***
By the end of the 'Sixties, I was hoping for Big Changes in lifestyle, politics, livelihood. I imagined towns without cars, without crime, without the news. I visualized children growing up in agrarian environments, people swimming in clean rivers on lazy days, people working in fields, working at crafts, teaching children.
The Sixties promised all this. It produced people who wouldn't trade the essence of life for a living standard, people who placed their primary faith in the creator of nature rather than the decaying codes of a dying civilization, or so I thought.
Sequences of things are confusing when you try to remember them years later, but I remember that during the time of student unrest at UT Austin, Regents board chairman Tank Sherman decided to mow down the trees on Waller Creek to make room for 15,000 additional seats in Memorial Stadium. There
There was a protest. People from the UT Law School and the School of Architecture sought an injunction to delay the execution of the trees. Students gathered at Waller Creek and camped out; they intended to stay as long as necessary to save the unique Texas flora that grew along the banks. Sherman ordered "construction" crews and machines to the scene to proceed with the destruction. Tension grew as it became obvious the demonstrators would not remove themselves from the creek bank and the trees. Many of the trees, pecan, oak, cypress, were older than the university. Some of them stood along the clear running creek before Austin was a town.
Sherman announced that the construction work would begin the next day. Fifty or sixty youths camped that night on the creek across the street from Memorial Stadium.
I got up before six the next morning and went to the creek. I always attended the rallies, protests, demonstrations, not really as a participant, I reasoned, but as an observer. This stuff was happening and it affected our lives. I wanted a true picture of events regardless of my opinion on the issues. I owed it to my students. I owed it to myself.
Figures moved along the creek bank in the chill of early morning darkness. Across the street the construction crews waited with bulldozers, front-end loader and lumberjack sized chain saws.
As it grew light, the number of students along the creek grew to a hundred. Over with the machinery and the hard hatted workers, state, city and university cops began to assemble. They wore riot gear. The crowd grew to two hundred. It was light now, but the morning was cold and gray. By seven-thirty the cops were ready. Somebody picked up a bullhorn.
"Clear the area!" came the raspy order, followed by, "Any one who attempts to prevent these construction workers from doing their jobs will be arrested. Clear the area!".
Most of the crowd stepped over the sidewalk running parallel to the creek, but many found spots in the trees and refused to budge. Firefighters and cops brought in ladders. The crowd saw what was about to happen and began to turn noisy and pushy.
Now a single line of Austin policemen stood between the large crowd and the people in the trees. Cops started going up the ladders after the demonstrators. The crowd surged into the line of cops.
People were packed shoulder to shoulder all around me, and before me, holding both arms outstretched as a barrier, was Kenny Taylor, formerly a third grade teacher at St Paul School, now a policeman. The last time we had seen each other was over a cup of coffee in the school lunchroom. Now he was a cop and I was a demonstrator. He had his badge and nametag removed. He was scowling and yelling, "Get back there, get back there!" He didn't know me even though I was pressed right up in front of him by the mob.
I said, "Hey, Kenny, what are you DOING? You trying to be a tough guy?" He looked at me with glazed eyes, totally without recognition. Then he recognized me and for a split second, there was guilt and shame in his face. But in that split second, someone slipped under Kenny's left arm and scooted up one of the ladders into a tree ten feet away. Kenny turned, lowering his other arm, but it was too late to stop the student. The way was open for me to go up the ladder and into the tree. "GO!" yelled the people behind me. In that instant, I felt sorry for Kenny because I had distracted him and caused him to fail in his job. We had him. We had made a hole in the line over his position. But it wasn't my pity for him that kept me frozen to the spot. I knew if I broke that line and went up that ladder, I stood no chance of keeping my teaching job. I saw myself arrested, out of work. I hesitated. The line held.
By nine-thirty, twenty-six persons had been removed, arrested and taken to jail. The angry but now passive crowd sullenly watched as the trees were ripped by chainsaws and shattered by bulldozers. Tank Sherman was photographed applauding as the great trees fell. Any one of them, any sapling or sprout, was worth more than his life at that moment. I had never wanted to murder anyone before.
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