FEATURE
What's In a Name?
Working with dozens (if not hundreds) of students and fellow members of the Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association, St. Helena Lighthouse in the Straits of Mackinac was restored while being the locus for Donn’s Great Lakes’ Maritime Heritage Education course offered through the University of Michigan-Dearborn. Photo courtesy of Great Lakes Lighthouse Keepers Association.
As an interpreter in schools and nature centers, I’ve noticed that interpreters can often become preoccupied with getting to know the exactitudes of history, or common names, or the exact genus and species of the generations of life on our sites. While the end goal of our preoccupation may enable us to witness the creative evolutionary wonder that each event or each species presents, it often becomes a stumbling block to a full appreciation of a species or historical event beyond being able to recite its nomenclature and or dates to ourselves and others.
Knowing names is important, but I’ve found that its emphasis must follow, not precede, attempts to create an understanding of the context as well as the uniqueness of whatever is to be observed in our interpretive programs. After all, of perhaps utmost importance to many interpreters, is enthrallment and the pure joy of getting to know another facet of the whole with which we all are connected and in relationship. This is a relationship of wonder.
Captain Zero
As an early-career member of the Association of Interpretive Naturalists (which merged with the Western Interpreters Association to form our National Association for Interpretation), I was at first preoccupied with knowing and sharing the names of everything I encountered. Four years as a Director of the Raymond School Nature Project for the Chicago Public Schools soon jarred me out of those preoccupations. My name-memorizing and name-reciting strategies did not connect with my students. Instead, my hands-on activities did.
So, when I became the naturalist for the City of Evanston and the Lighthouse Nature Center, I tried another approach.
Captain Zero was how I introduced myself to aspiring Jr. Naturalists in that summer of 1972. Then, as my students came in through the door, they were each assigned a number instead of a name tag. In my introductory lesson, I said that names don't mean much until you get to know, yes even love, a plant, an animal, or each other. And, by the end of the summer, I wanted to not just know everyone by name but also something about them that I would come to love. That went the same, I hoped, for each one of my students. I wanted them to learn something to love about all the wonders of nature we would be encountering together in the weeks and days ahead. So I led them, and my students and participants in the years to come, through many exercises and discussions—like these discussions on trees, snapping turtles, and sunrise experiences.
The beauty of wood and trees and the joy of woodworking have been the inspiration for Donn’s lifelong love affair with trees. Here, Donn shows the walnut lamp which was a 4-H project; a cross of Christ made while windbound in the Boundary Waters; and a cherrywood mantle, his finest creation. Photo by Dr. Benjamin Paul Werling.
Choose not just a big tree, but a tree with a story or stories attached to it (like this monarch white pine with a large grape vine) in a race to the sunshine. Photo by Dr. Benjamin Paul Werling.
Trees
I grew up loving trees, and I loved the beauty of their wood that I, for example, fashioned into a lamp and bookcase in my 4-H woodworking projects. So, interpreting them in natural settings came easily to me in the early 1970s when I was a beginning interpreter. But interpreting a being as complex and detailed as a tree presents challenges, too. How could I interpret any individual tree beyond its name, while also taking into account my desire to tell the whole (or “wholistic”) story of the many trees I had grown to love?
Here are some suggestions that I have used to help participants learn from their encounters with a tree of any species. In celebrating the individual tree, I also strive to help students see the forest, not just a single tree, to give this tree’s species context and to emphasize ecological relationships.
directions to students of nature:
Lie down like the spokes of a wheel around the tree. Then, imagine what animals in the past, present, and future use this tree for their own purposes. Now, stand up to hug the tree and look at its bark directly. Then, standing in a circle around a large tree, look up to the branches and the top of the tree, while holding hands with fellow participants or while keeping your hands on the tree’s bark, so as not to fall backwards.
These are kinesthetic ways to engage the attention of your participants beyond just stating the tree’s name. An awareness of the Spirit or animus vitae of what the tree and the forest has lived (and is living through) is nurtured with these literally hands-on exercises. And, in some potentially rare but precious moments, the tree and forest come to life with such power that it influences someone for a lifetime. Such a person may never look at a tree in the same way again; but more, they may find that single tree experience gives them a message “on slant,” as poet Emily Dickinson once wrote, a pathway to a new appreciation of the wonder of one tree inextricably linked to a forest.
Another approach is to use the power of music or poetry. One of the first songs I composed was “Big Tree.” After having participants move through the kinesthetic exercise above, I would next teach them this simple song so that we could, in unison, sing this song to the tree. As we sing, we look to the top of the tree, then look down to the soil and hidden roots, using hand motions while looking up and bowing down:
The Jens Jensen-designed waterscape, c. 1913 and at the Henry Ford Estate in Dearborn, Michigan, is an inspiration for all that view it to synergize with nature to create and enjoy beauty. Photo courtesy of Donn Paul Werling.
Big tree, where are you growing to?
Big tree, where are you growing from?
Your roots grow deep, deep in the ground—
your leaves reach out, up to the sun.
In the fall, the leaves fall down, down, down
To the ground where they’re scattered all around.
Where they turn back to soil with the help of the worms
to help the tree grow as the seasons turn.
Big tree, where are you growing to?
Big tree, where are you growing from?
Turn fear to wonder which leads to respect, then love, then actions to preserve and passing on our heritage. Photo courtesy of Gary M. Stolz (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).
Alligator snapping turtle
Snapping turtles abound in the ponds here in Michigan. As an interpreter, I have had many opportunities to give participants startling encounters with Chelydra serpentina.
Up close, a snapper is as fierce looking as any of its evolutionary dinosaur ancestors. Held by the tail and shown to participants, they can inspire fear. An up-close demonstration of why the turtle’s common name is “snapper” grabs participants’ full attention but also, once in my experience, a bruised finger from a child who ignored my strict warnings. (Some interpreters avoid bruised fingers by first gaining participants’ respect for a large snapper by encouraging the turtle to snap a wooden stick in half.)
Chelydra serpentina embodies the ferociousness and thorough lack of gentility that illustrates well Darwin's principle of the survival of the fittest. While that way of thinking is central to an evolutionary mentality there is another, the sexual side of snapping turtles that illustrates an insight that was experienced by this lifelong interpreter of snappers; its species mating dance. The awe and wonder created within me as I watched two sewer-lid-sized alligator snapping turtles dance together near the surface of the water was unforgettable.
The mating dance of creatures is first of all about survival of the species, but what the two huge snappers taught me was not just a lesson on turtle sexuality, but a real sense that love, vitality, and the Spirit of life is imbued into all creatures—no matter how we might judge them, sometimes, by appearance or behavior. These turtles’ dancing on the water inspired a love and respect for these remnants from the age of dinosaurs. I never would have thought these wonder-full feelings would have been possible when I first began interpreting these turtles and simply warned children to stay back.
Sunrise Experiences
When I taught interpretation at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, I trained dozens of staff, hundreds of volunteers, and probably nigh on thousands of students. One constant across my teaching there was that I always began my classes with an activity that was a “challenge” to my participants’ everyday routine.
Sometimes, for example, I challenged them to start getting up at 5:00 am to view the sunrise from the top of a 100 foot tall lighthouse. The early hour was a challenge for most. But the next challenge was my request that everyone turn off their cell phones and that no one speak a word until the sun came up over the horizon.
Then, I’d ask that each participant compose and share a personal haiku of sorts: seven words or less drawn from their sunrise experience. I was always surprised, pleased, and even honored with the responses I received. Many put into words a first-time spiritual connection to our “Spaceship Earth” that I could never have related to them in a lecture. The name “Spaceship Earth” became more than just a catch phrase for these participants. It became a reality filled with wonder-full sensory experiences that we could access in our everyday life.
Whether it is the common experience of a tree or a turtle, or the everyday experience of a sunrise, I have found that the above techniques can help guide students, volunteers, staff, and myself to a sense of wonder.
I might suggest that one path for the success of our work as heritage interpreters could begin with participants’ (and/or our own) fear or a state of ignorance. From here, we can invoke a sense of wonder, and wonder can then lead us into respect and even love. Love, I have found, increases our tendency to take action—both to protect our site and its resources but also to protect and preserve our heritage through off-site actions.
As Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth-century mystic said in a quote shared by the Center for Action and Contemplation:
“...in realizing the life force, the beautiful that would burst from the barren.... how strange it is that divine attributes can sometimes be seen in something so common. And how we’ll miss the whole of it if we refuse to be stopped in our tracks. "
