I was late to boot camp and I was worried. Not because I feared a tongue-lashing from some ill-tempered drill sergeant, but because after five hours of driving and one speeding ticket, I figured the way my luck was going, I would probably miss the whole thing. A half-hour late, I finally drove into the city of Arcata and found the street I was looking for. I couldn't tell if I was too late at first because there were only a handful of people standing around the aluminum warehouse that resembled a small airplane hanger. The street in front of the building was even more vacant, but my directions told me it was the right place - headquarters.

I walked past the group outside and peeked in the door. The building was vacant except for a rag-tag collection of used couches and easy chairs. A large map of what I presumed to be the battlefield hung from a chalkboard in the middle of the room. For a moment, I feared the trainees had already ventured into some part of that grid. I turned to the people outside and asked them if the other trainees had already gone.

"Not at all," said a guy with long, dark hair tied behind his head and a trim goatee on his face. He told me they were waiting for a couple more people and then they were going to some park up the street because it was a nice day. He said the training would take about four or five hours and suggested I get some munchies while the group waited to see if anybody else showed up.

"When we're all done we're going to play some ultimate Frisbee," he added. "You ever played?"

Later, during the training, I learned that Mike, who goes by his forest name Sleeper, joined North Coast Earth First! in 1996, when actions against the logging industry brought over 7,000 protesters to Humboldt County. At the time, Sleeper thought the movement would always have the same magnitude of that year, but he sadly admitted to us that it had dwindled ever since. Sleeper began his life as an activist at a Nevada nuclear facility in the early '90s. But it wasn't until he started protesting with Earth First! That he learned and adopted the discipline of non-violence that he spent that sunny Sunday afternoon teaching us.

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