'Tree-Sitter' has an eerie similarity to sabotage cases.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

Sometimes the boundaries between life and fiction blur. That's the case with the novel "The Tree-Sitter," the story of an East Coast university student who spends a summer in Eugene caught up with environmental activism that morphs into eco-sabotage.

The novel, by Suzanne Matson, was released in February, and the questions it raises in its final chapter are answered darkly by the recent real-life arrests in Eugene for arsons and other attacks that date back years.

Matson, who will be in Eugene on Tuesday at the University of Oregon Bookstore to read and sign copies of her book, said she had not kept up with the news of the arrests and was surprised to learn of them.

"It really is an interesting coincidence and of course, it's pure coincidence," she said.

Matson, an English professor at Boston College, grew up in Portland. She was inspired to write the book after years of flying back from the East and seeing from the air the stark checkerboard clear-cuts that mark Oregon forests.

"It's rather heartbreaking," she said.

At the same time, she found herself wondering about the eco-sabotage she saw on the news, and what kind of moral lines one would have to cross to blow up cars or burn down buildings in the name of some greater good.

What would an East Coast woman of education and means do if presented with the issues, especially if she was an outsider, Matson wondered. So she conjured a character, Julie, who falls in love with an environmentalist named Neil.

He coaxes her to spend a summer of activism in Oregon, and together they head for the nearest tree-sit. Before long, the activism becomes more convoluted. Julie finds herself spying as a temporary employee at a timber mill. And she's at the wheel when two others place a bomb at a car dealership selling SUVs.

Matson did most of her early research online, visiting activist Web sites. She also came to Eugene and spent some time at a Fall Creek area timber sale, where activists had set up tree-sitting platforms.

One of them, who went by the name Wily Coyote, showed her around and answered her questions.

"He offered to let me go up," Matson said. "Because I am the mother of three young children, I thought, 'Mommy shouldn't break a leg.' '

Three plot strands run through the tale: the political story of activism; the love story between Julie and Neil; and Julie's emotional separation from her mother.

While Matson's characters are fictional, they move through a very real Eugene landscape against a "ripped from the headlines" narrative.

In the final chapter, Julie, safely back East and two years away from her fateful Oregon summer, asks this question: "How far does an action carry its consequence into the future, like the butterfly in Beijing whose wing brushes the air into a ripple that will ripen to a hurricane in Mexico?"

Matson almost didn't come to ask the question. She only added the last chapter after a friend read an early draft of the book and raised the point.

"My writer friend said, 'I really want her to feel like this isn't finished, in terms of the potential real world consequences.' I thought that was a marvelous suggestion, so I rewrote the ending," Matson said.

In the real world, the consequences are playing out in the courts with 11 people charged since December for a range of crimes from arson and other attacks on lumber mills, car dealerships and other sites to conspiracy to blow up a U.S. Forest Service lab and other targets. The suspects face a sobering range of sentences - from five years in prison to a life behind bars.

AUTHOR EVENT

Tuesday: At 7 p.m. at the UO Bookstore, Suzanne Matson will read from her novel "The Tree-Sitter."