There are conflicts in every family. And well, in my family we have what you might call … a slight conflict. You see, my sister’s a firefighter - my brother is a convicted arsonist.
Caroline, who is my twin, was the 15th woman in the San Francisco Fire Department, out of 1500 men. She became one of only two women on the Rescue Squad, the team that goes into fires without hoses, with the sole intention of pulling people out. They also search for bodies in the Bay, rescue people off cliffs and bridges, and crawl into tunnels after collapses. This television show called The Bravest followed Caroline’s squad one day, and I saw footage of my sister saving a teenager who’d been run over by a train. I saw a newspaper photo of her carrying an old woman out of a burning building. She survived 2 explosions and a roof collapse. Caroline always chose to work the busiest fire stations in the poorest areas because she could save more people that way.
My younger brother Jonathan, on the other hand, had a secret life none of us knew about. We knew he cleaned antique rugs for work, was a wildlife photographer in his spare time, and he always had a girlfriend he was crazy about who was usually quiet and pretty.
But he was also a member of the ALF, the Animal Liberation Front, an underground network of activists who break into labs or fur farms to rescue animals from their cages. Jonathan liberated dogs from research hospitals, minks from fur farms, wild mustangs from corrals, and calves imprisoned for veal. Hamsters, rabbits - thousands of animals. And even though I didn’t know exactly what he was doing, I knew my brother. He’d been a vegan since he was a teenager and he took in every stray that came to his door. So I probably shouldn’t have been surprised at what happened next.
Cavel West was a slaughterhouse in Oregon that killed 500 horses a week and sent the meat to Europe. I’d seen a video of what they did to the horses in there, and it had made me physically sick. I’d waited for the sickness to pass, and went on with my life. But Jonathan couldn’t do that. In 1997, with other ALF members, he burned the slaughterhouse to the ground.
The two people genetically closest to me in the world are a firefighter and an arsonist. Me… I’ve been afraid of fire since I was a kid, ever since I read a LIFE magazine article about a burn ward. The description of the excruciating pain of burns and skin grafts scared me so much that I told my best friend Judith that the worst way to die would be by fire. So, while my twin was saving people from fire, my brother was saving animals with fire, and I was just trying to stay away from the whole thing.
You might think this would cause conflict in our family. But it doesn’t. There were things we’d get on each other about: Jonathan smoked and it worried Caroline and me. He wasn’t a health nut – he was vegan for the animals. I would irritate them when I got that “bossy older sister” tone of voice, and Caroline annoyed us when she didn’t return our calls for days. But the issue of fire never tore us apart.
Actually, Caroline and Jonathan are more alike in some ways than Caroline and I are, and we’re identical twins. Caroline was a vegetarian teased around her firehouse for looking for feed bowls in every burning home, in case there might be animals cowering under beds, needing to be rescued. She’d put the cats in her turnout coat and carry the dogs in her arms. The animals never ran from her, as if they knew this strange creature encased in 80 lbs of gear, appearing through the smoke, was there to help them.
And, soon after he set the slaughterhouse on fire, Jonathan became a firefighter himself. It was like penance, only none of us knew it at the time. He, like my sister, wanted to save lives. In his small Oregon town of 3,500 people there was one emergency call about every 72 hours, and Jonathan was the first to respond to countless car accidents, medicals, and fires. He was awarded Firefighter of the Year 3 times in 4 years, and soon he was promoted to lieutenant. He used to tease Caroline that he outranked her. She’d laugh and I could tell she was proud of him.
Two years ago, the FBI arrested Jonathan for the arson at Cavel West Slaughterhouse. The United States attorney general Alberto Gonzales, and the head of the FBI Robert Mueller, had a press conference, calling him and other members of the Animal Liberation Front “America’s most dangerous domestic terrorists”. My little brother, who would never hurt a fly- and I mean that literally - on a par with Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
My sister, although she always supported my brother’s animal rights activities, says he was wrong to use fire like he did. She’d responded to a lot of arsons, and it angered her that the arsonist could risk so many lives. Even Jonathan regretted it immediately afterwards. In his statement to the court he said, “I thought of my sister Caroline, who I am incredibly proud of, responding to a fire like Cavel West and putting her life on the line. I thought about the firefighters who responded in 1997 and felt deep regret and shame.” When the judge sentenced Jonathan to more than 4 years in prison, she told him he should’ve purchased the 25,000 horses that are killed each year at Cavel West Slaughterhouse and found homes for them, instead of burning the building.
A building, by the way, that had so much blood running from it that it overflowed the local sewage system on several occasions. A building the local townspeople had tried to shut down for ten years, because they couldn’t stand the screams of the horses.
But I cannot say he shouldn’t have burned that building. See, I write checks to worthy charities, I wave signs, I’m what you call an involved citizen, but honestly, I’ve always remained removed from real suffering. And I’ve never saved a life. My twin and my brother saved lives, and faced suffering head on.
They’ve both seen things I haven’t seen, things I don’t think I want to see. Caroline assisted at a stillbirth in a Denny’s bathroom where the mother was so high on crack she didn’t even care that her baby was dead. Jonathan told me that no matter how long he was behind bars, it wouldn’t be as bad as what animals go through. He wept when he said it, and not for himself. He was weeping for those 20 dead German Shepherds he’d seen lying in a pile in the corner of a lab, for the monkeys that live decades in a space smaller than your dining room table, and for the cats he’d rescued that had only ever been out of their tiny cages to have their brains cut open. When you see suffering up close like that, it changes you.
Years ago, I was on the VA grounds in Westwood and I heard dogs barking in that desperate, scared way where you know something’s not right. I went to investigate and came to a locked building, which I was told was the research lab. I stood outside for a moment, wearing my vegan shoes and my MAC not-tested-on-animals makeup. Then I turned around and I walked away, willing myself not to think about what was going on in there. And it worked. Last month, I was on the VA grounds again, and you know what, those dogs didn’t even cross my mind.
I talk to my sister every day. Caroline retired from the fire department after a knee injury she got crawling into a burning building, and is now an author with her third book being published this year.
I write daily to my brother in prison. Jonathan remains a vegan in there, which is a challenge. He’s quit smoking. He reads a lot of books on topics like global warming and the oppression of Native Americans, and worries about the animals he cannot help. He’ll be released in 2011.
My sister the firefighter and my brother the arsonist - they are both my heroes.
