Midnight Mission

We'd have looked a motley crew, if it hadn't been so dark. Five of us were on a midnight mission, a small band in dark clothing, struggling up a black hillside a few miles outside Rifle, Colorado. For every dusty yard gained, we slid back a step or two, trudging past broken boulders and scattered sagebrush in our climb up the mountain. No flashlights, since we were planning a criminal act. We tried to be quiet in case there was a guard. The nearest ranchers were in bed, miles away.

This was as close as I'd been to being a revolutionary. As a sophomore in college in 1969, I'd at times imagined being with a band of romantic radicals seeking to better the world, perhaps by robbing the rich and distributing to the poor what was left after cheese and cheap wine. I'd been steeping in philosophers and politics. I especially liked William James. I could understand such things as “sow an action, reap a habit, a character, a destiny.” I wanted character and destiny. I was vulnerable to the suggestion of a risky mission for the betterment of the world.

My companions were less romantic, if perhaps more dedicated. Chuck and Fred were my parents' ages. They were plumbers who had tended our community's pipes and cisterns for years. They were also Quakers and excons. Each had done prison time as conscientious objectors during World War Two. After the war, they had moved their families onto subsistence farms in western Colorado, holding to their pacifist ideology by living on sub-taxable income to avoid contributing to the defense budget.

Now they planned to strike against the powers of state in a different way, and for a different reason: to keep western Colorado from being nuked.

Yes, nuked. The remote areas of Rulison and Rio Blanco had been selected for an experiment. Oil companies believed that natural gas could be profitably extracted from the vast reserves of oil-bearing shale lying under large tracts of the West. Under Operation Plowshare, spons