High over the winding Eel River, wooded hills stretch to the Pacific Ocean. The mist rolls in, blanketing the valley below. On the forest floor, a tiny white butterfly alights on a fiddlehead fern. And from the canopy of a giant redwood, a voice crackles over the walkie-talkie. "I'm running out of power," it says, with a note of urgency. "Can you send up another cell-phone battery?"
It's a setting Thoreau might envy, but a setup that would appall him. For Julia Hill, the 24-year-old ecowarrior who goes by the nom de guerre Butterfly and now holds the U.S. record for the longest, highest tree-sit, life is anything but mellow. From the 180-ft.-high plywood platform where she has camped out since Dec. 10, she fields calls from a New York City radio station, a Little Rock newspaper and German television, which is sending a crew up from Los Angeles. "I have become one with this tree and with nature in a way I would never have thought possible," she says, as her pager beeps for the fourth time in 10 minutes.
The daughter of a former evangelistic preacher, Butterfly was bartending in Fayetteville, Ark., when she was in a nearly fatal car accident. Reassessing her life, she headed west last summer and ran into activists from Earth First, the environmental group that has waged a civil-disobedience campaign for the past decade to save old-growth forests. Soon the chirpy New Ager was volunteering to tree-sit, a favorite Earth First tactic.
Her specimen, a rust-colored giant 14 ft. in diameter and perhaps 1,000 years old, overlooks a massive mud slide in Stafford, Calif., that destroyed or damaged 10 houses last year. Homeowners are suing the Pacific Lumber Co., which was clear-cutting in the area.
The company, owned by Houston-based junk bond wizard Charles Hurwitz, would just as soon swat this photogenic Butterfly off her tree. It has disrupted her sleep with air horns and floodlights, placed 24-hour guards around the tree in an aborted effort to cut off supplies from her support team, and sent in chain saws and helicopters to harvest around her. On a video distributed by Earth First, helicopter blades are shown churning the branches of Butterfly's aerie, as a hard hat shouts from below, "Get ready for a bad hair day!"
With ropes, Butterfly hoists up supplies hiked in by an eight-member support crew, who identify themselves by such econames as Spruce and Thor. She detached herself from a safety line after a few days and climbs barefoot through the tree for exercise. She hasn't had a bath since December, but she makes do by swabbing herself down. It has been cold lately, and windy, so at night she wraps herself tight in a sleeping bag, leaving only a small hole for breathing. Beneath an electric blue tarpaulin draped around the branches, she cooks vegan meals on a single-burner propane stove. "Her potato-squash stew was yummy!" says Doug Wolens, a San Francisco filmmaker who is shooting a documentary on her.