It’s a recent Saturday morning and I’ve just spent an hour up on top of the house shoveling snow. The heavy white blanket that took out power and turned the middle of the week after Thanksgiving into a juggling act of generators and wood stove fires is still draped across rooftops. A pre-dawn freezing rain has transitioned to a steady downpour and I can almost hear the snow getting heavier around me as I work. It’s like lead on the shovel as I heave it over the edge of the roof. When the house is done I clear off some shrubs wearing crowns of white that now threaten to crush them and then, since I am suited up, I head for the tree.
It’s been a tough week or so of climbing, and it’s unusually bad today. A frozen slush coats the branches, and sluicing it off leaves a treacherously slippery residue packed into the crevices of the bark. For sheer glassy frictionlessness it doesn’t approach the three or four times I’ve climbed after an ice storm, but the mess and cold of it are almost worse. It’s nearly as slippery as ice and my gloves are quickly sodden. I’m tired and sweaty from shoveling. Rain drizzles down my neck. Nothing can be grasped or stood on. Everything has to be hugged, hooked over, draped on, wedged into. The whole thing feels like a bit of a death trap, and when I make it to the top I look out through the mist at the dreary hills—lying there like huge, gray, bedraggled dogs—and wonder exactly why I’m doing this.
There is no revelation here, no moment of beauty. It’s just a wet, miserable, dangerous climb, in a world that is gray on gray. There are these days; and we have to own them. (Keeping a sense of humor about them helps—hence the dogs.)
So I keep climbing, knowing that this tree is ten thousand trees. That tomorrow I’ll be climbing a different one. And that this tree is my tree too.
