I've gotten more active in Greenpeace lately. Today, I'm levitating over the California sea, darting behind low little puffy clouds. I have to dodge and zigzag: I'm trailing a loose flock of teenage girls in matching green bikinis, swooping like swallows over the sea, chattering and pointing at cloud-shadows, which they keep mistaking for the dim silhouettes of whales. They look so sexy and sound so sweet, I have to keep reminding myself they're not innocent whale-watchers, but Navy specialists: sub hunters!

There's a war on--on the Navy's side, at least. They decided Greenpeace is a terrorist conspiracy, so they've unilaterally decided to cut off all supplies to our protest vessels! We know our rights and didn't back down: we started sending supplies by submarine. The Navy escalated by deploying shaman-girls on sub patrol.

Greenpeace deployed me. Barefoot, cutoffs, sunscreen, and a small video camera.

"THERE!" shouts a clear voice. "Oh, never mind. Just another whale."

I chuckle to myself. The Navy hasn't realized what should be obvious: the whales are on our side. "Save the Whales"? The whales save us! They swim above our subs, hiding them. And carry messages via their infrasonic booming voices, so deep the Navy girls can't hear...

"Just another whale."

The cliffs of Big Sur loom ten miles east, green and brown. It's a lovely warm day and the truth is I'm having fun stalking them stalking us. From back here, seeing only their flashing caramel bodies, hearing only their sweet voices, they seem beautiful, magical, California angels in surf heaven. The Green Angels.

But not Green. And not angels. If they spot a Greenpeace sub, will they just call in ships to try and block it, as we drive our rafts between whales and their killers? Or will they try to bomb the sub--killing civilians? I don't know who I'm trailing anymore, or just what they'll do.

I'm not sure they know just how far they'll go. Or their bosses will go.

But I intend to make sure the whole world is watching.

A NOTE ADDED 2005

Every fall, a group of Navy precision fliers shows off above my home town, rattling windows, thrilling small boys and their grownup counterparts, and reminding us San Francisco leftists who really runs America, and the world. They call themselves the Blue Angels. My dream parodied the Blue Angels' war-porn (Wanna join the Navy? See? It's fun! Zoom, boom!) with a cheesecake airshow of green angels...

In my dream, no one actually spoke the name Greenpeace. No one needed to, then.

Three weeks earlier (in case you've forgotten your history) French Navy commandos bombed a Greenpeace vessel that had been protesting French H-bomb tests. The ship was not in French waters, but lay peacefully in a New Zealand harbor. The bombing killed one crewman, a photographer. Most of the team of killers slipped out of New Zealand; the two who were caught plea-bargained their way out of any serious jail time. Mitterand and his generals, who directly approved a military attack on foreign civilians on foreign soil--that is, both an act of war AND a war crime under the Geneva Conventions--actually had the chutzpah to call it ANTI-terrorism, and dared pipsqueak pacifist New Zealand to do anything about it... and simply went on with their careers, and lives.

The photographer didn't.

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