was so upset in the first place. She had helped to organize the Cal Occupation and was as cold and sleep deprived as I was when she said, “Hey how ‘bout Mister Pentagon Papers himself, Daniel Ellsberg, spending the night in a tent with us. Did you love the magic tricks or what?” That was my first inkling that the only person there older than me, was the historical figure who’d revealed this country’s buildup to the Vietnam War to be an absolute sham, thereby making the case to end it. It was Dan Ellsberg who, in 1971, decided to sound the alarm by publishing nearly seven thousand pages of high-level, top secret documents detailing his work with the CIA during the Johnson Administration. By outing himself in this way, Ellsberg proved that he and his former employers, President Lyndon Johnson and the CIA, had deceived the American public by overstating (even manufacturing) the threat North Vietnam posed to our capitalist democracy in its plan to conquer South Vietnam and spread Communism throughout Southeast Asia. In those days the word “Communist” inspired the same sort of reaction that “Muslim” does in some circles today, and its very utterance often triggered irrational fears and jingoistic nationalism, especially from elected officials eager to attract new voters. By the time the Pentagon Papers were published, the United States and its Western allies had been in a longstanding “Cold War” with Russia and its Communist allies dating back to the end of World War II. The Cold War was characterized by a chilly ideological disdain for Communism which manifested itself in intensive efforts to contain its influence by the West, countered by a push to expand its reach in the East.

No shots were ever fired during the Cold War, due partially to the fact that both sides knew that each possessed enough nuclear weaponry to obliterate the entire planet, yet there still existed a good deal of mutual hostility and distrust. The West conducted a pitched campaign of fear mongering with its assertion that a “domino effect” would be brought about by the fall of even one seemingly insignificant country (like North Vietnam) to the doctrine. The conflict between North and South Vietnam has sometimes been viewed as a proxy war between the United States and the USSR. At the center of it all was Daniel Ellsberg, a single high-level official in the CIA, who ultimately did more perhaps than anyone to expose the false premise which resulted in the death of over fifty-eight thousand American soldiers. Daniel Ellsberg has since dedicated his life to encouraging whistleblowers everywhere to stand up and resist the pressure to be complicit in a system they know to be doing the wrong thing. In one famous quote he warned, “Don’t do what I did and wait till the bombs start falling, to speak up and practice civil disobedience if necessary to advocate for what’s right,” even though doing so had made him a political pariah and caused a great deal of enmity between him and the Nixon administration.

So, how had the upper levels of authority handled the students’ expression of anger and discontentment? Cal chancellor, Robert J. Birgeneau, defended the campus police choice to beat students with batons the week prior, by saying, “It’s unfortunate students chose linking arms to protest … that is not nonviolent protest.” In response to this, students printed and distributed leaflets on campus bearing an iconic image of Martin Luther King linking arms with Mario Savio and other justice workers in front of Sproul Hall in the 1960s, along with Chancellor Birgeneau’s suddenly infamous quote. And the regents themselves dealt with the students’ concerns by postponing a planned meeting, where it was expected that they would vote yes on the proposal to raise tuition by 81% to be phased in over the next four years. The students did not take kindly to the delay that was seen by them as a stalling tactic to let tempers cool before jacking up rates as initially planned. Not to be distracted, Occupy Cal organized a cooperative march with Occupy Oakland through the financial district of downtown San Francisco where the regents had chosen to lay low in their offices on the day that was originally scheduled for the tuition hikes vote. At 9:00 a.m., I boarded one of the waiting buses the students had hired to take us there and dozed most of the way, surrounded by union workers, students, and Occupiers from the night before.

We were let off right across the street from the Embarcadero BART stop, where Occupy San Francisco was still operating in the last remaining days of its tent commune. Lots of OSF members joined in the parade, which began at the Federal Reserve Building across the street after some speeches were made by experts on the topic. It was early afternoon and from the outset I gauged our numbers to be around six hundred. We promenaded past many of the greatest offenders in the financial collapse and paused in front of each one to chant slogans like, “Banks got bailed out—We got sold out.” Some among us had megaphones and read the names of the regents with offices in each bank. The route took us deep into a canyon of tall buildings, where suited office workers pressed to the windows to record the spectacle, which had by this time grown to nearly three thousand demonstrators.

We were flanked on both sides by motorcycle cops who looked pissed as we clogged the streets for blocks brandishing our MAKE BANKS PAY signs and beckoning onlookers to join us. Our chants reverberated off skyscrapers as we raised our voices under the TransAmerica Tower, then Wells Fargo, Citibank, Chase, and others. We finally wound up facing the Bank of America, only this time, instead of pausing to chant outside, the vanguard of our procession marched us right into the foyer of the building, holding the entrance doors open while beckoning us to enter. The unscripted detour instigated a free-for-all romp inside the bank, whose manager chose, unwisely, to ignore our approach, perhaps hoping we’d go away. A teller finally noticed what was happening and ran to the door trying to pull it shut against the hundreds of us who were charging in.

Most of the startled employees ran back to their cubicles, grabbed their personal effects, and bolted out the back door, abandoning their posts. Gleefully I stood gaping in disbelief at the unfolding scene. Kids danced wildly atop desks that held computer monitors that stayed running the whole time, frozen onto the pages their operators had last opened. Bank documents were being grabbed and flung riotously into the air, landing like confetti wherever they may. Someone tilted back in an office chair, propping his feet on a plastic keyboard while he lit a cigar. Another Occupier busied himself resetting the system’s screen saver and soon all the monitors began flashing, “MAKE BANKS PAY,” in seventy-two-point bold red type. Another still, pushed the print command on a machine he’d commandeered, ordering it to produce hundreds of multicolored copies of the message onto the floor beneath the removed receiving tray. I knew it would be dangerous to linger since the cops weren’t going to let this tomfoolery continue forever, but I did not want to take my leave. I turned my head toward a faint trickling sound to take in the silhouette of a bookish youth wearing a cardigan sweater, who was quietly urinating into the back corner of the room. I admired the carrying capacity of his bladder and the impressive stream volume as his urine splashed gaily from the wall onto the carpet, eventually seeking places to pool and call home.

Just as I was threading my way to the exit, a tiny, auburn-haired sprite, who looked to be twelve or thirteen, grabbed a dormant bullhorn, mounted a desk, and began to deliver a powerful address. She hoisted the speaker with trembling hands as she began, “My friends, colleagues, fellow students, and comrades in struggle.” She went on to summarize the academic journey that brought her to this improbable present. Despite earning outstanding grades, devoting countless hours of free labor to internships, and receiving numerous accolades for community service, she’d been left virtually bankrupt, living at her parents house, trying to pay off student loans, and working at Starbucks for her effort. Throughout her speech I found myself fighting a gnawing sense of futility in trying to go up against these huge institutions and their fortresses. Even though her advanced intelligence and capabilities were obvious, how was this person ever going to dig out of the cavernous hole she was in? When she finished there was a reverent hush of sorrow and empathy that held us all for several seconds, even as I feared I’d tarried too long.

On my way out, I scurried past a glass-enclosed side office, where I noticed a lone employee who’d been trapped by the melee as we rushed in. She was hunched over her business phone, head down, talking anxiously into the receiver to someone, probably a police officer, on the other end. Our eyes met for an instant as she risked a furtive glance into the room where all hell was breaking loose. I guessed that this frazzled creature, who bore a passing resemblance to Mayor Jean Quan, was likely the branch manager. I’d love to have been privy to her conversation as she described her odd predicament to whoever was listening. I hoped she’d get a raise for her valor, even though she seemed in no particular danger from Occupy Cal, whose members paid her absolutely no mind as she did what she felt was her duty to the Bank of America. I also hoped the police would spare her, along with everyone else, when they stormed in, guns blazing.

Once on the outside, I pushed through the crowd of two hundred or so, and pressed myself against the window, to film the thirty or forty students who’d made a conscious decision to subject themselves to arrest. Inside I saw a boy of nineteen or twenty sitting at a computer, staring intently at the screen as he moved the mouse to scroll around. Minutes later he grabbed an empty sheet of paper and found a pen. He wrote the words: Monica Lovano/BofA Regent to UC/213-622-8332. As he finished writing the last number, a young woman standing next to me fished her phone out of her purse to make a call. “Yes, I’d like to speak to Monica,” she said assertively. “Who’s calling? … Yes, tell her the people are calling.” She waited a few minutes and then said, “Oh, she’s unable to come to the phone at this time? Yes, well can you please tell her that there are Cal students here in San Francisco Occupying the Bank of America close to her office and we’d like to know why she thinks it’s appropriate to raise tuition 81% on us while the bank is making record profits and education is unaffordable for most of the people in California. Thank you, oh and can you also tell her that we aren’t going away anytime soon. Thank you.”

After she hung up I began eavesdropping on another phone conversation from a copper-skinned, raven-haired boy with fine features, standing on the other side of me. He was talking to another boy with a similar profile, sitting cross-legged inside the building, just on the other side of the glass. “That’s my little brother in there,” he intimated to me. “I gotta make sure he’s okay—or Mom’s gonna worry.” As I continued peering inside the bank, some enterprising individual began erecting a tent he had stuffed inside his backpack, between two teller windows up front. I admired the heck out of his preparedness for this moment. The police did arrive shortly after that, and used uncharacteristic restraint while making their arrests before dozens of filming onlookers.

That evening I headed back to Snow Park in the rain and spent another night sleeping uneasily against my tarpmate, who was proving himself to be harmless. Since this determination, I had decided to make peace with him, even though we’d never spoken a word or looked directly at each other. He was, in all likelihood, a hapless hobo, just trying to stay dry as he crowded my back, shifted occasionally, and snored from time to time. The next morning the sun shone brightly on me once more, as I roused myself and greeted the new day. Two policemen strode by in the warmth and began distributing newly minted eviction fliers telling us our days at Snow Park were numbered too. I wasn’t sure what to do with my tent, but left it up for the time being while I tried to figure out how serious they were this time. I circulated around the sparsely populated park to learn that Occupy Oaklanders had identified a great big fenced vacant lot nearby at Nineteenth and Telegraph where there was ample room for us to re-establish our Oakland Commune. I walked over to OGP to see what was happening and on the way poked my head into a tiny art gallery on Fourteenth and Franklin. It was packed with people who were listening to Harvard graduate, and Princeton Professor, Dr. Cornel West, speaking. I had heard of him before but had to google him while standing outside in the overflow crowd, to get some background and find out that the body of his work had been on issues of race, gender, and class in this country. I could just make out the salt and pepper tip of his afro as he said, “I am not a supporter of the Occupy Movement, I am a part of it.” He went on to assert the need for activists to, “stay focused on personal commitment to the movement rather than on creating consensus.” I didn’t stay because so many others wanted to get closer, but I did hear him advise that “we should use the diversity of the Occupy Movement to build and strengthen it instead of letting differences weaken it.”

When I got to OGP I saw that Quan Lake, which was now also being referred to as Quantanamo Bay, had risen by a few inches and was threatening to flood the sidewalks of City Hall. I decided to sit down inside the Rising Loafer bakery whose owner supported Occupy Oakland and didn’t mind if you took up a seat for awhile. I browsed the printed materials looking for news about Occupy. I learned that the tent village on the Berkeley campus had been torn down again, and that students vowed to put it back up as they could. Then I read a tweet that said Occupy Oakland would definitely be taking over the vacant lot at Nineteenth and Telegraph in front of the Oakland School for the Fine Arts on Saturday, the 19- of November. Another tweet said that OPD wasn’t planning to raid Snow Park before then so, while I drank my latte, I decided to stay put the next two nights until the move to Telegraph. As I sipped, a woman of about sixty came in and sat at the table next to me. She searched the room as if she was meeting someone, so I took a chance and asked her if she was with Occupy. She said “yes,” so I went over and sat with her. As we talked, I told her of my recent experiences with the OPD and Bank of America and she told me that she sang with a vocal group called Occupella, that went around performing topical songs for the Movement. Her name was Nancy Schimmel and she showed me lyrics for some of their parodies. I commented on one that was taken from a Malvina Reynolds song I’ve always loved called, “Little Boxes.” “I’m so happy you’re doing that tune,” I said. “Malvina Reynolds rocks. What a great pioneer of feminist folk.”

“I know,” said Nancy. “She’s my mother.”

“Get out of here!” I exclaimed, before launching into, “Turn around and you’re two—Turn around and you’re four. Turn around and you’re a young girl, going out my door.” I, like many others, first heard “Turn Around” as a child when Kodak used it in a commercial for their cameras. Another title of Malvina’s, “Little Boxes,” was the theme song of a TV series called, Weeds, about a suburban mom who decides to grow and sell marijuana after her husband dies without life insurance, leaving her broke. It’s about how people are put into boxes, socialized to conform, and discouraged from raising a fuss or questioning authority. “There are boxes, little boxes, little boxes made up of ticky tacky, little boxes on the hillside and they all look the same. There’s a pink one and a green one and a blue one and a yellow one and they’re all made up of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.” Great lyrics, and great to be sitting there with her charming daughter. We talked some more and even sang together a little bit before exchanging contact information and heading back out into the world.

On the morning of the nineteenth, I packed up my third tent and waited for my friend Penny, who’d agreed to let me stash it in her car. As I crammed it in its stuffsack, I noticed there were several brand new burn holes in the tarp, right next to where my head was while I slept. Oy vey. Penny offered to bring the tent back to me later that night, after I checked out the situation at Nineteenth and Telegraph. First there was a rally to support labor unions scheduled for 2:00 p.m., followed by a long march which was supposed to end up near the new #OO campsite. It started out small, maybe five hundred people, but by the time we got to Lake Merritt there were a lot of us—thousands. We were several blocks long and took up the entire width of the street when we paused briefly to pay our respects to the Lakeside school that was closing in March because of cuts in educational funding. Along the route we also stopped to stare at the marquee of the Grand Lake Theater whose owner, another ardent support of Occupy, had written, YOU CAN’T EVICT AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME—SHAME ON YOU MAYOR QUAN. From there about five hundred of us turned back the way we came and began making our way to the Oakland School for the Arts at Nineteenth and Telegraph. Darkness was approaching as we reached our final destination, only to find that a chain-link fence had gone up since I’d last seen it days earlier. A group of motivated Occupiers came prepared with bolt cutters and began demolishing the fence as others pushed aside pier blocks and created openings. Soon we were all barging onto the lot, and tents began popping up everywhere. Brian brought the sound truck and from then on the party was in full swing. More bodies showed up to celebrate our new digs and in no time we were up to a thousand revellers as a light mist began to fall. The ground was rocky and wet, but twenty hardy campers set up nonetheless while we danced beneath the sculpture garden that would be our back yard once we were established.

Remember Them, Heroes for Humanity is the Mario Chiodo sculpture that we were all clustered around that night, after we tore down the barriers and tried to appropriate the space for Occupy Oakland. There are twenty-five historical figures in the piece, which was dedicated to the city exactly two months before our arrival. Among them are: Mother Teresa, Sojourner Truth, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, Maya Angelou, Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks. Remarkably, the nine million dollar artwork was funded almost entirely by private donations during a time of great economic instability, known as the “Great Recession.” I was calmed by their presence, almost as if they were guardian angels overseeing and protecting us in our own fight for justice. Then I saw the cops. Lots and lots of them were amassing in every direction as it started raining hard on our celebration. I called Penny, who was already on her way, and reported, “Hey, it’s looking kind of dicey, maybe we just keep the tent in your car tonight if that’s okay.” She was just pulling up to our location when she observed several dozen police officers in riot gear preparing to make a move.

“No problem, be safe tonight,” she said, kindly, as I waved her away from the area. Brian was pleading through his sound system for us to stay put and keep our numbers up to defend the encampment as it got wetter and colder by the minute. I hunkered down under a canopy someone had brought and looked up at the balconies of the surrounding apartments. It seemed that every tenant had a cell phone camera capturing the excitement from above. Some also had small children and pets peering down at us from their decks. One young blond woman jogging with her Jack Russell Terrier glowered at me as she passed on the sidewalk to her residence. “Hey, thanks for totally fucking up my front yard with this bullshit,” she sneered as I shivered.

After midnight the order to disperse was sounded, which some freezing, soaked comrades decided to heed. Hours later, we were down to roughly forty rain-soaked souls and a handful of tents. Those of us that remained were tired and miserable. Then, Brian announced that he had to take the sound truck back to the garage because it was too wet outside for the delicate gear, and he didn’t want it confiscated again. He drove half a block, turned left, and was immediately pulled over by the cops who impounded the truck and towed it away, leaving Brian and his crew empty handed and without transportation. Morale took a nosedive when the music died and our misery seemed to compound itself. I saw the handwriting on the wall and opted to leave then, not wanting to be arrested again. I didn’t know how I would make it back to Laura’s house by myself, since she and Lori had flown out earlier in the day to spend Thanksgiving with family on the East Coast. They’d given me a house key and told me I could crash at their place anytime in their absence, which I’d almost refused as unnecessary. My, how things had changed. The BART train was still running, but not as often as in peak periods, so it was very late when I got off, exhausted, at the Fruitvale Station where Oscar Grant died, which was still miles from their home. I hadn’t wanted to be without it, so I was forced to drag my cumbersome rolling suitcase behind me as I navigated the route to their address. Somehow I got turned around and found myself lost at 3:00 a.m., wandering through a graffiti plastered, payday-loan-mart-infested neighborhood featuring malt liquor billboards and Newport signs everywhere I looked. I could almost picture the pale ad executives in tall, glass buildings downtown, conjuring up the slick slogans they concocted to prey on every misbegotten occupant of these hellholes. Perhaps I could have respected them a little bit more if they’d just come out and said what they really thought: “Drink nigger, nobody gives a shit about you. Get goddamn good and drunk, broke motherfuckers—why the hell not? Cash your pathetic little check here dawg—it ain’t enough to live on anyway, might as well give half of it to the man.” The next day I figured I’d walked about a mile and a half out of my way before I learned how to use MapQuest on my phone and get where I was going. Dawn and my back were near breaking when I saw the familiar car in the driveway, signalling my safe arrival to Laura’s place.

On the short plane ride home the next day, I leaned my head against the window, closed my eyes, and let gratitude flow that life had provided me with a warm house, a loving family, and a tiny, unsophisticated police force to return to for Thanksgiving. I’d had enough drama to last forever hanging out in the dirty, desperate city. No more forays into the dark side for me. I did my tour of duty. I’d tried to make a difference by “throwing myself onto the gears of the machinery” and “raising a ruckus.” I had not “waited until the bombs started falling” to blow the whistle on what was being done to my country. I’d occupied for the Florida panther who could not hire a lobbyist, and I’d been knocked around, tear gassed and arrested by the cops for the evening grosbeak. While many goals remained unreached, I was satisfied with the knowledge that I’d at least gotten off the couch and tried to do something.