MOSCOW – Carrying her signature sign that reads “Stop Exxon Genocide,” 68-year-old Ellen Roskovich was first on the protest scene and one of the last to leave early Wednesday morning after three more megaloads destined for Canadian oil fields rolled through town.

Just a few months ago, Roskovich was among nearly 300 demonstrators who tried to curtail the twice-weekly parades of oversize infrastructure equipment.ith her sign this week, Roskovich was among nine protesters at first, then just two, or perhaps four, after a minor accident south of town delayed passage of the Exxon/Mobil equipment.

Roskovich, a retired former restaurant owner here, said she’s missed only one demonstration against the loads. “I just have very, very strong feelings. In the beginning, I thought people were saying, ‘Oh, they’re going to damage the streets or disrupt my life.’ ”

But she said the demonstrations eventually represented something much bigger. “The bottom line is, there are people who are suffering and it bothers me. It bothers me a lot because of the pollution.”

As the temperature dropped below freezing, Roskovich was joined by 56-year-old Maree McHugh of Moscow, another one of the more stalwart demonstrators. “The tar sands project. That’s what we’re protesting; Exxon’s not paying attention to what’s right and proper in terms of the ecology, the health of the land and the people. And do we really need to extract oil from that place?”

Moscow is one of the few places, if not the only place, where protests against the Canadian tar sands projects have continued, albeit in ever-diminishing numbers. That hasn’t discouraged the likes of Roskovich and McHugh. “It doesn’t discourage me at all,” McHugh, a nurse practitioner, said. “I’m just proud of the people of Moscow who have the conscientious awareness that this is what the problem is.”

The earlier demonstrations attracted the likes of Moscow Mayor Nancy Chaney and members of the city council who came to observe. City police and county sheriff’s deputies also joined with state police to ensure safety and, on fewer than a dozen occasions, arrest people who defied orders to stay on the sidewalks of Washington Street as the loads moved north in tandem through town.

Bill Beck, a school custodian in neighboring Pullman, said he’s another one of the die-hard protesters. “Why do I do it? I do it because I feel better if I speak out against injustice. The injustice is in the name of profits for very few people.” Beck said it’s time to look away from oil and toward new energy technologies.

“Staying out here in the cold and watching these incredible industrial behemoths come by, reminds me that there is a different way of thinking,” Beck said. “I think one of the things we can do is cut off the arteries for getting oil out of the land-locked area where it is. Stopping that would make a huge difference. If they can’t get the dirty oil out, it’s not worth the dirty money.”

But stopping the loads, said Helen Yost, spokeswoman for Wild Idaho Rising Tide, has proved difficult, if not impossible to date.

“We can’t seem to get them into court because we can’t find a lawyer,” Yost said.

Ideally, she said, demonstrators hoped a test case that goes to the heart of the big oil issue could rise for the local protests. But that hasn’t happened.

“We’ve had a good couple dozen most of the time,” she said of protest numbers in the last few months. “It’s such a shame because if you don’t have a lawyer you can’t take your own state government to court.”

Yost said the state of Idaho should have never allowed passage of the loads over state highways.

“As we get down to the last few, we’re maybe going to have a going-away party that will draw more people. The ideal is that they would no longer come up this road.”

And yes, Roskovich said she’ll be there, with her signature sign, to the bitter end.

(By David Johnson, The Lewiston Tribune)