Interview 2 — My First Interview with the Trees
In my first entry in this ongoing project, I began exploring the notion of arguing with a copse of madrona trees. I wanted to explore this type of dialogue further, and so under the influence of Robert Weiss’s interview method in Learning from Strangers, I sought out qualitative interviews with the trees. As I approached my first interview subject, a copse of Western Red Cedars growing near the edge of a field in the Happy Valley neighborhood, I had no idea what to expect. My environment once again demonstrated that it has countless stories to tell though, and new insights in terms of metaphor and my process of attenuation arose like eager spring shoots from fertile soil.
To interview a tree requires a specially designed process. Obviously I wasn’t going to be able to just turn on my digital recorder and wait for responses to questions as I might in a traditional interview. However, as I said in Arguing with the Madronas, narratives can rise out of anything, and so I knew that if I were to ask the right kinds of questions and listen in a variety of ways, the answers would come. Weiss’s method involves determining an aim of an interview and then tailoring a substantive frame which guides the types of questions to be asked. In this interview though, the aim was less about the answers that I received and more about exploring how a conversation of this kind can unfold.
This interview was also influenced by insights yielded in my previous interview with John on ways of gaining nature awareness. To go about the interview, I combined conventional question-asking with methods of attunement based on John’s practices. I made a ‘sit spot’ — a sense meditation exercise — and tried attenuating with different senses as well. I also tried to incorporate other aspects of nature awareness such as wildlife tracking, although I am still an amateur at best with such skills.
When I first arrived at the site, I began to take note of the surroundings. I asked the trees, “What do you see? What is this place that you call home?” I could see a path running tangent to the cluster of trees, leading from the road through an open field and into the forest. From the trees’ vantage point, a breathtaking view of the Chuckanuts lay between expanses of brown grasses and blue sky. Someone seemed to have a gardening project going next to the trees, and there were remnants of an attempted treehouse as well: bolts were screwed into the tree trunks, and lumber in various states of disrepair was strewn about at their bases. Whether construction of the treehouse was abandoned for good or only put on hold during the cold, wet Bellingham winter will only become clear with time and subsequent visits.
I could clearly see that an anthropomorphic community had formed around this dendropomorphic community, and I asked the trees how they felt about this. Might it bring them joy to see people cultivating new life in the shade of their boughs? Might they have felt pained as bolts were driven into their flesh, as they became exploited as supports for a structure composed of their fallen kin? Or could they be happy to take place in this interspecific partnership? My questions were met with stolid silence, and I was left to ponder.
After allowing myself to be drenched in the wordless ambience of this non-answer for a few moments, I decided to delve deeper into attunement with my various senses. I reached up into the outstretched branches of one of the cedars and closed my eyes, letting my mind focus on the tactile sensations of our human-tree handshake. The individual leaves were rough to the touch. If I took a handful of leaves at once though, the perceived roughness of the individual leaves was replaced with a distinct sensation of softness. Influenced by John’s constant mindfulness towards survival skills and natural resources, I found myself instantly thinking that a collection of these would make comfortable bedding were I to need to build a shelter.
Being reminded of John, I thought to look for any animal markings that might contribute to these trees’ narratives. I was unable to find markings, per se, that I could interpret, but I did become more aware of the wildlife intertwined with the trees. Spiders had spun webs spanning fissures in the bark and birds flitted about and sang from the tree tops. I was beginning to see the various communities overlain and interwoven in this small stand of trees, which started to shift my metaphors. Would it be a stretch to think of these cedars as community organizers?
As I continued to move about through the trees, breathing in their freshness, feeling the softness of their wood, and observing them up close, I came to notice a peculiar quality in the coloration of their bark. On certain sides of the tree tinges of green could be found all along their trunks, most likely some species of lichen. This had the effect of causing the trees to appear from afar greyish-green on some sides but greyish-brown on other sides. Suddenly I saw this simple dichotomy of perspectives as a microcosm of the very ideas that I am working with in terms of metaphor and attenuation.
I imagined that someone might spend their whole life walking along a path to the west of these trees every day. They pass the cedars by and orient themselves within the space as being next to a group of greyish-brown trees. Now, another person may walk along a slightly different path every day which takes them on the eastern side of the trees; this person would orient themselves in regard to the greyish-green trees. Both people’s mental maps would be correct, and yet if they were to confer with each other about the trees in the middle, they would call the other person wrong. That is until someone comes along who walks along multiple paths, weaving varied perspectives together to form a more highly-aware understanding.
This seemingly simple anecdote can be analogized to a number of situations with much greater implications — morality; religion; environmental practices — being open to other perspectives and ways of orienting can circumvent conflict and bring us to greater levels of awareness. It was as if in that moment the trees were trying to tell me something, embodying and demonstrating the power of perception from multiple perspectives. This felt like an affirmation of the work I’ve been doing with attenuation and metaphor.
Initially my plan for this endeavor had been to get an interview or narrative out of several individual trees that day, but I quickly realized that this was a highly reductionist way of thinking about the process. As I was trying to enter into a dialogue with the trees, other elements of the environment began to seep into the conversation as well, and I saw that I was not interviewing just a tree, but rather engaging in a dialogue with all of the cohabitants in my environment that I was able to attune myself to. It also soon became clear that this would not be a one-time event for an hour or two like my interview with John; these conversations would be a long-term process that will require multiple visits to be able to glean answers from the trees and other cohabitants of that space. I carried these realizations forward with me as I moved on to new dialogues with new trees. As I headed down the path toward the forest, a sense that interviews there would continue to inform and reshape my processes of attenuation began to grow within me.
