All the organizing for the occupation was based on the SNCC/Quaker affinity group model. You trained in non-violent responses with this small set of folks, and you’d go into the action with them, supposedly as independent cells. I’d come late, so I was with a pick-up group, not anyone I knew.

We expected to meet police resistance, tear gas and mace, so we’d been told to get sheets of plastic and bandanas. I remember standing in my Dad’s garage taking big sheets of polyurethane he had to line the bottom of a backyard skating rink. He didn’t want much to do with me those years, but he was happy enough to do this. We had such trouble talking. I'd be trying to explain the "space" I was in or going through, and he'd look at me, this nuclear physicist-engineer, and say, "What do you mean, space? What are you talking about?" I can just imagine him thinking, "Does he mean Euclidian space? Outer space? Is he talking about drugs? Isn’t he here in this room?" I can see now I meant something like episodic--moods or emotions; but isn't it telling that the best word we had then to say this was "space" as in "I am not in the space right now to deal with that." Not feelings or affect but space.

Still, despite being completely freaked out by me it was nice that my Dad pitched right in to help me arm for battle.

I don’t know how many folks actually took part. I’d say maybe 800, but it might have been more, a few thousand. We expected the police to be ready for us—there was a lot of probably accurate paranoia about informers and FBI plants among us. The plan was for the small cells to spread out along the two-three mile fence so as to stretch their resources—use bolt cutters to get through the fence. I suppose the hope w as that enough people’d get in that it’d be hard to arrest everyone at once.

We got up there in the night and made a camp in the woods near the site. I don’t know whose land it was. The camp was the usual hippie tribe scene. This road warrior woman-shaman calling herself No Guns laid out a big garden of wheat grass in the centre of the camp as a garden. I wandered around a little, trying to avoid my old girlfriend Pat.

The next morning, early, we marshaled along the edge of a marsh near the front gates and the fences. We are all pretty scared frankly, getting ready to go to war. Then this RSB (Revolutionary Student Brigade) guy—I’d seen him at practically every protest the last four or five years—makes a big speech about marching on the gates. It was timed right. A lot of us were scared, wanted some leadership. Flocking together sounded like a good thing. Of course, tactically it completely undermined the planned assault since now we’d be clustered together. Even to this day I figure that RSB guy was FBI. Either that or he was more interested in staging a spectacle of the People’s Resistance than actually carrying out the assault.

            So, everyone but maybe ten or twelve affinity groups went off with the RSB guy to the gates. My group didn’t want to go, so we split off to a copse of trees a quarter mile from the gates and got out our sheets of plastic. The group leader then passed around some pot brownies. We ate those, and then went down to the fence to try to cut our way in.

All up and down the fence little groups were advancing to the fence behind sheets of plastic. Once we got to the fence, someone’d start trying to cut through the plastic with the bolt cutters, and the cops on the other side tried to spray mace through the gaps in the plastic or up over the top. We’d work at it awhile, get blown out by the mace and back up. Finally the cops started grabbing the plastic sheet where it was pressed against the fence, getting a corner or handful and then trying to pull it away from us.

There's a picture that was in the Boston Globe of my affinity group struggling in a tug of war with my Dad's polyurethane sheet. I am standing between the guys pulling and the cops, my hands out, like I was trying to get between the two, as if I was saying, "No, no." Like a mother hen, even in the middle of this crazy boy tussle.

No one to my knowledge actually got through. We got maced, and, at some point, the pot kicked in, and then we spent the afternoon laid out in the trees talking about what to do next and what assholes the RSB were.

That night, back at the camp there was a big process meeting about what to do in the morning. These kinds of meetings always scared me a little. My instinct was always to evade conflict, but I didn’t want to be a deciding or influential voice. So, I wandered away, and found No Guns. She was performing a directional ritual by the wheat grass garden. I don’t remember a lot about the ritual, save that she drew a circle on the ground and laid things in the different directions. I remember she laid an old work glove to the northwest quarter, a blue thing that reminded me of my brother Bruce who lived out in Bellingham Washington, but when she walked away there was this electric neon plastic lizard in the Southwest quarter. I sat looking at it, and decided then that it was a sign I was supposed to get myself to the Southwest. I remember just putting that one by my heart.

You can say, of course, that I was hallucinating or whatever. To me it doesn’t matter much whether it was something real or not. You see signs, you read them.

About ten that night a group of guys from Texas came into the camp with a section of fence they’d cut down rolled up over their shoulders. They tried to get everyone to come with them to the gap they’d made, but by then people mostly wanted to protest, not occupy, so the decision was made to meet en masse at a different gate in the morning, where news media’d be.

My affinity group wasn’t into that kind of thing, so the next day we went back out into the trees along the coastal fence. I remember hiding in the trees as helicopters went over head, thinking, “this is just like playing army when I was a kid; we’re just playing”. Of course we didn’t get anywhere, ate more pot brownies and spent the afternoon snoozing.

The next day I decided to split; I think the protest at the gates lasted a few more days.

I know the whole thing was painfully naïve. Long process meetings & not much effect. Maybe in one way we were doing what’s so often done, trying to recreate a previous victory. (The first Seabrook occupation was legendary, like Woodstock, a “were you there?” thing, and, in the late seventies, it was already beginning to be about nostalgia.) But what I remember is that there was something amazing about this free army camped in New Hampshire woods at the edge of the sea, campfire flickering. Ineffective, yes, but somehow even more amazing for all that, like a Surrealist dream or something out of Klebnekov or Cervantes.

So, I went back to Boston. I don't remember whether I quit my job at the sandwich shop to go to Seabrook, but sometime that fall, I changed jobs, started working as a shipper-receiver at a stationary warehouse in the South Boston docklands. It was a strange period. We had no heat, so I'd get out of my down bag early in the morning, dress quickly, and then walk across Quincy Market to the Warehouse, maybe see Jack Powers, the guy that ran Stone Soup poetry, washing down the pavement stones around the flower market. I don't know what the guys at the warehouse really thought of me. I'd bring these wheat grass, peanut butter sandwiches into the break room, and they'd laugh, but mostly, I was under the radar, in a kind of extended dream. I think that, as happens, they knew at some instinctive level that I was off on some private holy journey, and they left me alone. I was trying to quit cigarettes too, having my first smoke after lunch, so I was often in that extended withdrawal fugue that's like a sickness but also a healing. And some lunches, I'd go out back of the warehouse, down near the water, and I'd sit a bit.

I don't remember where Lisa was during that winter. I think she'd moved to Detroit and finally met Patti Smith. The place on Margaret St. was great, even without heat, so it was nice she'd arranged for me to take it over. One funny thing about that. When I'd lived there with her in the spring, I'd had really long hair for me. One time I was watching the kids in the street, rushing up and down the Margaret St. hill after a ball. They threw it high (Rilke's plummeting ball) and it got stuck on the fire escape. I started to climb up to retrieve it, and suddenly the street was full of angry Italian men and women, yelling at me to get down. I guess you didn't climb up the fire escape in the North End, something about maybe looking in the windows. Anyway, when I moved back in during the summer, my hair was shorter. The landlord met me, saying how glad he was that a friend of Lisa's could take the room (I guess she'd charmed him). Then he leaned in and remarked that I seemed much nicer than the guy that'd lived there with her in the spring.

So, that was a winter I began to get better. No heat, walking to work, miso soup in bed and reading at night. Then, in February, working at the Clam Shell office, I found a request from some folks in Phoenix. They were looking for organizing help around uranium mining on Navaho Land. I put that together with the electric lizard, and decided that was the place to go.