Her Life In The Trees
By Jeannette Cooperman
Inching her way up a nylon rope—pull feet up, stand up, move to the next segment, sit down, pull feet up, touch the tree’s bark to brace—“Kaya,” 21, started sobbing and couldn’t stop. Back in St. Louis, she hadn’t felt a moment’s hesitation when she announced to her parents that she was taking a year off from college to tree-sit in Northern California’s Nanning Creek. Her father, a St. Louis judge, had been furious at first—not so much because she’d be breaking the law by trespassing on private property, but rather because his baby girl would be living 300 feet in the air. Now here she was, about to cross over from a neighboring tree to the giant redwood that would be her home. To get there required a “space climb,” a daring ascension with a moment of pure dangle, no bark on either side to touch for comfort.
Another sob rose, and she nearly choked on it. “Hermès,” a friend from St. Louis who had tree-sat out here in 2003–2004 and had flown out to help her get settled, called up soothingly from the second rope. They were almost to the platform, where they’d have a nice pancake dinner and listen to some music and talk. She rubbed her eyes and inched upward once more, every muscle straining. Finally they reached the platform, made pancakes, listened to music and talked. “You just did the hardest part,” Hermès said, and Kaya felt a calmness sneak over her.
That was January 8. Two months later, when we talked via cellphone, she wasn’t ready to come down.
So tell us about your tree. Spooner’s over 1,000 years old; he’s an ancient redwood. He’s about 300 feet tall and 18 feet in diameter at the base. To my knowledge, he’s the biggest tree any tree-sitter has ever occupied.
How’d he get his name? A year ago September, a couple fellow tree-sitters hiked in at night. The first person in the tree gets to name the tree. But first they had to climb the tree next to it, Liebertau, and then throw a rope into Spooner. His base is really thick. You can’t wrap your arms around him the way you would normally get into a tree.
Do you climb trees much? I did as a kid—the magnolia in our neighbor’s back yard. But this isn’t your neighbor’s tree.
Did you say earlier that you had visitors over the weekend? Yeah. We have traverses between the trees so we can move from tree to tree without touching the ground.
How many people are sitting in Spooner? We don’t normally disclose that. A lot of people can stay comfortably in Spooner. They—“they” being Pacific Lumber, which is the company that supposedly—well, I guess they do own the land. Pacific Lumber is not fond of our presence out here. They send climbers to extract people out of the trees.
They what? It hasn’t happened in a couple of years, but they hire arborists, nondeputized climbers, so they don’t have to follow nonviolent protocols, and from our point of view they forcibly remove us. They come up and tell us we don’t know what we are doing and they need to rescue us.
When’s the last time that happened? They haven’t removed a person since 2004. There’s a lot of risk involved in climbing a tree to remove [a tree-sitter]; it’s hard to find people willing to do that—and there have been lawsuits. More recently, they have cut our lines—not our safety lines but the hammocks we sleep in.
Where exactly do you sleep up there? Spooner, he’s got a sprout that comes off of him at about 140 feet—essentially another tree growing out of his side. On that sprout there are dreamcatchers, like a spider web of rope we tie between the branches, and that’s what we sleep on, at the top of Sprout, which is 180 feet.
Ever worry about sleepwalking? Yeah, sometimes! But you become really aware of your surroundings.
So you sleep at the top of Sprout ... And at about 160 feet there’s a platform, essentially a tabletop that’s tied around the base of the tree. That’s where we do cooking and have our library and community.
What books did people choose to haul up? The Republic of Plato, Alice in Wonderland, a really beautiful dictionary—really big, not a dictionary you’d expect to find in a tree. Henry V. Currently I’m reading The Republic. We read Alice in Wonderland as a group. And I’m in the middle of some Tolstoy.
So is 180 feet as high as you go? Oh no. After the platform, there’s another rope that goes to the top. You climb up, and then you can actually climb the branches. You have “lobster claws” you can wrap around a branch so you are locked on. From there you can see clear-cuts—they look like bald spots—where they have cut down all the trees. It’s very disturbing. Even the grove we’re in is very thin, and there will be areas where the land is just bald and there’s nothing there. They have sprayed pesticides, and they are cutting on steep slopes, which is causing mudslides. And trees are usually protected from the wind by the other trees around them, so the trees are falling.
Your mother’s flying out for a visit—did you clean up? We cleaned the platform. We have stuff hanging out in the branches to dry. She’s coming out at a really good time. It’s been raining for a month nonstop, and it’s finally stopped.
Do you have any shelter up there? We have tarps, like tents, so when it’s raining, you are tarped in and you don’t get to see the forest. Storms can be scary. In the last storm, 12 trees fell.
What if Spooner fell? Yeah, that wouldn’t be good. We are about a football field away from a huge clearing. The moment we hear something crack, we can climb down and just run. But some people think you are more safe in the tree. Spooner’s thick. You feel the tree sway in the wind, and then you feel it catch and go back the other way. But down on the platform you don’t feel it as much, because Spooner is probably still5 feet in diameter there.
How will your mother find you? We have people in town who support us; they hike out every so often to bring us food. She will be hiked out.
And she’s going to climb the tree and stay awhile? With no ... er ... bathroom or anything? We have milk jugs and funnels and buckets. And yeah, there’s not a lot of privacy—and I’m the only girl in Spooner, so that made it really interesting. When I first got here, I was having a really hard time going to the bathroom. The boys sang “In the Jungle” [actually, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”] so I could pee.
How did your parents react when you told them you planned to tree-sit? Oh, my dad was just livid. My mom was secretly excited about it but didn’t want to show that to my dad. I think most of the time he was just scared for my safety, 180 feet up in an ancient redwood tree. But after a while he started to realize, “Hey, she’s standing up for something she believes in,” and not a lot of people do that anymore.
What happens if you fall in love with one of the guys? I guess I fall in love with one of the guys. Actually, it happens all the time. It takes a certain type of person to come out here, so you are definitely going to be more connected. Yeah, there’s a lot of love that happens in the trees, for sure.
What do you think about up there? That these forests have been around longer than we can even imagine. I can’t comprehend 1,000 years. We as a human race are producing more and more carbon dioxide daily, and trees are the earth’s lungs. Every time you cut down a tree, it’s releasing all the carbon it has stored.
Do you see any hopeful signs? Is your presence changing anything? That’s hard. It definitely slows down the logging. Whether it does a lot is debatable. We’re just kind of a way to slow things down.
And it’s got to give you a new ... perspective. Yeah, being out here makes you feel very small. We are walking among giants. Life is so much bigger than just us humans.
Have you been in Spooner the whole time since January 8? I’ve been to the ground a couple times: We had some people hike in from Canada to do an interview, and then I got a staph infection, and I had to go to town. It was overwhelming. You have to get oriented. You are always moving in the tree—the tree is always swaying a little bit—so when you get to the ground, you have nonmotion sickness. You stumble around, because you have so much room to move around and you are not used to walking. Your upper body is more of how you get around in the tree.
Sounds like you’d just as soon stay up there. Yeah, I don’t like to go to the ground. They are logging around us, so there are people in the forest who don’t like our presence here. It’s a bit stressful to go to the ground, because you have to be very alert, and the person in the tree has to raise the line back up, so you are stuck on the ground until they lower it again.
What other wildlife do you see or hear? Owls all over the place, and salamanders that live at the top of the tree, and hawks and other birds and frogs. We try to be as quiet as we can. We have different ways of communicating between the different levels; instead of screaming, we will sing a song that means something. We have a cellphone—we recharge it with a car battery—but we keep ground-to-tree communication limited, especially at night because the owls get really scared.
What’s hardest? Being up here when they are logging. They have been using helicopters over the ridge. It’s a steep slope—they have to remove the trees by lifting them up in the air—so these helicopters are flying right over us. They will hover right over the tree to try to scare us, or they will set off fireworks.
What’s best? The view when the sun or moon comes shining through the trees, just beaming through, and I can’t believe I’m experiencing this.
Are you starting to feel like a tree yet? I feel more in tune with the tree; I feel connected to it. This tree is my brother. Some people have a hard time wrapping their head around that, but I’m very much a part of this tree, and this tree is very much a part of me. Everything is connected. Redwoods are all connected by their roots, so if you were to cut Spooner down, you’d essentially be cutting a lot of Jonas’ roots as well. It’s a lot like a family.
How do you get clean clothes? Um ... you don’t. If it gets really bad, you send it out with ground support. We do bathe every so often; we boil water and bathe on the platform. We have wet wipes. We have fancy long underwear; you just strip down to that to sleep.
What was tough to give up? A computer, at first, but after a while you don’t miss anything.
Do you get a break? The seabirds nest in the upper branches of the old growth in the canopy, so in summer they are not legally allowed to log. Relief sitters come in for us then.
So you’ll climb down and come home? No, there’s a tree-sit going on in Berkeley—they are trying to save some old oak trees people want to cut down to build a gym or something—so we will leave this tree and go there. And then there’s another tree-sit in another grove that is in danger.
