Beaver Queen Pageant - Meet the judges

Trip N. Rivers, our next judge, took a more circuitous route, but has arrived in the same place as our other beaver cognoscenti. She describes her journey:

Long-time Durham wetland activist Trip N. Rivers is one of the six co-founders of the Durham-based Southerners On New Ground (SONG). Founded in 1993, SONG is about building transformative models of organizing that connects race, class, culture, gender, and sexual identity/orientation in southern streams. SONG knows diversity creates a vibrant ecosystem. Trip N. Rivers was named one of the "1000 Beavers for Peace for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize".

This year's pageant has Trip N. euphoric about the days she left her family's lodge. In the summer of 1966, after graduating from high school in upstate New York,

Trip N. did volunteer work for Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD) in the West Village. In exchange for her work she was given the warmth and comfort of a NY den for the summer. She remembers the experience as one of the best summers of her life.

Her job for the project job was to work the 24-hour hotline for anyone freaking out on Acid (LSD) and talking "them down" if they were on a bad trip. And, letting folks know that Vitamin B and/or Niacin would bring them from a bad trip. In fact, she took her own advice after her first and only trip in NY City's psychedelic waters. The hydraulics were just too much.

But she could not forget the color and motion of trippy waters. She then hitched out to San Francisco with two other friends at the end of that summer and ended up in
Haight-Ashbury and went to the Haight Ashbury Switchboard to find a place to stay. There Trip N. Rivers stayed with draft resister Vincent O'Connor of the Catholic Peace Fellowship. He was tied in with the War Resisters League/West office which is where Trip N. got her first ever movement job. That job ultimately led to her taking a job with War Resisters League/Southeast located in Durham, NC. Which is how she landed in Durham back in 1982. One of the folks on the hiring committee was Joanne Able of the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association.

Small world isn't it??!! Peace, Love, Beaver!