Climbing Trees
At the age of six my parents moved our family from the first home I remember to the only home that I choose to remember. Though I don’t recall much about the move, I do remember leaving a neighborhood full of young children, lots of places to run and play, and little to no traffic. My parents moved our family, consisting of myself and two siblings, from the edge of town to smack-dab-in-the-middle of the bustling, thriving metropolis of
To this day the old lamps still work. The people living on the street work hard to keep them in good repair. Several times the city has offered to replace the monumental antiques with a modern-day, maintenance free counterpart; every time the families pull together and reject the offer, preferring their unique landmarks to the modern day eyesores. For the longest time I wondered why everyone fought so hard to preserve the lamp posts. When two teenagers, racing down the street in their suped-up rice rockets, collided with another car at the intersection in-front of my house, one of the cars spun out of control, rolled up on the neighbor’s lawn and struck one of the light posts almost knocking it completely over. For about three months the lamp sat at a forty-five degree angle, propped up by wooden braces and ropes tied to tree branches or anchored into the ground. The lamp didn’t work for several months after the accident, even after a new foundation was poured, the anchors set, and the lamp righted. One neighbor, a journeyman by trade, finally opened the service panels located at the top and bottom of the lamp and rewired several of the damaged pieces. Once again the lamp’s white globe glowed, a resurrected beacon of home; the rebirth was a triumph for the block, who all stood on the corner that night waiting for night to fall and the automatic timers to kick in, sending power to the hidden bulb.
On another occasion, me and a group of kids from the neighboring blocks all ran around with our “Wrist Rockets” trying to shoot anything that would stand still long enough for us to find a rock, load it up, pull back, and loose our tiny projectile of destruction. None of us could really hit anything smaller than a trashcan and most of those were lucky shots. After about an hour of shooting dirt clumps at trashcans we decided to move on to bigger better game. We set off to find a more challenging, rewarding, destructive target. Being the motley group of hoodlums we were, we turned our attention to the street lamps. First we shot at the modern street lamps found on the streets parallel to mine. Atop the actual light sat what, to our limited knowledge of street lamps, looked like a soda can. Often we had wondered how the soda had gotten up there; our theories ranged from an absent minded city worker forgetting about his lunch to a giant condor snatching the refreshing drink form the unsuspecting hands of a picnicker. Why a condor would be seen in suburban Twin Falls or snatching drinks from picnickers was beyond any of us, but we though it possible—stranger things have been known to happen. It wasn’t until much later, when I had my drivers license, that I realize the soda can was actually the light sensor used to indicate when the lamp should turn on and off, though I admit that I sometimes prefer the childhood assumptions as opposed to the truth.
Our fist few of shots at the light-post-soda-can were near misses followed closely by near broken windows from said shots bouncing off roofs and windshields. We quickly abandoned our “can” destined activity and turned our attention to the “Sesame Street Lamps.” On my first and only shot, I loosed the small rock at the metal post. The shot went rogue and instead shattered the globe and bulb inside. Never have I run so fast in all my life. The news spread quickly through the neighborhood, the unknown culprit cursed for defacing a neighborhood “shrine.” The act was, in many cases, worse than spray painting a church or cursing in front of your parents for the first time. My guilt was written plainly across my forehead, or so I thought. A pool went around the neighborhood to replace the broken pieces; in my guilt, I contributed the $120 that I had been able to earn through mowing lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow, and picking weeds. The money was intended to be used for purchasing the newest Nintendo Video Game system, the coolest invention ever. Instead it was used to repair the broken pride that I had caused. Several years later, while on a break from college, my mom brought up that fateful memory. Another young delinquent had broken a bulb and globe as I had. The young boy was forced by his parents to apologize to the family whose property the lamp resided and to work off his crime by performing yard work and service work to try and pay of his debt. In my mind I pictured him in a hunter’s orange vest and khaki jumpsuit carrying a plastic bag while his warden father watched him through large aviator sunglasses obscured by the large brim of his mountee hat. My mom reminisced about the time when I broke the same lamp, but because I gave all my savings to replace what damage I had caused there was never an accounting. My assumed subtleness had been a neon sign proclaiming my guilt and repentance. Though there are many more fond memories I could associate with the lamp posts they are not the strongest associations that I have to my childhood on
To a child there is something magical about trees. When one is in them, mingling with the branches, sap, leaves, and bark, the world takes on a whole new perspective. On a windy day, when you are sitting on the top-most branch, the tree feels as though it is alive, swaying to a rhythm that only it can hear. I would like to consider myself somewhat of an expert in the field of tree climbing. Though I was never the biggest child in school—quite the opposite—there was never a tree that I couldn’t somehow figure out how to scale[1].
Throughout my life I have climbed many trees of various shapes, sizes, and types; each tree provided its own set of challenges. A pine tree, for starters, has branches so close together that one doesn’t climb the tree so much as one slithers towards the top. You can always tell when someone has climbed a pine; typically there is the sharp, heavy scent that always conjures up memories of Christmas and camping out under the tree waiting for Santa to arrive. Along with the pine scent, which car fresheners have long tried to perfect but have never gotten quite right, there are the tell-tale sap stains—sticky Rorschach test looking tattoos turned a dark brown from mixing with sweat and dirt. No piece of skin was safe from pine sap; you could wear a full haz-mat suit and still there would be sap stains covering your body like spots on a Dalmatian.
In contrast to the pine tree stands the willow tree with its long limbs and hanging vines. Possibly the best part of climbing a willow tree was in the potential for vine swinging. One could move to a comfortable height, grab a fistful of vines and then swing in Tarzan-esq fashion from branch to branch around the tree. As a child we would do this with a trampoline underneath us. One person would climb roughly ten feet up the trunk of the tree and shimmy out on a limb that extended roughly 15 feet out from the main trunk, from the middle of this limb they would then grab a handful of vines and hurl themselves into the air. The hurling was often times accompanied by the primal yell of Tarzan—I always hear Carol Brunett when I think about that yell—and the popping of several vines as they pulled away from the various limbs. At the apex of the swing—which in all actuality resembled more of a fall—Tarzan Jr. would release the vines and plummet the remaining few feet to the awaiting tramp where he would perform such daring acrobatic feats as a front-flip, back-flop, or knee-drop.
[1]Perhaps this is the reason why I am now an avid rock climber, and have been for the last 10 years. I always assumed that it was a product of lacking the necessary hand-eye coordination and physical prowess to needed to meet the requirements of the Big Three sports—Football, Basket Ball, and Base Ball. In all honesty I did contemplate trying out for the Football team in order to avoid remaining a social outcast in the ranks of the High School caste system.
