January 2018

Branches Like Glass
January 22, 2018 In Climbing Night Weather Winter No Comment

It is a Monday evening and I am bringing four girls back from a yoga class in White River Junction.  It has been raining hard for hours and the temperature is below freezing.  The roads are slow but not as bad as they might be: a very thin layer of snow fell before it turned to rain, and this dusting is providing enough texture that the roads are not turning into sheets of ice.  When the three of us finally reach home, I put on snow pants and head back out to the tree in the dark.  It is still raining hard.  I make my slippery way up the ladder, onto a treacherous tree house floor, and reach for the lower branches.  The topside of every branch is as smooth and textureless as glass.  In the dark I can’t see how thick the ice is, but it may as well be an inch thick for all the difference it makes: the tree is heavily iced and streaming with rainwater.

I take a few moments to prepare myself.  I have climbed the tree like this two or three times before, but never in the dark; and always it takes total concentration.  It’s not just that it’s physically demanding.  It requires moment-by-moment problem-solving, sometimes while stuck in precarious positions.  It is, like all such things, an opportunity.  An occasion to go deep, to enter the moment with total focus and commitment.  Maybe we should live like this always, but it’s hard to do without an imperative.  And I have been given a delicious imperative!

I slide my body onto the lower branches, wrapping my arms around them as I go.  As with prior ice climbs, feet are of limited use.  If you trusted your weight to them you’d shoot into space.  I experimentally slide a foot back and forth along a branch.  The motion is absolutely frictionless.

I begin the ascent, using the crook of wrist, elbow and armpit to hook my way upwards.  The wind spatters heavy rain on tree, ice, me.  At every point most of my weight is suspended from my upper body—not with my hands, which are as useless as my feet, but with the full length of my arms and all their wonderful joints, helped occasionally by knees and stomach.  Right now, armpits are the crowning glory of my body.  I hug my way up among the branches.  This is full-body tree climbing: graceless, but effective.

As every time, there is a place just below my perch that is difficult to negotiate.  I have to stop for a while to figure out what to do with my body to make it up there.  In the end it is all about angles: which branches to slide my body between, at precisely what angle to push off a from third branch so that my foot doesn’t slip, how to pull myself to my feet.  And then I am up there, wedged in place, glorying in the windswept rain forty feet above the ground.  

When I am down I walk back to the house with a deep feeling of peace.  Katharsis, perhaps: the purification and cleansing of emotions through an encounter with darkness—usually vicariously, in art.  

It is good once in a while to have one’s world reduced to ice, rain, and the abyss.

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The Twilight Flags
January 7, 2018 In Climbing Prayer Flags Winter No Comment

For Christmas Emme gave me hand-dyed prayer flags.  She bought them white and dyed them blue, and they came out the color of snow at late twilight.  The tree has been empty of flags for a month or so now, empty of everything but snow and wind and, occasionally, me.  The day after Christmas I manage to anchor myself in place against the wind, tuck my gloves in my pocket, and lean out precariously to tie the new strand of flags in place.  This sort of thing is much easier in summer.  I lean back against the tree and take them in, fluttering among the branches.  They are perfect.  They are the color of winter.  

I am out early on this Arctic Sunday morning, the rest of the house still sleeping, to fill the bird feeder on the back porch.  Soon it will throng with goldfinches, chickadees, juncos.  They’ll need every seed they can get; it is at least -18.  I figure I may as well climb the tree while I’m at it, so I head around to the front of the house.  The skies are clear and the snow crunches loudly underfoot in the silence of the morning.  As I follow my path through the snow to the tree I see crisp, delicate deer tracks in my boot prints from last night.

It was late when I climbed, and only -8 or so, but with the kind of wind you duck your head against.  When I was close to the top the wind grew more violent, blowing through the tree like a freight train.  It must have been at least 30 mph, maybe 40 when it gusted, lashing the branches—and me—effortlessly about.  I struggled through it the last ten feet or so to my perch, trying to breathe and wishing I had worn something over my face.  I climbed down as quickly as I could and ran back through the darkness and the blowing snow to the house, gloves over my face, sliding as I went.  This was the coldest I remember it ever feeling in the tree, through three winters; the wind chill must have been at least -40 or -45.

Now I follow the deer tracks through those elongated boot prints.  It must have walked at dawn from the big apple tree through the snow to the driveway, down the driveway to my path, along the path toward the woods.  Just before the tree the tracks cut off to the right into the underbrush.

The sun is just rising through the trees as I make my way upwards, the light sliding down the opposite hills.  The air is perfectly still, and -18 is comfortable compared to last night.  After a few moments at the top, watching my breath drift past the twilight flags—I am grateful they are still there after last night’s wind—I make my way down, and follow the deer tracks, now mostly obliterated by my own, back to the house.

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The Inhospitable Tree
January 1, 2018 In Climbing Landscape Night Weather Winter No Comment

Two days before Christmas it rained all day in 20-degree air.  Water froze on everything it touched, and then on top of that, hour after hour.  Ice built up on every surface.  Partway through the day I climbed the tree, brushing away crusted snow as I went; over the remainder of the day a shield of ice accumulated ever the entire tree.  The next day it snowed on top of the ice. By Christmas Day, the wind blowing geysers of snow up into the air, the tree was as treacherous as it has ever been.  The day after Christmas I gave up on climbing with mere boot treads, and strapped on sets of metal teeth.  I wore these for the next three days and then stopped, fearing damage to the tree.

Nearly every day since then has struggled to reach 0 degrees, and the nights have averaged -10 to -20 degrees, in a sustained Arctic freeze.  It is weather that reminds one how quickly the world can kill.  Over the last several years I have climbed the tree in the aftermath of three ice storms, but they generally happen in late winter or early spring when temperatures are fluctuating and the ice melts from the tree within a day or two.  Now, New Year’s Day, looking out the window across the field through brilliant sunshine, you can see fragments of ice from ten days ago still clinging to the branches of trees.  The bitter cold has arrested the world.  Little changes in subzero conditions.

The tree is still full of ice and snow.  Climbing at night in the dark I sometimes dislodge from the bark chunks of ice that fall shattering like crystal into the darkness beneath me.  Each movement of each climb is careful, controlled, the possibility of error everywhere.  No surface can be trusted.  The placement of every boot—the hook of every wrist or arm around branch—is critical, all the more so under the distraction of gusty winds and -10 degree temperatures.  Once, on a day when I am wearing teeth on my boots, one foot abruptly slides down the slope of a branch toward the trunk.  My arms are well-placed, and I catch myself before falling.  Eighteen-inch claw marks are left in the ice.

There are moments of contemplation at treetop, but they are brief under the force of the wind, even when prepared for with snow pants, hat, good gloves.  Mercifully, the air is usually still at night, and one can lose oneself for a few moments in the penetrating silence of a deep winter twilight.

I climb at midnight on New Year’s Eve as Claire and Emme and their friend Lexie run their traditional circuit around the house to ring in the new year.  Their shouts and laughter vanish indoors when I am still only halfway up the trunk, navigating treacherous branches.  But when I stand in my place at the top in the brilliance of the near-full moon, the winter night is laid out around me in all its lustrous glory, nearly as bright as afternoon.  Shadows lay pitch black across the snow of the meadow, and the hills recede whitely into the distance.

I straddle branches and years at the same time, stepping from one into the other at the top of a tree.

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