I have been doing some creative writing, and I thought I would share this piece with you – you might find it amusing, you might not! It’s more of a character profile that a proper story (so don’t complain it has no plot).
The Green Avenger, real name Toby Maguire, has spent the last thirty days and nights aloft in the tree that he calls Aurora. Aurora is in danger of being cut down to make way for another runway at the nearby airport – a fate that the Green Avenger believes would be a tragic end to a two hundred year history.
It takes a great deal of stamina to spend a month in a tree, but the Green Avenger has it in spades – at thirty-two he is a small, wiry person and he has the constitution of someone who has eaten nothing but lentils and fresh vegetables for years. There’s not an ounce of spare flesh on his bones, and he leaps around the tree branches like a hairless gibbon.
Toby’s story begins like anyone else’s. He has two parents, both middle class and unremarkable. He went to school, then university, and achieved a first class degree from Edinburgh in Life Sciences.
It was whilst working at his first job that Toby’s life took a new path. Details are sketchy, but it seems that the amount of paper generated in the average office caused Toby to have an epiphany, and he became an environmental campaigner. Frustrated with conventional campaigning (which in itself leaves somewhat of a paper trail) he took to direct action – protecting trees wherever they are in trouble. The Green Avenger was born.
The Green Avenger has left behind family, friends, career and personal hygiene for a life in the treetops. Wherever a construction project threatens tree life the Green Avenger appears, bringing his determination and small carbon footprint to the scene.
To date, the Green Avenger has spent a total of two years in the rainforest canopy in the Amazon. His stay in the area was brought to a close when he was finally dislodged from a felled tree and deported. Although in good spirits, he was weak from dehydration and malnutrition and required a considerable period of rest before embarking on his next mission – six months in the tree plantations of Indonesia, preventing paper companies from felling old growth forests and replacing them with ordered rows of fast-growing saplings.
The Green Avenger does not allow his periods of being tied to tree trunks to prevent him from spreading his message of salvation far and wide. His first book, ‘My Life In Trunks’, is being published – in electronic form only – next month, and he regularly posts on his blog (‘My Best Friend is a Tree’) from the field, relying on a tiny iPhone keypad to translate his thoughts into words (he uses a solar charger to keep his battery topped up). As far as the Green Avenger is concerned, the future is very green indeed.
© Copyright Emma Cooper, 2009. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction; any resemblance to persons either living or dead is just unfortunate :)
