by Kristin Kaye

One thing that I have discovered as an author is that when I want to write a book, it’s really the book that wants to write me. As if the unwritten story is an invitation to delve into a mysterious question, to explore every inch of a new perspective, or to discover as-yet unknown dimensions of a previously held assumption. The invitation beckons a journey not only within, but out into the world as well. And the story won’t let me rest until I have looked under every rock—or in the case of Tree Dreams, up a tree as well.

The seed of the story first planted itself in my heart in Muir Woods National Park, just outside of San Francisco, as I stood in front of placard about Family Circles. When a redwood tree dies, I learned, new trees grow from the roots of the fallen tree in a circle around where it once stood. These circles are called Family Circles and they can be found all over redwood forests.

One such family stood just beyond the placard, their roots entangled above ground, seeming to be almost a single entity. Each tree was massive, easily wider than my outstretched arms and so tall they blotted out the sky. Something about the way they appeared to be huddled together struck me as quite dear, as if they had wrapped their arm-like roots around each other in a vow to keep what was lost within the family.

This is when the question came to me: what do we when we lose something vital? Do we draw together to create new life from what came before? Or do we draw lines in the sand that separate Us from Them, in order to defend ourselves against change and to protect what’s ours? This question took up residence within me and I knew I had to write about it.

The forests of Oregon and California are fertile ground for a such a story. The battle between environmentalists and loggers over the management of forests has raged for decades. But the arboreal world was a mystery and I would need to learn everything I could about forests and trees.

I immersed myself in every possible way: I registered for Urban Forestry 101 and became a Neighborhood Tree Steward, learned to climb with the Pacific Treeclimbing Institute and slept in a 600-year-old Doug fir, and tagged along with Ascending the Giants, a team of young arborists who climb and measure the biggest tree of each species for the National Big Tree Registry. I conducted hours of interviews with foresters, loggers, and state and federal employees who manage watersheds and forestland, and shadowed a conservation forester as he managed his 800-acre property in the Oregon Coast Range. My research was essential to bringing the forested world to life on the page.

At one point during the writing, however, the narrative fell flat and my characters became drained of the life that had enlivened the pages. This is always a telltale sign that I don’t know enough about a given topic—either I need to envision the scene in richer detail, or conduct additional research to write with ease. In this case, my character found herself with radical environmentalists at a tree sit—but how on earth was I to write about living in the canopy of a redwood tree?

My daughter attended a hippy-ish pre-school in Portland, Oregon at the time, and a break in my conundrum came when I asked her teacher about his unusual name. He explained that he had been a Forest Defender—a term used by environmentalists active in forests—and that they choose fake names to protect their identity. He liked that the name was symbolic of protection and utility and adopted it after his days as an activist.

I could barely contain my excitement at learning of Shield’s past as a Forest Defender, and immediately asked to interview him. Lucky for me, he graciously agreed. Our sessions together filled in most every detail I could think of, but when he inquired if I’d like to actually visit the only tree sit in the country at the time, my answer, of course was, “Yes!”

The vetting process alone was instructive—given that these activists risk their personal safety to protect the trees, they are extremely cautious about who is given access to tree sit details. A few different people phoned (I was never given anyone’s phone number) to inquire about my interest in their work. I was ultimately invited to join Forest Defenders at an undisclosed location in Humboldt County, California where we would climb one hundred feet (ten stories!), inch-worm-style, up a rope to where they lived to protect the trees.

Every detail of my trip was vital, from learning how to climb without damaging the tree and the blisters that raged on my fingers only fifty feet up that rope, to the ‘dreamcatcher’ I slept on, woven from pea cord between two branches, and the 2’ x 4’ plywood ‘commie’ platform (as in ‘communal’) where all of the food and cooking supplies were kept.

I may have been able to glean some of this information from online posts by blogging tree sitters—but I could have never known the feeling of falling asleep in the gentle embrace of branches, as the 600-year-old tree I lived in gently swayed from side-to-side, the branches raising up and down in the breeze. It felt like floating on a raft on a river. I would have never known the shock of crisp air that slipped into my sleeping through the small opening I’d left to breathe through when I pulled the puff of the down over my head to keep warm. And there is no way I could have come to know the tender hearts of the activists, whom I’d assumed would be radical in an in-your-face kind of way. They were simply young and broken-hearted and trying to find a way to heal a broken world.

Upward of fifty pages flew from my fingertips upon my return, the story now taking on a life of its own, and me doing my best to help it come to life on the page.