My Tree

Do kids still climb trees? I never see kids in trees these days. Maybe kids never climbed trees all that much, even when I was a kid. I climbed trees all the time, though. It was my passion. I could climb the hard ones, too. My Dad would never help me get up into a tree when I was little; he’d say it wouldn’t be safe for me to climb it until I could do it all by myself. So I suffered in jealousy watching him up in a tree; and me down below, salivating and imagining the feel of the bark under my hands, the high wind cooling the sweaty roots of my hair, the wedged balance of the swaying view below me. Of course, now I think of it, most kids’ Dads didn’t torture them by climbing trees in front of them and refusing to help them up, either.

Anyway, I was an expert by age eight in technical tree climbing. Freestyle, of course. I was a bookworm, too. I know, because I was told so repeatedly by my mother and my grandmother. So, to me there was an obvious and immediate synchrony between trees and books. (My favorite bookplate, even now, is a picture of an open book grasped among the roots of a big oak tree.)

Did I mention that, growing up, I was free to wander far from home alone? That has changed as well, these days. Kids aren’t allowed out of sight of home alone because it isn’t safe. About a quarter mile from my house, down around the corner, there was a little park with trees and a creek and a bridge. My tree was in this park. I don’t believe other kids ever climbed it. The other kids weren’t quite as dogged as I was when it came to getting to the top of a difficult tree. They’d noodle around on the lower branches, or scrabble up the trunk a little way, but if it got too hard, they’d quit and go play hopscotch, or get some gasoline and light the creek on fire, or something.

I can still remember my tree the way I remember old friends. I remember the shape of it, and the exact sequence of moves I had to make to get up it. The first branch was way over my head, and I had to do a twisty friction move on a bump in the bark, jam my fist into the crotch between two branches; swing around the trunk and grab a horizontal branch; and hook my heel over another branch. Then I was up. My tree had a smooth U-shaped main fork that felt like a hammock when I laid down in it. Best of all there was a branch that went right across my chest that made a perfect book-rest. I remember thinking that the tree had grown it for me on purpose just to be kind. I was grateful. I laid in that tree’s lap for hours at a time, over many years, reading. I remember when I finally got big enough that I could jump up from the ground and grab that horizontal branch and swing up. That was a good day, because I usually lost some skin off my hand every time I jammed my fist into the crotch and swung around.

I used to lean my bike right against the tree; I even cheated a few times and climbed up on my bike to get into the tree. That never felt right, and I realized I was missing the sense of accomplishment I felt when I did it without help. I was also probably feeling the effects of my Dad’s earlier conditioning regarding climbing trees without assistance. Besides, if I left the bike there, people knew I was in the tree. I took to leaving my bike way over by the swing sets, and adding the thrill of secrecy to my enjoyment. I felt positively predatory, perched up there with kids playing and riding their bikes, and even the occasional older kid or adult wandering by, all without a clue that I was there. This is where I first learned how unconscious people are. I knew that if they simply looked up they could see me there, plain as day. But no-one ever did. No-one saw me up there watching them. They didn’t see the birds or the squirrels either. I felt more kinship with the wild things than I did with the people on the ground. I felt the tree speaking to me somehow, through its bark, mostly. I knew in a strange way that the tree knew I was there; felt my weight, my sweaty grip, my scuffing feet. I always felt as if the tree decided each time to hold me up, to allow me to perch there, even to take some care of me, in the same way that my mother carried my sister perched offhandedly on her hip while washing the dishes or cooking. I knew the tree was occupied elsewhere, doing or thinking whatever trees do or think. But I knew somehow that it was aware of me, and was kind. There were other trees that I climbed that were not kind at all, and so I knew the difference.

Not long ago, after many years of neglecting to climb trees at all, I climbed the greatest tree I have ever climbed. It was a game of hide-and-seek at a summer camp. The counselors, including me, were to hide from the kids. This was a high-school camp, so there was no need to make ourselves easy to find. I ran off looking for the ultimate hiding place, and it occurred to me to climb one of the giant spruce trees. I had never liked climbing pine trees as a child because they were pricky and sticky, and made for tight maneuvering. They smelled good though.

I picked a huge old patriarch of a tree with a lot of squaw wood bristling out of the lower trunk. The first branch was about fifteen or twenty feet up, and the only way to get to it was by climbing carefully up the brittle dead branches. It was tense, feeling the deadwood crack and break under my feet, until I could get my hand around that first living branch. I think I heard the tree speak to me then, the way my tree used to when I was a child. I was too excited to pay attention just then, though, I was abandoned to the thrill of climbing this hundred-foot tower of a tree, like no other I had ever climbed.

I went all the way up, out of the shade, high over the cabin roofs, on and on into the sky. I went as high as I dared, up to where the branches were only an inch or two around. I stopped there and squirmed and adjusted until I had a perch where I could rest my weight and relax. It was then I felt the tree swaying in the wind. It was such a slow sway that it gave me vertigo. I felt its hugeness in the slow rocking; the sunlight lifting the scales on the branches; the silver hair of a spider’s thread curving sideways in thin air; the skidding whistle of a hummingbird’s wings far below; the haze stacked blue and gray in the shape of mountains at the farthest edge of the world.

Up here the air is strange. It turns you inside out, and mixes in with your heartbeat; barely shivers against the underside of your skin; gets behind your eyes and bends the light until near and far are the same; rolls under your elbows and knees and lifts you up so you have to tighten your grip to make sure you’re still there; slips between you and the world below until the ground is so far away you only hear faint, meaningless echoes; wraps around the back of your neck and changes you into a creature outside time, content to do nothing but cling motionless to the top of an ancient tree and gaze outward.

I don’t remember why I came down, but I do remember the click in my brain and the change of focus when I got to the last branch and had to face the challenge of the tangle of broken branches below. I had broken so many climbing up that the business of getting down the last twenty feet was twice as hazardous as it had been going up. I was sweaty by the time I was safely down, my skin was right side out, and my eyes could grasp perspective again.

I put my hand on the tree and felt a little dizzy once more. Maybe we should all climb such trees now and then. (By the way, none of the searchers ever found me up there.)