Trees version 2

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 Twin Falls, Idaho. Our new neighborhood was affectionately referred to as “Sesame Street” due to the presence of eight faded green antique lampposts located on alternating sides of the street every 25-30 feet. Instead of the tall, wooden, electrical pole-like street lamps with light fixtures that look like the aliens from the original film version of War of the Words, our street lamps stood around 15 feet tall and were topped by a large white globe—just like the one on Sesame Street. For the families living in our neighborhood, the lamps were a symbol of pride.
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 parent’s cars, 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 everyone living on the block, all of whom stood on the corner that night waiting for darkness to fall and the automatic timers to kick in, sending power to the hidden bulb.
Though there are many more fond memories I could associate with the lamp posts they are not the strongest connection that I have to my childhood on Lincoln St. Instead, when I think about growing up, I’m immediately drawn to trees—two trees to be more specific.
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 .
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 time, campouts in the South Hills, and chopping wood. 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 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 while climbing a pine tree 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, papery limbs and draping tendrils. There was a Willow tree on the playground of Harrison Elementary, the school I attended from 1st grade through sixth. Its climbing limbs, those branches which were best suited for enabling one to move upwards in the tree, were impossibly high off the ground; it truly was an impossible tree to climb. Instead, as if recognizing that it would never be able to cradle children in its strong limbs, it would drape its slender vines towards the earth, asking for us to play within its living bower. There was a certain magic that accompanied the willow tree. Even in the slightest breeze, the willow looked alive, its vines swaying hypnotically in the wind. We would hide within its canopy, separated entirely form the outside world. The girls would pluck the vines from the tree and use the flexible cords to weave wreaths, baskets, bracelets, and leafy crowns. With these homemade props, the playground would transform from a simple asphalt covered lot filled with the sounds of tether ball and four square, into a magical faerie kingdom filled with queens, princesses, knights in shining armor, and daring feats. In the middle of this imaginary world sat the willow tree, a palace for the Queen, the home of a dangerous dragon, and occasionally a wedding chapel where willow rings were exchanged under the guidance of a ten-year-old priest. Possibly the best thing about the willow tree was the potential for vine swinging. Any good tree climber knows the importance of vine swinging, its ability to free one (for a brief moment) from the confines of gravity and allows him/her to float along with the other vines caught in a gentle breeze. Robert Frost understood this principle. In his poem “Birches” he says:
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
While the willow and the pine each presented their own unique climbing challenges, the tree that I most enjoyed climbing was the maple. The most prominent tree on Lincoln Street is the maple. With roughly fifty different Maple trees scattered around the two different blocks; most houses have at least one somewhere in their yard, some have two and three. In my mind, the maple is the perfect tree. It has wide, strong branches; rough, deeply grooved bark; and a canopy full of large, thick, five pointed leaves. Each of these characteristics made climbing the Maple more enjoyable. The large branches enabled one to climb with out fear of falling—every branch was sturdy. The bark provided nice, deep, rough grooves that ran vertically around the trunk, and horizontally across the branches. In the absence of an adequate sturdy limb, the grooves in the bark served as great handholds. I would wrap my arms around the tree as far as I could stretch them, dig my fingers into what ever grooves I could find purchase, and shimmy up the bare trunk like a caterpillar slowly inching its way along a branch. Though this method of climbing would work well for any tree, it seemed particularly well suited for the Maple—Pine trees were too sappy, Birch trees’ bark would peel too easily to get very high, Willow trees were too smooth to get good hand of foot hold. But with the Maple, none of these obstacles were an issue.
In all my years as a tree climber, there is one tree that stands out above all the rest. It is a giant Maple tree that sits to side of my parent’s driveway and towers over every other tree on the block. This was the first tree that I climbed when my family moved to Lincoln Street, and it was the last tree that I climbed when I finally moved off to college and out on my own fifteen years later. When I was six years old this tree looked enormous. Its first branch stood nearly six feet off the ground and in order to reach it I would have to take a running start, plant one foot as high up on the base of the tree as I could get it, and launch myself up towards the stump of a small cut-off limb that protruded about six inches from the trunk. From the perspective of an observer it would appear as if I was running up the tree like Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, or any of the other cartoon characters showcased on Saturday morning cartoons. Once I caught hold of the stump, the rest of the climb was like moving up a ladder. I climbed that tree so many times that I can still picture every movement, feel every swing of my body, and hear each scrape my shoes and hands made as they sought the next limb or foot hold. There were thirteen different movements that would carry me from the base of the tree to the top. About ten feet up the trunk the tree splits in two; in order to climb the tree I would start on the trunk to the right and about ten feet from the top I would jump across to the left hand trunk and finish ascending. In the top of the tree—roughly thirty plus feet from the base—sat the prefect perch, a thick limb which extended, horizontally, three and a half feet from the trunk, and then angled sharply upwards. A second limb grew straight up behind the horizontal portion and provided a backrest that was more comfortable than most la-z-boy recliners. This was my throne.
It was here, among the shaking leaves and swaying branches, I spent almost every summer evening from the time I was twelve until I graduated from High School. When I would get in trouble I would race out of my parents house and dart up my Maple; my mother, usually in pursuit, would stand at the base of the tree and yell for all the world to hear, chastising me as an old de-clawed cat will sometimes berate a squirrel that has escaped its grasp and found solace in the arms of a tree. It has been several years since I last ascended the branches of my maple tree. It is interesting to see how the both of us have changed over time. I have begun my own family, planted my own sapling which I hope to nurture and raise up to be a strong, healthy, maple with roots planed deeply into the soil of our family. In the time that has passed my maple has grown old, the branches which once supported the dreams of a child as he grew into adulthood has all been cut off. Not long ago I returned home to visit my parents while on vacation from school. While my wife sat and scrap-booked images of the first few months of our son’s life, I returned to see what life was like living in my Maple. It is no longer the same tree. Nearly all the branches fewer than fifteen feet have been cut off; no stumps extend to give small purchase for a hand hold. Several years back—I was later informed—my maple contracted a minor infestation of Asian Long Horned Beetles, a serious problem for many North American shade trees. The lower branches were weakened by the infestation and had to be cut off after a strong wind ripped through the town and broke the branches where the infestations were worst. Standing at the base of my tree, I wondered whether I could have prevented the bug problem. Did my tree become ill because it missed my presence? Surely there were enough children in the neighborhood to keep its limbs in shape. It’s not possible that my tree has been left alone this whole time. In my heart I knew it wasn’t true, but in the back of my mind I wondered. I resolved to climb my tree again, one last time to show that I still cared and had not forgotten what it felt to be in its limbs.
In order to climb this time I had to return to the bear hug. Wrapping my arms around the tree, I truly am a tree hugger, I dug my finger as far as they would go into the familiar grooves of the bark and began my ascent. This time the bark would not hold. Whether because a 28 year old weighs much more than a 12 year old, or because of the trees aging condition and bug problem, the bark simply broke off in my hand each time I tried to put pressure on it. This, I resolved would be my Everest. If I could make it up to my perch again, one last time, I would be happy. Inside, I knew my tree felt the same. Again, I gripped my maple in a bear hug so tight I felt that every piece of my body was connecting to the tree. My arms were no longer independent entities, they were extensions of the tree, extra branches that would move upward as I needed somewhere to hold; my feet became stumps and my body, part of the trunk. I was no longer someone trying to climb a tree, I was returning home and my maple was greeting me, bending its bow to lift me from the ground that I might perch once more in its lofty embrace. “So was I once myself a swinger of birches. And so I dream of going back to be” states Frost. I wonder whether he ever returned to the Birch tree that he remembers in his thoughts. The tree which he tamed and bent low under the weight of love.