Most Revolutionary - Chapter One
The Water Protectors
Note: In 2021 and 2022, Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) water protectors, Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya were sentenced to 8 and 6 years respectively in federal prison for destroying millions of dollars of oil pipeline and construction machinery in Iowa that is destroying the planet. Both principled activists were outrageously hit with a terrorism sentencing enhancement that has “been applied almost exclusively to defendants with ties to overseas extremist groups like the Islamic State group or al-Qaida or to domestic extremists like Cesar Sayoc, who pleaded guilty in 2018 to mailing pipe bombs to members of Congress.”
This novel, Most Revolutionary, with its eponymous characters Jenna Ryzcek and Jasmine Maldonado, imagines and reimagines a kind of new and parallel revolutionary moment, one in which revolutionary consciousness, imagination, and acts might bring about a far more livable and humane world, in face of the current human, animal, and ecology extinction-level climate collapse and nuclear threats, genocide, and boundless other forms of death and destruction perpetrated in large part by concentrations of all-too-often bigoted financial wealth and its brutal club of military and police power.
Stories help change the world one way or another. Grounded in the real and lifted by imagination, Most Revolutionary is a story of, by, and for revolution, including revolutionary ways in which people view themselves and the realities and possibilities of the world that we all might help create, or fail to in increasingly irreversible ways. Most Revolutionary is a story for a good and livable future, if there is to be any one at all.
MOST REVOLUTIONARY - A SERIALIZED NOVEL
The Dakota Access Pipeline hulks in the ground beneath them like a long and dangerous time bomb. They know it. They feel it.
Three eco-warriors. They are prepared to defuse the DAPL bomb in a way that no one else dares. Hit and run, has to be. A three-woman guerrilla army. Strike force of the Americas. They tried everything else, legal and not. As lawsuits and protests come and go, the oil stops and starts, and only one thing never fails — blow shit up. It's the most effective strategy they've found so far. Don't blame them — it's what they know, what they've learned, what they care to do. Sometimes things are exactly what they are. Sometimes you fight fire with fire because it's all you've got — even if you know in the end you'll burn.
They are there now, they are alive now, be with them, the three rabble rousers from the Hawkeye state: Jenna Ryzcek, Jasmine Maldonado, and Sabia Perez. They park in the dark and cold of northwestern Iowa next to a stubbled cornfield along Highway 7 near Prairie Creek and North Raccoon River.
“We're here on the stolen land of several Plains tribes,” says Sabia. “Let's remember that.”
“You know it,” says Jasmine.
“That's a fact,” says Jenna.
“It's time to act with honor,” says Sabia.
“We need to be careful,” says Jasmine.
“We need to act,” says Jenna. “If we don’t stop the flow of oil, we’re all cooked. The planet fried. Anyone here lovesick, carsick, or homesick?”
“Fuck no,” says Sabia. “Let's do this.”
“Should we really be out here all alone acting on our own?” says Jasmine.
“The whole world's behind us,” says Jenna.
“You sure?”
“Earth, Girl. It's rooting for us. Fucking own it.”
The Earth. You can smell it — mud and river — creek and field — farm — a patch of woods — damp night air. And oil — the bitter tang.
It's late. It's so very, very late.
Jenna leans on the steering wheel of the old Chevy Bolt and looks into the sweep of headlights at a cluster of heavy machinery parked near the blocky industrial infrastructure of a pipeline transfer station. They've scouted this.
“That's it,” says Jenna. “That's the target.”
From the front passenger seat, Jasmine scans the machinery, metallic, toxic, inhuman, their adversary. She wants it gone. She studies Jenna whose lips move silently as she reviews their plan of attack.
Sabia leans forward from the back seat, three loaded packs of gear beside her. “Let's do it,” she says.
“Stay in the car, Sabia,” says Jasmine. “It’s too risky.”
“No way,” says Sabia. “You go, I go. No one stops me.”
“Sabia, you can come with us, but keep your distance,” says Jenna. “Stay back.”
“She’s only 15,” says Jasmine.
“I’m only 34,” says Jenna. “You’re only 28. We’re all too young for this. And there’s no way anyone stops any of us.”
Jenna and Jasmine are lovers. Sabia is in love with them both. She thinks it's cute, their affair. She thinks it won't last and doesn't need to. How can it matter now? They have a job to do this night and every night for the rest of their lives: How to be revolutionary in a reactionary world?
Sabia is certain that Jenna and Jasmine feel the same. Why wouldn't they? The world is being torn apart. Their world. They know it. Can't stand it. Goddamn climate collapse.
Fucking nature girls for life, from life, of life, from the start — splashing in creeks, racing through forests, skiing on snow-layered fields, climbing trees, swimming lakes, playing, breathing, and working in the natural world. Come snow. Come rain. Come wind. Come sun.
Into the wind. Against the wind. With the wind. Through the wind. By the wind. Of the wind. As the wind. Rough and raw, they go. It's the world that lets them fly. They know they are nothing without it.
They try to learn from their Native allies across the continent, across all continents as they cast their lives into the struggle over the source of life. How could they not be who they really are? Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia are become land and water defenders by this late hour or they've become nothing at all.
Just as the moon reflects the light of the sun and the sky colors sunrays, so the power of the sun, even at night, fuels Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia in their passion and work there on the prairie and all across the fruited plain. They feel they are the light the world has been waiting for.
No one but they know where they are tonight or what they are doing in this remote field, though it's far from their first sabotage, far from their first takeover, far from their first fight, and very far from their last.
The breathtaking solitude and staggering isolation of this dark field and the covert nature of their endeavor may be the great flaw in their line of resistance, they know that too. The attack tonight might be considered almost a private revolutionary blow on behalf of the public. So be it. The big carbon bombardiers, the ghastly fuel fossils would like to see them fail entirely, but the three eco-warriors can only see win. Win something, somehow. So it's cloaked action tonight, torches not daggers. Stealth is their greatest weakness, their greatest strength, the path they can see in the dark of the night and the dark of the times.
Are they fearful? They are nerved. They are afraid not to act. Afraid for themselves, afraid for their people, afraid for their country, afraid for their world and all creatures in it. They use that fear. They neither know nor care at what hard and merciless point they might be stopped. Prison? Death? Irrelevance? There's no stopping now. Though they risk death and worse, the reward is life, much life otherwise lost, life worth living. And so on principle and on instinct, they plan and they move. They decide to risk it all here and now. Together as one, and yet, each in their own way.
Jenna, a nurse in her thirties. Jasmine, a teacher in her twenties. Sabia, first year in high school and a grower on her abuelo's small farm. Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia. No tears, plenty of fears. Minds made up. Plan clear. It's a go. Something is going to burn tonight.
Who is anyone – compared to them, compared to anyone — who is anyone to judge? There are laws and then there are laws. Higher laws, lower laws, and outright lawless laws. They are to judge. Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia. They preside. Human beings acting in self defense. So they rule.
Jenna kills the headlights. She slaps and drums the dashboard of the Chevy Bolt, as if to wake everyone up. She pounds the rigid blunt polymer. She enjoys the sting against her fingers and palms.
Then she takes Jasmine's hand, warm and reassuring. She nods. Strengthened, they let go.
“Let's get it,” says Jasmine.
“Let's go,” says Jenna.
“Follow me!” says Sabia as she grabs her pack and leaps out the door.
The bouncing lights of three powerful LED flashlights are Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia charging the fearsome and unfeeling metallic dragon breathing terminal fire on us all.
Oh, America. What are you become America? Founded as Empire, from sea to shining sea, Manifest Destiny, killer of the indigenous, enslaver of captive Africans, mass destroyer of beasts and plants alike. America what have you done, what have you wrought, what are you doing?
As it happens, tonight is election night in the fearsome and mighty United States of America.
Another farce of a corporate carnival election. Kill me now.
The liberal candidate for President, Kristen Silver will soon be declared victor, a cause for celebration to some, and disappointment, depression, and outrage to many others, though mostly her elevation engenders a collective shrug across the country. And world. When is any great change, so terribly needed, ever to arrive?
To Jenna and Jasmine and Sabia there can be no Presidential winner when the dominant candidates are bought and sold in the dominant media, by and for Big Money, or as Sabia calls it, the Capitalist Alliance of Corporate America — CACA — the corporate state — the banks, high finance, the wealthiest profiteers — the Empire — where poverty is a policy choice, the policy choice of CACA, and so much worse, chosen from on high and put on the people down low. CACA rules the World. Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia never forget. That's why they race armed into the belly of the beast tonight.
To them, it's the Empire's election and nothing for the People, a charade for the People, a grotesque and ludicrous outrage, a neon fraud on a global stage. There's no democracy where there's no democracy. They've learned. Some things, some people, some policies are what they are, especially when they try so hard to appear otherwise.
Take for example the US Constitution — as much a bigoted white male supremacist slave-owners' document of Empire as it is a trace of any pathetic form of democracy.
Oh, but don't let it be said, let alone taught, in respectable circles. Shield the children! No, no, instead, be sure to call the US Constitution a wondrous sacred document of the Enlightenment! Implicitly Christian and explicitly holy and to be revered by all good loyal consumers in the most brainwashed and obedient of Empires.
Well, Sabia is no vassal, no serf, no slave. No tool of Empire. She will blow shit up tonight. Fuck it. The US Constitution doesn't know who it's messing with when it's messing with Sabia Perez. She's dug in, deep, literally, on principle, she's dug in deep in dirt and blood, in sweat on a planet of tears, so deep she can barely see the sun above the ground.
But we'll get to that – how very deep in Sabia is dug.
For now, look around, be aware. Democratic or Republican candidate for President, for Governor, for Senate, for House — does it matter? Sure. Fascist Conglomerate versus Regular Conglomerate. One will get you to the cliff edge faster. You're still going over the edge. Unless someone does something to prevent it. Who better, who other than Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia? Where better than Iowa? When better than tonight. To Hell with your precious ears, your painful minds, and your deathly lack of vision and action. Get out of the way. Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia are far into their Winter Journey.
Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia, they know who they are. They know what they stand for. Friends, allies, lovers — an explosive mix. They know they have big work in their grasp, bigger work than electing the next high finance fake of a leader. They know they must wound the terminal beast, Big Oil, one of the lethal parasites destroying the planet and all creatures on it.
Warriors against climate collapse. Against tyrannical rule over the peoples. Against dollars shooting bullets and dropping bombs. Their hatred is pure. After all, it should be easy to hate Evil. Necessary. Totally on their own tonight, they entirely comprehend why, and they chew on it like a drug.
Locked and loaded, right there in icy northwestern Iowa, in the middle of the beast's belly where the Dakota Access Pipeline knifes the midsection of America, of Turtle Island, the bullied and abused continent, Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia run fearless in their latest attack against the infernal. The long tail of the metallic dragon gouges the land from the Bakken Formation in northwestern North Dakota to an oil depot in southcentral Illinois, near Patoka, before passing by way of another pipeline to refineries and depots in Nederland, Texas, on the edge of the Gulf of Mexico.
To Sabia and friends, DAPL is hellfire that must be fought with hellfire, simple as that. This is the time and place to burn, to melt, to break one of the many apocalyptic knives gashing Earth.
The damage, it's already done here in Buena Vista County along Prairie Creek where the planet-cooking oil pipeline has leaked, contaminating farmland and waterways, exactly as predicted, exactly as planet-obliterating pipelines do.
The replacement pipe has been laid, the ghoulish flow of oil and the Earth-cooking release of carbon dioxide soon to be resumed. Maybe not so fast now. Sabia, Jenna, and Jasmine have traveled from their homes in the southeast corner of the state because the pipeline comes for them too, and for all. Who should not resent the knifing of their home, their only home? They intend to stop it now. Sabia is so ready. Jenna and Jasmine have shown her how. The oil stops here. They will blow it all up, if need be. They will blow everything up, shut it all down.
“The Dakota Access Pipeline goes down tonight!” says Sabia.
Beneath heavy backpacks, they race through the field, Jenna leading to a group of parked bulldozers and excavators and a crane.
“Let’s move, let’s move!” shouts Jenna. “Come on, Sabia!”
“Come on, Jenna!” shouts Sabia.
“Come on, Jasmine!” shouts Jenna.
“Let’s go! Let’s go!” shouts Jasmine.
They run past bulldozers in the dark, then crawl under a fence. By a series of pipeline valves, Jenna removes an acetylene torch from her backpack. They each take out welding helmets and face shields and put them on. Jenna lights the torch and begins to melt a valve.
Jasmine turns her head from the flame, lifts her face shield, smells gas. “Stop, Jenna, stop!”
Jenna kills the torch and lifts her face shield with Sabia.
“Smell that?” says Jasmine.
In the shifting breeze the air smells contaminated, an acrid bite. It's distinct from the stench and scorch of liquid metal under torch.
“Fuck,” says Jenna.
“Fuck what?” says Sabia. “Burn this shit.”
“You're making me nervous, Jasmine,” says Jenna. “Or if it's gas, maybe I smell it too.”
“It’s a line for oil,” says Sabia.
“Somebody pumped in some gas, smells like,” says Jasmine. “Maybe they knew we would sabotage these repairs like we did the valves at the other transfer station.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” says Jenna.
“They're trying to kill us. I told you it was too dangerous to bring Sabia. And now if they bust us, they bust her too. If they don't kill us first.”
“Listen. No,” says Jenna. “If the cops ever catch us, we tell them we met Sabia at a Catholic Worker meeting in Des Moines and never saw her again. Got it?”
Jasmine does not seem convinced. “Okay.”
“I can take care of myself,” says Sabia.
Jenna slams the torch to the ground. “Let’s burn some fucking dozers.”
They pack up and crawl back under the fence.
They remove cans of motor oil from their bags and pour the oil on bulldozers, excavators, and the crane. They puncture more cans of oil, stuff in rags, put them on the seats of the heavy machinery, and set fire to the rags. The work is dirty and dangerous, athletic and strikingly aesthetic. Skilled hard labor. They love it.
Soon they run breathless back to the car. They laugh and holler. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”
The machinery explodes. The horizon burns.
A lovely moon slips through the clouds.
Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia dance in the flames.
And then they flee.
Condemned to Life!
In a few years, Sabia Perez will be the most fierce and feared person in the world.
Not tonight. Tonight she is a kid in Iowa trying to do the right thing.
In a few years, Sabia Perez will overpower power, and the world will owe her for a new chance at life.
Not tonight. Tonight, armed with torches, rags, and small cans of motor oil, Sabia tries to keep up with her much older friends.
In a few years, Sabia Perez will bring history's greatest Empire to its knees.
Not tonight. Tonight Sabia is eager to dance after burning a few Earth-destroying machines.
Up to her neck in the fight against oil and Empire in rural Iowa, Sabia Perez is isolated but not alone. In the Dakotas six hundred miles to the northwest, the Water Protectors and many Native allies continue the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, in other sections than the one that Sabia and friends attack tonight.
One thousand miles to the east, the Catskill Mountainkeepers helped win a permanent ban against gas fracking across parts of four states in the Delaware River Basin, and their allied eco activists won a fracking ban across three states entirely: Vermont, Maryland, and New York.
Thirteen hundred miles to the west in Nevada, the Shoshone people fight to protect the Ruby mountains from oil and gas exploitation.
Three thousand miles to the south, indigenous groups and farmers in Ecuador with their attorney Stephen Donziger continue the battle after winning a $10 billion settlement for lethal pollution against Texaco-become-Chevron oil company. The settlement goes unpaid except by vengeance against Donziger and the indigenous, in the form of retaliatory political persecution in the US court system, taken over by corporate prosecutors. But the indigenous and the farmers and Donziger battle on. They're in the fight of their lives. And Sabia's. And ours.
The fights go on and on. There are good guys and there are bad guys in some parts of life. Sabia says, “Fuck off or fuck in.” She's one of the good guys, in the eyes of her allies and her conscience. In what she does and why she does it. And she's one of the bad guys, in the eyes of the corporate state and high finance.
All will judge.
This is what Sabia sees: the blank and glazed, crazed eyes of the corporate state, rapacious in its profiteering, fossil-fueled, dollar-addicted. Gun and bomb terrified and terrifying. Sabia knows all too well exactly how she and her allies are seen: as terrorists fit for prison, or death.
Scary stuff to some. To Sabia, well, Sabia decided long ago — like Huck, in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — if the world goes against the truth, then she will go against the world.
If the world goes against sanity, against life, against human rights, then Sabia will fight back. In her own way. As if she were living The Saga of Sabia Perez. Which she is. And she knows it.
Sabia fights back and hopes she will always fight back. She has so far.
Sabia, Jenna, Jasmine and many of their allies are well aware that their fight is against Empire and that Empire by definition and deed means controlling, conquering, and capitalizing. Empire rules by force, by propaganda, by any means necessary — often violent and deadly, a highly organized form of cashing in and cashing out. This is what you can see with your head above sand and your brain unwashed — “May your brains be ever unwashed,” says Sabia. She will straight up hit you with truth, as she sees it.
In a fucking World of hurt. As Empire goes against the People, so Sabia will go against Empire.
It killed her mother. Empire.
And it kills people all around her all the time. Anecdotally, statistically, in reality.
And so she fights. A civilized country would keep fossil fuels in the ground, keep Earth and all creatures alive for one more day, one more century, one more eon, one more everlasting chance at life.
Sabia happens to be civilized. That's why the profiteering predators of the corporate state find her obscene.
To Hell with that. Sabia and friends are out to get Empire tonight, as in nights past, and nights future — if there are to be many nights future. Or any. The ever-present threat of nuclear apocalypse is yet another monster that Jenna, Jasmine, and Sabia look to fly into battle against whenever they can.
So many monsters, so little time.
All these pissant movies about fictional monsters and cartoon villains – what a joke. Earth right now is in the fight of its life. Someone ought to make the Great Terran Movie, write the Great Terran Novel. A thousand times over. Recreate culture. Assign art. Engage in its greatest task ever.
Sabia may ride her horse higher than most. That's okay, that's Sabia.
Who is she anyway? A bit player. A country girl. A water lover.
Sabia and friends latch onto the most fragile wheel of Empire they can find, the one they can wrench most close at hand, the deadly stinking wheel of oil pumping and spinning wildly out of control in a dark remote field in northwestern Iowa.
Sabia Perez wouldn't know how to sugarcoat shit if her life depended on it. It might be in her nature. Anyway, it's in her now. So here is told her story the way it deserves to be told, with all the audacity and accuracy and power and timelessness of a desperate time, in a raging world.
Oh, to not sugarcoat shit! No to you, Kind Reader. Won't do it. Won't bury the lead, pull the punch, slant indirect, water down the ever-living milk, the great stream of life. We need to respect Sabia, because our lives depend on the Sabias of the world who cut through the crap and actually say something. And do something. At the right time, in the right place, with the right people. Leftward-Ho! Truth-tellers, water defenders, life givers. Seekers, movers, shakers to the good.
We make no apologies, like Sabia, to anyone for anything in the telling of the tale that is the Saga of Sabia Perez — Most Revolutionary.
Never heard of the girl! Sabia who? Oh, might have seen her at a Catholic Worker meeting in Des Moines, once or twice. Easy to forget. She's only a kid. A kid from the countryside, I guess. Don't know her really.
The fucking FBI tracks them down. Took awhile, given that Jenna Ryzcek and Jasmine Maldonado left a long and vocal trail of sit-ins and blockades, demonstrations at courthouses and corporate headquarters, hunger strikes, write-in campaigns and marches and rallies and legal challenges — apart from their lengthy string of fire-bombings — hard to miss.
Even the mind-forged manacles of the FBI can figure it out, eventually.
The agency looks around, asks around, putters around, and knows it must be these two most prominent, most pointed, most acerbic, most active, most bold and unrelenting leaders on the scene, Jenna and Jasmine.
The FBI finally gathers enough evidence and makes their move. Jenna at her hospital, Jasmine at her school. The agents cuff them in front of patients, students, and colleagues. They make quite an impression. Quite a lesson for all.
Society's best are criminals. Society's worst are — ooh, don't say it!
Someone might get mad!
Fortunately, the FBI miss Sabia entirely. Jenna and Jasmine are good to their word. Sabia is never caught. In fact, never suspected, too late to the action, too careful in communication to be detected. The FBI too slow to the point.
Jenna pleads guilty to reduce the severity of the punishment, then is blindsided by an unprecedented charge of terrorism and hit with lengthy prison time. Jasmine too now expects to be convicted and smeared with the terrorism charge before being thrown behind bars, caged, in a modern-day dungeon, like Jenna.
Sabia might lose her mind, her shit, if she were of the type. She's not. She could spit though. And spit again. And she does, walking through her family’s long-established orchard, tending the fruit and nut trees. She makes pruning cuts and ties down branches to improve crop yield. She's so mad. Terrorists! More like saviors! Fuck that shit.
She will show them, show everyone, the courts, the country — who are really the terrorists. Not her! Not her allies!
Sabia works out her madness among the upright and bountiful ever-living, ever-giving trees of the orchard. She makes her vows right there in the theater of nuts — acorns and hazels, walnuts and hickories — hard and smooth, stubborn, nutritious, and sweet. Water grown, sun-ripened, bark-clothed sprouts of Earth. Some days, Sabia feels she has already died and come back as a tree of life, a nut tree, disguised in a human body and fully empowered by the human brain.
Jenna wears an ankle monitor on home confinement, while her attorney continues the fight by way of a technicality, her prison report date soon to be set.
Jasmine's attorneys also stretch the legal fight as long as possible. She remains out on bail, as the supposed follower of Jenna, not the leader.
Jenna pleading guilty — Sabia can barely stand it. She would never do that. No guilt for her. Fuck no. No deal. She is wholly innocent, after all. They are all wholly innocent. Sabia would fight to the death before pleading guilty to saving the world.
In the meantime, Sabia intends to set things straight. She knows she needs to. She has no idea how. Absolutely no idea. Not yet.
Some things you can't blow up. Some things you can't burn the shit out of. You need a different kind of power, or luck, though Sabia is no one to ever go looking for anything she cannot control. Not luck, nor love. Not now. No time. Sabia has no time to play. Her Mamá is dead. Her Papá too. Through no fault of their own. Her Abuela as well.
Sabia has been far from a carefree child since those dark early days. She leaves little to nothing to chance. She makes a living already off her website and mail-order plant business. A high school senior, she makes her own way in the world – with a huge assist from her Abuelo, Roca. She controls everything she can.
It is true, however, that Sabia would never turn down any bit of good luck that may slip into her grasp — however ultimately dangerous it might turn out to be.
