Mary Lou huffed her disgust. “Yeah. The depot land is valued at two hundred and fifty million, and you want to know how much it pays in property tax?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Not a cent. Not a single penny.”
“So I guess people must depend on the depot for jobs then,” I said.
Mary Lou shrugged and raised her hand. “Jennifer? Do you know how many townspeople work at the depot?”
“Only a few,” the intern said. “Most of the fourteen hundred jobs at the depot aren’t open to local residents.”
“You’d think they could at least hire people from the town to do the cooking and cleaning if nothing else,” Mary Lou mumbled.
“Two hundred to two hundred fifty of the depot jobs are for military police,” Jennifer said. “They’re trained in anti-terrorism and authorized to use deadly force.” She paused to let that sink in.
Gasps rippled up and down the length of the bus. Moisture seeped into my T-shirt from under my armpits. Would we be considered terrorists? Surely not. We were just a bunch of middle-aged white women, respectable-looking mothers and grandmothers from the Midwest. Surely the military police wouldn’t use deadly force against us. Or would they? I scrunched down in my seat with Norton’s words—Do what you have to do—ringing ominously in my ears.
“Ladies!” The microphone squealed. “Sorry.” Bertha Pickering looked a lot younger than her sixty-four years in a blazing orange T-shirt and long denim skirt that brushed against her ankles. “I have something to say. I know that’s unusual.” She chuckled. “Seriously. We must not be pessimistic. Our job this week is to stop the shipment of nuclear weapons to Europe. Our mission is not impossible! Remember, we’ll be less than fourteen miles from where Elizabeth Cady Stanton lived. Where Susan B. Anthony traveled, to the first women’s rights convention, held right there in Seneca Falls in 1848. So if anyone tries to tell you we’re crazy, just ask them what would have happened if those women had given up when they were told that the right to vote was too radical and impossible.”
“Right on!” Mary Lou and I shouted to the sound of scattered applause.
“Did you know that Seneca Falls was a station on the Underground Railroad?” Bertha was emboldened, her voice louder.
“Yes!”
“And did Harriet Tubman give up the fight to end slavery when that seemed impossible?”
“No!” we shouted.
“Is eliminating nuclear weapons from the face of the earth impossible?”
“No!”
“Are we going to give up?”
“No!”
“That’s all I have to say then.”
The bus erupted in laughter and applause. We clapped and clapped. We stomped our feet. We chanted. Won’t give up. Won’t give up. The bus driver honked the horn. Bertha laughed and returned to her seat. I knew she was a force, but I’d never seen her in action like that before.
After several minutes, the bus fell silent, with Mary Lou snoring on my shoulder while I slipped into an optimistic sleep.
We were on the bus for two days, getting off at truck stops for food and, for a lucky few, showers. It was dusk when we finally arrived at the camp. I stumbled down the bus steps with Mary Lou behind, a tight grip on my shoulders to keep from losing her balance. Acres and acres of parched land were visible at the darkest edges of twilight, not yet night, clumps of soil hardened into rock by months of drought, a dizzying new world from which I would return changed in ways I did not yet fathom.
“I thought the mosquitoes were bad at home.” Mary Lou swatted her forearm, then waved her hand back and forth in front of her face.
A black Lab sniffed my toes. I leaned down to pat her head, and she licked my hand and wagged her tail like I was her new best friend. To our left, a two-story farmhouse beamed light through open windows, women’s voices inside, floodlights outside exposing peeling white paint. Next to the farmhouse, a large open tent with long tables and benches, cooking utensils hanging from a board at one end, wooden shelves, stacks of bowls and plates. Behind the kitchen area, a barn on which were drawn nude female figures with their stomachs painted white, their beautiful bodies connected with black spider web lines.
The screen door to the farmhouse slammed shut. A Black woman in her twenties strode toward us, a long thick braid thumping her waist in time with her footsteps. “Welcome!” She skidded to a halt. “So glad you made it. We’ve been waiting for you. I’m Janice. From Toronto. I’ve been here since the beginning.”
Several more female figures, semitransparent halos in the dusky mist, appeared in different shapes and colors and smiles of youthful exuberance at the sight of our open mouths and wide eyes. One young woman was topless.
“Hi, my name’s Brenda.” I stared at her ample pale pink breasts and wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
“And I’m Felicia.” She was a heavyset brown-skinned woman in a much too tight T-shirt and much too short jean shorts.
“Welcome, you can call me A.” She looked like an ordinary white boy with a butch haircut. “You know, like ‘hey there’ without the h? It’s short for Annabelle but I hate that name, so call me A. Just A.”
A slightly older and taller woman stepped forward, much more confident than the others, but maybe it was just the way her bright red hair set off her chalk white face that made it seem that way. “Jackie here. Hi.”
One by one, the rest of the women introduced themselves, each voice solicitous in its own unique and, in my view, delightful way. They grabbed our tents, sleeping bags, and knapsacks and walked off with our stuff while we trudged along behind.
“Now that we’re here,” I whispered to Mary Lou, “the average age of the camp just jumped twenty years.”
“More like forty.” Mary Lou chuckled under her breath.
Someone behind us muttered, “I feel so conservative,” and that set off a barrage of responses.
“So middle class.”
“So white.”
“So boring.”
“So clothed.”
“Well, I don’t care what anyone else does, I plan to wear clothes.”
That one made Mary Lou chuckle again. “I always wanted to go braless,” she said from the corner of her mouth. I laughed out loud. I was secretly envious of these young women, so free and in love with themselves. When I’d been their age, and even now sometimes, I was uncomfortable in my own skin, my too skinny, too pimply, too unattractive, too not-perfect body.
We passed the kitchen area, a row of sinks to which hoses were attached to draw in water. Underneath the sinks were pipes to drain the water into plastic buckets. Beyond the sinks, a row of small tents with a portable toilet inside each one. A respectable distance from the bathroom area, hundreds of tents arranged in small circles. Neighborhoods within a village. In the center of everything, an open pavilion-type building, its roof supported by wooden posts, bales of hay inside arranged in concentric circles. A women’s meeting space. On the other side of the pavilion, the young women stopped and dropped our things on the ground.
“Ta-da! The Midwest section!” Janice pointed at the open field with a flick of her long braid. She started to say more, but the sound of a helicopter drowned out her voice. It dropped low enough for me to see the spinning blades and the bared teeth of two men inside, then made a sharp turn and flew off.
“They do that when it gets dark.” Janice laughed.