Climbing

Maple, Poplar, Pine

May 21, 2017 In Climbing Miscellanea Rumination 2 Comments

The other day I was remembering the trees I climbed when I was young. In front of our house, in the expanse of lawn enclosed by a semi-circular driveway, was a maple tree that was a gift to a tree-climbing kid. It was dense with branches, like a porcupine. From one branch hung a swing, and I discovered that if I swung high and jumped at the right moment I could grab a branch out in front of me and from there pull myself up into the tree. This tree was my playground for years, and I spent hours jumping and swinging from branch to branch, exploring circling and climbing higher.

Later, when I was older, I discovered that across the driveway and on the edge of another lawn, a hundred feet from the house, was a poplar growing next to the road that afforded excellent climbing. This tree I could climb much higher, and it was far enough from the house that I couldn’t be seen, and the branches thick enough that I was invisible from the road below. This is where I would go to disappear, to escape from family, world, life. Where I would go in secret—not to swing and clamber about and explore, but to sit and brood on the miseries and yearnings, and savor the occasional joys, of adolescent life.

When I was older yet, I would climb The Forbidden Tree. My father was extraordinarily relaxed about matters of safety when we were kids, unshakeable in his faith that the universe was fundamentally benevolent and would cause us no real harm. But at the bottom of the field that dropped away from the house and sloped down to the woods was an enormous white pine that rose above all the other trees at the wood’s edge. Because of its great height, and because the wood of pine trees is soft when living and brittle when dead, this was the one tree I was told not to climb. And so, of course, as soon as I was capable of it, I would drift off down the field in another direction, trying to look aimless to the eyes of the house at my back, and when I reached the woods, cut back under cover of the trees to the forbidden pine.

It was a precarious climb, the branches farther apart, and it nearly always felt dark and gloomy inside it, which added to its allure. Up and up I went, circling the trunk as I hunted for safe branches and viable routes, until I came out just feet from the top, back into the sunshine. I could look down on the crowns of other trees below and around me. The top of the tree shifted side to side in the slightest breeze, and in a strong one would swing two or three feet in each direction. It was terrifying and wonderful and I was at the top of the world, surging with adrenaline and exhilaration.

I think now of the secret language of flowers, the centuries-old code that reached its culmination in Victorian England, when each flower had a symbolic meaning.

Freesia for innocence; lilac for beauty; rose for passion.

Pine for danger; poplar for secrecy; maple for joy.

Buds and Bubbly: Two Years in the Tree!

May 1, 2017 In Climbing Evening Landscape Rumination Spring Tree Weather No Comment

[View with images] As of today, I have been in the tree every day for two years (with the exception of one day that first July, when I forgot, and of course the handful of days each year when we are out of town). Climbing is not about milestones like this, it is about each day’s practice, each day’s adventure, but still there is a feeling of quiet satisfaction in having kept it up this long. In having stuck with it through injuries and a busy life and challenging weather; but especially in having continued to climb on the occasional day when inspiration waned. The hard obstacle can be easiest to overcome, a focused target for our energies; and we may undone in the end instead by the sheer passage of time and the straying of interest. But in persevering I have again and again received gifts.

This week has been a gift.

With astonishing speed small hard leaf buds have swelled, dehisced, burst. Last year it took long weeks to accomplish what this year happened in days. And to my delight, when buds split flowers burst out and hung from twigs in clusters, thousands of them. More flowers than leaves, it almost seems. Last year the tree produced not one flower. I read that sugar maples produce flowers in abundance every two to five years.

When leaf buds swelled last year and I was observing them minutely, I found a marvelous guide available online as a PDF: the Field Guide to Monitoring Sugar Maple Bud Development, produced by researchers at the University of Vermont in 1994. This year I could have monitored both flower bud and leaf bud development.

They are beautiful, these inconspicuous little yellow-green flowers cascading out of their scale-like shells. Every twig ends with a seemingly different configuration of flower and leaf. A few variables played out over and over again, in infinite variety. Each minuscule blossom and its filament of a stem, each new leaf, is fringed with fine hairs that catch and hold the sunlight.

I decide we deserve to celebrate, the tree and I (well, mostly I).

So up I go in early evening, around seven o’clock when Claire and I get home, with a glass and a bottle of bubbly, for Mayday and a thousand flowers and a new year in the tree.

The weather has turned and it is quite cold, only in the 40s, and misting heavily. The trunk and branches are wet, and a heavy blanket of cloud has come down over the hills. Sometimes on rainy days the world has a kind of muted luminescence to it. Everything glows darkly. It is that kind of day. Up I go with glass and bottle in bag. In my perch at the top I carefully fish them out, juggling objects while bracing myself in the tree with back and elbows.

I must add the usual provisos and warnings here–kids, don’t try this at home! Mixing trees and alcohol is best avoided until you are least thirty years old. On the other hand, as soon as you turn thirty, give it a go! It turns out that letting a champagne cork fly from the top of a tree is a total hoot!

I fill my glass, raise it to tree and sky, and drink. Champagne at the top of a tree is truly delicious, like lunch on top of a mountain. I wedge the glass in a branch to free my hands for balancing the bottle where the tree parts into several trunks. This affords me the opportunity to fish my phone out of my pocket and take pictures of both, which is kind of fun.

I stand up there a while, drinking and looking around at the misty, subdued beauty of the landscape, of hills and trees disappearing into clouds. I give the tree a splash of champagne but it seems largely indifferent. Rainwater is more delicious, more intoxicating, than the best champagne, I can almost hear it murmuring. I think of a verse from one of my favorite poems by Emily Dickinson, “I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed”:

Inebriate of air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro’ endless summer days –
From inns of molten Blue –

And I yield the point, remembering my gin and tonic made of sunlight and cold just a few weeks ago. Still, the champagne is fun, and I have another glass (thinking how glorious it would be to do this on a warm summer evening! Champagne and fireflies!) before heading down. That’s when I realize I haven’t really thought this through: the bottle that fit in a bag on the way up is now open and and must be carried down. So I embark on a slightly tipsy and one-armed descent, one hand lowering body down from branch to branch, the other carefully clasping the neck of a champagne bottle, and occasionally offering a stabilizing wrist or elbow to branch or trunk.

Walking back across the lawn to the house, I turn, lift the bottle once more to the tree, and have a last swig.

That night the rain pummels the house harder than I have ever heard it, drumming on windows and roof like a flood across the landscape. [View with images]

Being a Beast

April 21, 2017 In Climbing Night Reading Spring Weather 1 Comment

I climb the tree in the dark in a cold drizzle late in the evening after returning from Bagua. The branches are covered in a slick organic film and I go carefully, slowly. I am dressed in black from class, wearing a black jacket, climbing in the dark on a moonless, starless night, and I think how nearly invisible I would be if anyone happened to be walking through the woods in the rain. And soundless, as drenched bark makes little noise.

I think of meeting friends for lunch at the Base Camp Cafe in Hanover several months ago, when one of them asked if being in the tree made me feel like an animal. It was an interesting question, and it came at a time when I was reading the delightfully outrageous Being a Beast by Charles Foster. In the attempt to understand what it might be like to be a red fox, a badger, a swift, an otter, he does the usual, researching their habits and their habitats, their ways of movement and feeding practices and sensory systems, but also the unusual: he spends months endeavoring to live like each animal.

As an otter he slithers through the rivers of England trying to catch fish with his teeth; as a badger he lives for a summer with his son in a scrape in the side of a hill in Wales, traversing fields and woods on hands and knees and eating earthworms (and, occasionally, chicken curry). The book is a bit erratic, as are his efforts to be a beast, but it is viscerally entertaining, full of grit and blood and the smells and sounds of the natural world at its earthiest.

One of the best paragraphs in the book is a disquisition on the varying tastes of earthworm slime and flesh in different regions of Great Britain, a sommelier-worthy exploration of earthworm terroir, if you will. This I am delighted to have read but feel no need to experience firsthand.

But the attempt to become something else, and the impetus that drives him to make it, I understand. The desire to somehow push beyond the bounds of one’s own experience into another experiential world. This is not foreign to me as I sit in the tree for an hour in a snowstorm, or climb by moonlight and touch on a summer night. We think with our bodies. Our flesh is our other mind, our other spirit. Maybe our best spirit. (To make use of a distinction that is wholly arbitrary to begin with.) This is why we sing, dance, hike, do martial arts, hug, make love.

In a tree we traverse a new landscape, vertically, and our spirit follows.

Eostre

April 16, 2017 In Climbing Landscape Prayer Flags Spring No Comment

[View with images] I won’t be climbing the tree until later today, when we have returned from out of town. But earlier in the week I have climbed in sunshine and luxurious warmth and it has felt like Easter over and over again–it calls to mind for me not so much the eggs and lambs and church service kind of Easter, but perhaps Eostre, the Anglo-Saxon goddess of the spring, after whom the 8th-century English monk Bede reported that Easter was named. But Easter or Eostre, I’ll take it either way!

It has felt like the East, like sunrise, like a new dawn, every day. The snow is gone from lawn and field, remaining only in large piles on the north side of the house. Mud is the element du jour. Daffodil spikes rise a full two inches from the straw-colored meadow floor, pushing up between the flattened stems and grasses of last year’s waving vegetation. Alger Brook in its ravine rushes louder than I have ever heard it, swollen with feet of rapidly melted snow and days of rain. Everything is drenched, liquid. Even the air is liquid with bird song in the early morning, after long months of silence.

Easter or Eostre, it feels like the world is risen again. Everything rising: moisture into the air from the ground, vegetation up toward new sunlight, birdsong from the air up into the sky. Me, up into the tree and its branches. The unimaginable benevolence of warmth almost pulling me upwards, after long months of fighting my way up through cold and wind and ice.

I walk the meadow, examining old seed pods, new channels of water, and think about the green shoots pushing up between the dead bodies of their own for sunlight. Pushing aside plant matter that by next year will be nourishment, though to shoots other than these. I resurrect old stone statues that have been tumbled by wind and snow and buried, and it feels good to have hands on stone again, working with textures and contact points and palpable centers of gravity. With things so willful in their mass, yet so unexpectedly gracious in their willingness to stand against gravity.

Up in the tree there is a softness to the light, so different from the violent light of just a few weeks ago. I begin to examine leaf buds, though we are a long way from budbreak and budburst. Even the prayer flags look different than they did just days ago: their very fibers–like the world itself–seem to have swollen and softened. Their texture is appealing to eye, to camera. Soft fibers in the soft light. And, serendipitously, loose prayer flag threads have woven themselves around twigs again and again until they have formed a kind of natural cross. It is hard not to think, and to rejoice in thinking: a Christian cross formed from tree twigs and strands of Buddhist prayer flags, suspended in the light of Eostre. [View with images]

Hands on Bark, Face to the Sun

April 2, 2017 In Climbing Miscellanea Rumination Spring No Comment

Thursday, March 30th. Deep blue skies, sunshine, warmth.

Never mind that we’ll have a substantial snow storm tomorrow through Saturday—for now it is gorgeously, invitingly mild. Almost cruelly springlike. I climb without even a fleece, on my way out to collect the girls from school and continue on through an afternoon’s transport to, eventually, community chorus with Claire in Bridgewater, from which joyous expedition we will return late at night. The bark is warm under my hands, and it is an invigorating climb.

I have been thinking about the strangeness of using an advanced technology to communicate something as profoundly untechnological—almost anti-technological—as climbing a tree.

Tree climbing is rudimentary. It requires nothing but a working body (and perhaps an eccentric mind). The only technology I use in climbing is the clothing I wear. In summer, perhaps a pair of shorts. In the cold windswept rains of November, rain pants, good shoes, and a raincoat are useful. The technology ramps up in winter to include long underwear, a winter coat, snow boots, good gloves. Ski pants if the tree is full of snow. Even so, technology of a basic order.

But I think and write and talk about the tree as well. Language is a technology (arguably) that is built into the experience of climbing for humans, even if the act of climbing could be performed without it (squirrels manage nicely). And language is essential to conveying the experience to others. Enter the computer. And the camera. These are intricate but—by today’s standards—routine technologies. Is the Internet simply an extension of these? A place to put writing and pictures that lots of people can get to?

And yet, I climb partly as an act of defiance against a world that feels increasingly digital. Hands on bark! Face to the sun!

There is a dissonance in using the digital medium to communicate this act, this experience. There is likely no sun on your face as you read this. However hard I try I cannot put your hand on my tree. I’m sitting at a computer; you’re looking at a screen. There’s no chance either of us will fall; neither of us is swaying in the breeze.

Chuang-Tzu asks, am I Chuang-Tzu dreaming I’m a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I’m Chuang-Tzu? If the Internet is a kind of a dream, a manufactured reality—am I using technology, or is it using me? What if I’m just the butterfly? Just one more billionth of the way the Internet finds its way into every part of our lives? And manufactures us?

Because I could, after all, just climb the tree.

But, since I do climb the tree, Chuang Tzu might say it doesn’t matter who is the butterfly and who is Chuang-Tzu. Because I am, after all, always back out there among the branches. Sending down that taproot. Hands on bark, face to the sun.

(Maybe I should ask instead, am I climbing the tree or is the tree climbing me? This might invoke more of what is—dare I use the word?—spiritually profound about the experience.)

Climbing a tree is magnificently primitive.

It sends us back in several ways: back to childhood, which is when those of us who have climbed trees mostly did; back on our evolutionary tree, to simians swinging from branches; back to a core of experience that feels more primal, more present, less mediated, than so much else in our technology-ridden lives.

Hands on bark! Face to the sun!

And an infinite blue sky.

Tonic

March 22, 2017 In Climbing Rumination Spring Weather 1 Comment

It is one of those bitter winter days (on this second day of spring) with transcendentally blue skies and luminous sunshine. The light reflecting from the full snow cover is blinding. It is about 15 degrees with a strong gusting wind.

Emme and I are back from her hammered dulcimer lesson and will shortly be off to see Claire in a one-act play. It seems a pleasant time to climb the tree, in that abundance of sunshine, rather than later that night, when I will have gone from the play to an Irish flute lesson before coming home.

On the spur of the moment it seems like an excellent idea to climb the tree shirtless. The combination of vitamin D-laden light with a subzero windchill is rather manically appealing. So off come three or four layers of clothing to the skin; on go boots and gloves. Out go I.

As soon as I am out the door and onto the porch it becomes clear that running is a good idea. So off I go, sprinting across the driveway, leaping the low retaining wall onto the slope of the lawn, and sliding my way across the frozen snow to the tree.

The light is glorious without a doubt. It’s strong and hard, almost violent; there is no light like this in summer. Every detail is sharply etched. The world feels almost swallowed up by the blue vastness of the sky. The bark and lichens in front of me, sliding downwards as I fly up, are microscopically clear.

And flying I am, because it’s cold. The higher I get the stronger the wind is, and I quickly find myself gasping for air. It’s like diving into an icy river. You surface and the cold is so intense, so penetrating, that you struggle to take a breath.

I stand in place at the top for a few moments, trying to get some air into my lungs and marveling at the intensity of the sky’s depthless blue. The wind is battering at my bare torso and I am well past the point where I feel the cold mostly as pain, so a rapid descent seems in order. I go down even faster than I go up.

Running back across the lawn, refreshed and exhilarated beyond words, blown inside out, renewed, I search for the right word anyways. “Tonic” is about the best I can come up with: “giving a feeling of vigor or well-being; invigorating.”

When I return to the house my amused daughter comments on my possible insanity. I tell her I am just trying to drink deep of life. She gets it.

Later I look up the etymology of “tonic,” and it is beautiful in every way. Lines of meaning converge serendipitously.

“Tonic,” adjective, ‘invigorating,’ comes from the Ancient Greek tonos (“strain, tension, pitch”), from teino (“I stretch”). And I am stretching hard, climbing the tree half-naked in the cold and the wind. And there is strain, and there is tension; it is not entirely comfortable. I am vibrating at a higher pitch up there among the branches, and it is wonderful.

“Tonic,” noun, the first tone of a musical scale, from the Latin tonus (“sound”) from the same Greek tonos. The note from which one ascends the scale, and to which one returns at the end of a piece of music. The root, the harmonic foundation, the completing resolution. And is this not what I am in search of when I climb the tree?

“Tonic,” noun, a healthful or medicinal substance given to restore vigor and well-being; a word devised in the 17th century when health was believed to come from well-stretched muscles (see the Greek teino, above). And used later, of course, for the ingredient in a gin and tonic that isn’t gin.

And then I think of my words to Emme, about drinking deep of life.

I have devised my own gin and tonic, and I have drunk.

Beautiful.

Riding the Storm

March 14, 2017 In Climbing Landscape Snow Weather Winter No Comment

A real storm at last! Stella is working her way up the coast. I am home from a morning at work and we are all settled in for the afternoon as the rate of snowfall is beginning to increase. Brad, in town for the weekend, is stranded by Amtrak, and the storm gives us the perfect backdrop for visiting longer. Soon the dogs are coming in with a quarter of an inch of snow on their backs. By late afternoon the snow is blowing sideways across the field in great billowing curtains, and climbing the tree becomes irresistible.

The wind is strong enough that most branches are bare, so there is no need for the somehow almost-magical ritual of brushing the snow off each branch as I climb. When I reach the top, I stand in place for a while, rocking a bit in the wind. The snow is blowing at great speed down this crease in the land, coming over the hill and racing down toward the valley. It is surprisingly quiet in the tree given how fast the snow is moving a few hundred yards away.

I watch this river of air and snow for a while, and then its direction shifts and I see it coming across the field at me, and then the wind is among the branches and driving them this way and that, and Stella has come to play. The trunk rocks back and forth, and while the sheer force of wind is not as strong as it was last week, it carries a good fistful of snow to liven things up. The effect is exhilarating, being held up unprotected to the storm, currents of air driving wildly about as rivers collide overhead and drive downwards.

For a little while I close my eyes and rest my head back against the shifting trunk. I lay my face open to the stinging snow and listen to the steady roar of the wind coming down the valley, the snapping of prayer flags in the branches in front of me.

Eventually I dig out my phone because this is too great not to share. The storm has calmed a little, but the videos capture at least something of it.

Snow blowing across the hills:

The wind in the tree:

Prayer flags in the storm:

Within minutes my now-bare hands ache to the bone with the cold, and putting gloves back on doesn’t help. With hands largely numb I make my way down the tree carefully, using wrists more than fingers.

Exhilarated, and glad to have been part of it all, I wade back through the snow towards the house.

Riding the Wind

March 11, 2017 In Climbing Landscape Tree Weather Winter No Comment

All night winds beat at the house, slamming loose screen doors and driving empty buckets around on the porch. The very walls creak and shudder.

The winds continue unabated into the morning. Later I read that wind speeds today reach 30 mph, with gusts to 40 mph.

When I hear an especially powerful blast roaring across the meadow and through the trees I throw on boots and a coat and run out of the house. It is about 30 degrees, fairly mild, but with the force of the wind it feels much colder.

I work my way up among the branches, moving quickly so as not to miss the wind at its peak. I stand in my perch and look out at the opposite hills, the air pushing hard against my body and face. The wind is so strong it sucks the air out of my lungs; it is difficult to breathe unless I turn my face to the side. Even without leaves to act as sails and catch the air, bare branches are lashing about like riggings in a storm, seeming all to move in different directions, crossing and knocking and uncrossing.

The trunk itself, with me perched on it, lurches precipitously forward and backwards. My eyes water as I squint into the oncoming freight train of air that barrels unobstructed over the open meadow and the roof of the house into the edge of the woods around me.

For the fun of it I take out my phone and take a video or two, but it can’t really capture the intensity and exhilaration of the experience.

By way of comparison, here are two videos of windy days in summer, though the wind is not nearly as strong as it is today.

I could watch the foaming of the leaves in the second video for hours. Like water washed back and forth by the tide, or seaweed moving in ocean currents. I think of meadow flowers and my post on froth and foam last July.

I spend as much time up in the tree as face and fingers can stand–which is not long. I return to earth braced and refreshed. Exhilarated.

There is nothing like being pummeled by the wind at the top of a tree to cleanse the palate of the soul.

Hold My Beer

February 27, 2017 In Climbing Landscape Prayer Flags Weather Winter 1 Comment

Our weather the last few weeks has whipsawed between spring and deep winter, with autumnal and nearly summery days thrown in for good measure. An apt joke makes the rounds on social media:

Mother Nature: You can’t possibly do four seasons in two weeks.

Vermont: Hold my beer.

The roads are clogged by a premature mud season, the sap is running and sugar houses are smoking, and a few days have made it to 60 degrees; but some nights have dropped to frigid subzero temperatures and there have been winds strong enough to bring down branches. The rivers are running high from rain and snow melt, and their banks are piled with slabs of ice. I have climbed the tree shirtless twice, and other times I have climbed quickly and regretted not being better dressed against the bitter cold, jogging back to the house with head ducked against the wind and frozen fingers tucked into armpits.

But–oh joy!–my rotator cuff injury has healed enough for me to climb back to the upper reaches of the tree on several occasions. Not consistently yet, but two or three times, on days when my shoulder is feeling good.

My first full ascent in several months is on a pleasantly warm day, and I make it my task to replace the prayer flags that have been stolen by the wind from both upper and lower branches. After spending a little time reclining on a branch and enjoying the warm light in the tree foregrounded against an intense blue sky, I begin the climb, prayer flags draped around my shoulders.

The delight I feel at making the full climb for the first time in several months is lodged at least partly in my body—hands and shoulders and legs encounter familiar configurations of branches, recognize movements like old friends. And how wonderful to feel the ground drop away beneath me again, to survey the hills from on high! To be up there for the first time in a few months (though I have never missed a day in the lower branches) is to be reminded of how simple and how extraordinary this pleasure is: the meditative yet physically invigorating act of climbing itself, the new perspective on the world offered by heights, a sense of being a part of the tree that is never quite as pronounced down in the lower branches, and the exhilaration of being perched a bit precariously 40 feet above the ground. Of shifting with the wind. Of once again being held up to the sky.

After enjoying being up there for a while, I tie a string of flags between some branches, and all feels right with the world. They make of the treetop a shrine—without being intrusive—once again. I climb down to the lower branches, and for the first time since my injury step across to the other trunk and hang the longer string of flags looking back into the woods.

I didn’t realize it when I bought them, tied into a tight roll as they were, but they are not traditional prayer flags; their fabrics are in a wider range of colors and they are in English, each flag flapping into the wind a different prayer, for prosperity or compassion or equanimity as the case may be.

But there is no equanimity in weather or landscape in these late winter days. We all hold their beers—maybe occasionally taking a sip—and watch with awe as they plunge and ricochet from season to season to season. The tree ices and cracks and thaws. Rivers flood. Ground turns to mud. Sap runs. Winds roar mouthfuls of snow and mud hardens to granite again.

Windy Ridge

February 14, 2017 In Climbing Company Miscellanea Snow Weather Winter 1 Comment

We are having a strong winter storm at last! It is Sunday and I climb the tree as Claire and I head back to the house after a hike through the storm along the Cross-Town Trail to Whitcomb Hill. We weren’t wearing snowshoes, just slogging along through six or eight inches of loose snow and occasionally punching through the undercrust if we stepped off the path. It is snowing heavily but windlessly in the woods, until now and again a gust of wind hits the tree tops and giant clouds of snow billow down like sifted flour around us. The hemlocks are heavily frosted, and even fine deciduous twigs are marked white with a line of snow.

Every real lover of the woods knows that the true heart of walking in the woods is sitting in the woods. And this is what we do. We walk for a while, or until we are tired, and then—five or six times over the course of the hike—we head off the trail a short distance into the woods, looking for a spot that calls out to us. We find trees to lean against, sometimes shoulder to shoulder, sometimes a little ways apart; sometimes individual trees, other times a sheltering congregation of hemlocks or a miniature grove of beech trees. And we settle ourselves down into the snow and we just sit.

As magnificent as walking through the woods is—striding through the forest and the falling snow—it is when you sit down and and become still that the woods really gather around. The silence is absolute, and you can hear the sifting of snow through branches and onto dried beech leaves. You are pleasantly warm from walking and everything is impossibly still and beautiful and it feels like you could sit there forever. Time stretches out and it feels like this is the way the world should be, always.

Later, as we grow thirsty and over-warm from walking, we eat snow from our gloves as we sit watching the woods. In one of our sitting places a hairy woodpecker is working busily at a dead tree trunk about twenty feet off, rat-a-tat-tatting away, apparently the only other living creature out and about in the storm besides us. I say as much, and an enormous pileated woodpecker shoots through the neighboring trees like a spear, and then, moments later, as we marvel, arrows back again and vanishes into the woods.

As we forge on and up the final ascent to the top of the hill, the wind blasts up the ridge from our left, freezing the snowmelt on our faces; we turn our heads to the woods on the right and walk half-sideways the rest of the way up, trying to shelter our faces. At the top, the snow drives horizontally over the open field with such violence from the valley below that this modest snowstorm on this modest hill feels like a maelstrom. We stand on the stone bench in the center of it all facing away from the storm—we can’t turn into it for more than a moment or two, ice driving into our eyes and faces—and look out over gray treetops towards hills and mountains gone invisible behind roiling clouds of white.

I don’t know how it started, but somehow, possessed by the exhilaration of it all, we end up calling shape-note songs—including the aptly named “Windy Ridge”—exuberantly and hoarsely into the wild wind, trying to recall and piece together the bass and alto parts from our last session of community chorus as the storm whips the sound from our throats, and laughing at the haphazard results. We sing two or three songs, then stand there leaning against the wind as long as we can bear its needles driving into the back of our skulls through our hats–then run for the shelter of the trees. At first we leap and slide down the steep part of the trail, trying to resurrect old bits of Shakespeare from memory—and I declaim Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill” a bit breathlessly as we bound madly along—and then as the trail levels out and the wind is gone and the snow falls quietly through the quiet woods, we just walk, stopping once halfway back to sit again and quench our thirst with glovefuls of snow.

And now Claire has gone into the house and I am in the tree. It is late afternoon, not far from dark, and here the snow is falling steadily and diagonally, the wind stronger than in the woods but nowhere near as violent as it was on the top of the hill. And I reflect that I climb the tree every day partly as a stand in for the walk we have just taken—which is why I offer it here. Climbing the tree is that walk in the woods in miniature.

Everything about this walk—the quiet, the falling snow, the smell of the cold air, the violence of the wind on the hilltop, the singing and the reciting, the exhilaration of slip-sliding madly down, the sacred stillness of just sitting—shows up in the tree in miniature, in glimpses, scattered here and there among the days. It is in this spirit that I climb. It is a way at least to taste these things–at the very least to remember or imagine them—for a few minutes each day in the midst of lives so otherwise busy.

And then I go into the house too.

Snowstorm

December 29, 2016 In Climbing Evening Landscape Snow Weather Winter 2 Comments

It has been snowing hard all afternoon, coming down densely, but in small flakes so it doesn’t feel as heavy as some snowfalls. And the storm, which was originally forecast to drop 12-18 inches, has been downgraded to 6-8. Still, it is beautiful out, late afternoon, about quarter after four, the final dark shades of day before twilight falls.

For a while now I’ve had a hankering to go out and spend a long time in the tree in a snowstorm, and I had imagined something wild and violent and swirling, a Nor’easter with high winds and a foot or two of snow, a pummeling blizzard–but for now, this will have to do. I dig my oldest, puffiest, most gigantic L L Bean parka from the back of the closet and, astonishingly, find in a drawer the hood I unzipped from it the day I got it a decade or so ago. The hood is also huge. Wearing it is like having my head in its own fur-lined tent. I don’t like hoods, but for this it will be useful.

When I head out, encased in snow boots, snow pants, parka and gloves, the world is bluish and full of snow. I make my way to the tree and clamber a little awkwardly up into the branches, feeling a bit like a bear or some other ungainly creature with my added bulk. I am still limited to the lower branches by my rotator cuff injury, about fifteen or twenty feet off the ground, but there is no good place to sit higher up anyways.

I situate myself facing back into the woods so I can watch the snow falling sideways through the trees. I am seated on a branch that is too slender to be really comfortable, but it is tolerable if I shift sideways a bit toward the trunk, one thigh on the branch and the other leg dangling down. My upper body is between two other branches at about chest height, so I can lean back against one and rest my arms in front of me on the other. The hood extends so far out from my face that it’s a bit like looking out of the end of a tunnel onto the woods. I feel like a creature peering out of a burrow. But it shields my face from the heavily falling snow.

I sit, unmoving. Time passes and snow piles up on my arms, my hands. I have the tantalizing thought that if I spent hours out there I would become part of the landscape. Just another thing mounded high with snow. There is little wind and the snow is falling at a steady gentle slant, coming in through the trees, sifting through the branches. Slowly the light becomes darker and more bluish. The woods are silent. The only sound is the faint susurration of snowflakes landing on my hood, and then that disappears too as they begin falling on others of their own kind, snow piling up silently on snow; head, shoulders, and arms disappearing under a blanket of white.

I am a drift in the woods.

Blake, Trees, and the Imagination; Or, Why I Climb

December 28, 2016 In Climbing Reading Tree Winter 1 Comment

This week I came across the following fantastic quotation from William Blake, which could stand as an epigraph to this project:

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the Eyes of others only a Green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all Ridicule and Deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is, So he Sees. As the Eye is formed, such are its Powers.

Nature is Imagination itself. For Blake, of course, imagination is not ‘making things up.’ It is the vital generative matrix of perception and creativity that yields the world we live in. And when I climb the tree, I climb right up into the heart of that, because being in a tree alters experience, renders it more alert to this inner relation between human being and the natural world.

Nature is Imagination itself. This is why we meet ourselves in the world around us; why when we stretch out a hand, it finds and is taken by a hand reaching back. We are everywhere already, and come home to ourselves through fields, trees, streams, cliffs, stones, sky, enrichened. This thronging, this inner relation, is Spirit.

Arborwear

December 25, 2016 In Climbing Landscape Snow Winter No Comment

It is cold and clear when I climb the tree in late afternoon, one-armed still and only into the lower branches. The sun is millimeters from the horizon. Light rakes sideways across the landscape, across new snow and into the tree. The world is rich with eye-feel when lit from the side, every texture thrown into relief. And golden in the sun’s last light. I climb in winter coat and Bogs and latex-palmed wool gloves for grip. There is a fair wind, and it feels bracingly good on my face.

And I am experiencing an absurd degree of pleasure at the fact that I am also wearing an Arborwear fleece I have just received for Christmas, a piece of clothing from a company founded by arborists—clothing designed for climbing trees. It is a beautifully made fleece, to be sure, and while it doesn’t really equip me any better for the tree than any other good fleece, it is still ridiculously fun to be wearing something on my daily ascent that was made specifically for climbing trees. It will become a favorite.

I take some photographs, watch the last reddish light rise up the trunks of the trees in the woods behind me as the sun sinks below the horizon, then climb down and wrestle with the dogs in the snow on the way back to the house.

A fine Christmas climb.

Week of Many Snows

December 10, 2016 In Climbing Evening Fall Landscape Snow Weather No Comment

It was a week of many snows. Flurries, gusts, light snowfalls of a few inches. One afternoon a few flakes dropping from dark clouds, the next morning just enough on the ground to require boots, and more falling thickly. I climb at odd times, usually briefly, tucking the tree into gaps in my schedule. Snow becomes customary; cold becomes familiar. Boots and snow pants are useful, since climbing with only one arm you end up getting up onto branches with a knee, instead of being able to pull yourself up properly with two hands onto your feet. I am still not climbing high, because of my injured shoulder. Just into the lower branches. They are brisk climbs, and pleasant, but also routine.

And then one evening it isn’t. There is nothing unusual about the day. Several inches of snow have fallen and piled up on everything. I go out in the near-dark, and even just walking up the lawn everything feels different. There is that bluish-dark light of deep winter, though it is only early December. The world is silent, and vast. There is a sense of presence in the woods, the orchard, the open meadow. Shriveled plant stems are just visible in the field. And when I climb the ladder and enter the treehouse the act feels full of meaning. Stepping from the treehouse into the branches feels sacred. As though I am entering a temple.

I didn’t expect this; I wasn’t looking for it. I thought this would be another routine climb. A few branches up, look out across the lawn, climb back down, and head for the house. Back to making dinner, or whatever was next in my day. Most climbs are like that.

But instead, every curve of branch and mound of snow feels fraught with significance. With every movement of my body I feel like I am participating in a ritual, or a solemn dance.

As I climb, I brush each new branch free of snow with a gloved hand, and I find myself pausing in mid-motion. The snow is capped three or four inches high along each limb. I sweep, and the snow cascades down alongside the trunk and disappears below me. The branch is laid bare. I can see the corrugated patterns of bark, set off by the snow still packed into its crevices. I climb onto this branch and brush the snow off the next, examining the patterns of snow and bark.

I would like to climb the whole tree this way, but I have promised myself not to do so until I can use both hands again. So I content myself with spending some time here, fifteen or twenty feet off the ground, savoring a world made strange. I thank the tree and the night, lower myself back down the few branches into the treehouse, and head for the lights of the front porch.

Quiet; Or, The Twilight Seat

December 1, 2016 In Climbing Evening Fall Landscape Rumination Weather 4 Comments

My destination in the tree has shaped when I choose to climb it, in recent days. Since I am limited by my injured shoulder to the lower branches, since I can’t roam freely about the tree to explore or take pictures—since I can’t swing from branches—I nearly always go out now to climb at twilight. Because the branches I am in offer a natural seat, I end up spending more time in the tree than when I stand at the top. And to sit there at twilight for a long time is deeply beautiful. It has been raining much of the past week, so I go out—in rain pants or snow pants, coat, hat and gloves—pull myself one-handedly into the tree, and just look out over the world.

I watch trees on the opposite hills vanish into the mists. Or disappear behind curtains of rain. And slowly darkness comes down over the world. As it falls, it looks like you could peel the world back in layers of white, gray and black. Mists roll up the hillside and the trees at the far side of the meadow disappear. The house and garage grow dim and distant through the lowering twilight. The near branches, all around me, their bifurcating twig-ends reaching spindly fingers toward the sky, become silhouettes, and then are swallowed up. Lights from the house stand out, soft through the rain, against the darkness.

The soft percussion of raindrops on fallen leaves rises up from below. It is a soundscape very different from summer, when the sound of rain beating on leaves comes from above as well as below, and from every side. When you are in the center of the soundscape, as of a sphere, rather than up above it and looking down on it with your ears. Eventually I bring down my own darkness by closing my eyes so that I can enter this soundscape fully; it replaces the landscape, which is disappearing anyways. For a little while it is my only scape, and I roam around in it.

The shoulder injury has slowed me down, and quieted me. It was so much fun to run up the tree and clamber around that I forgot to stop and just be. From the beginning, being in the tree was supposed to have been an exercise in slowing down; it says a lot about human nature–or my nature–that even so, I needed further constraint to force me to just sit there for a long time, every day, for days at a time.

And so I find, yet again, that, as so often when things go ‘wrong,’ there are unforeseen fruits, unexpected gifts. Maybe grace is as good a name as any for this, in a naturalistic rather than theological sense. But it is the kind of grace that only comes from maintaining a practice. With doing something frequently enough, for long enough, that the unexpected can emerge from it. It comes with climbing, and refusing to not climb, even when climbing is curtailed. It comes from being open to whatever experience might come. It comes from sitting in the tree and listening to the rain, and watching the world get swallowed by mist and slip away into darkness.

The Lower Branches

November 21, 2016 In Climbing Fall Landscape Taoism Weather 2 Comments

[View with images] Overnight I have decided on a compromise. I cannot justify climbing to the top of the tree, but I refuse to not be among the branches! For a time I will have to content myself with hoisting myself one-armed into the lower branches of the tree. There is less risk to my right arm, and if I slip and fall the tree house is not too far below me. These are larger branches than those higher up, and closer together, and form a more easily navigable structure.

On go coat, ski pants, gloves, boots, and out go I, into a gray morning. Everything is covered with several inches of sticky snow. The tree is frosted. I pull myself from the wall of the tree house into the tree, and go a few branches higher. Here I can turn around, face the field, and sit on one snowy branch with my back against another, my feet resting comfortably on a third below. There is a fourth right in front of me, on which to rest my arms. It is in fact a lovely spot. The snowfall of the day before has crusted the branches with snow and ice, and even the smallest twigs bear heavy loads. There are patches of blue sky that leaven the day with color. The world is white, dark gray, and blue. I have the camera with me, and it is a pleasant change to take photographs from a seated position, and at my leisure, albeit with my left hand, which is awkward. I sit there comfortably for some time.

I will admit that once or twice I gaze longingly upwards at the prayer flags twenty feet above me! But I am also deeply grateful just to be in the tree. In fact, my appreciation of it is even sharper now that I have been confronted with the possibility of not being able to climb at all.

And it is good—if not always fun!—to be reminded that we have to live in a state of permanent flexibility and adaptation; that, as the Taoists point out, the unyielding oak tree snaps in the wind-storm before which the slender reed bows and springs erect again.

This is a part of the tree I have rarely spent time in before. There is a whole new branchscape here to explore with the camera. And a new season to explore it in.

I sit and watch the way the light gleams through crusted ice.

Human Flesh, Human Frailty

November 20, 2016 In Climbing Fall Weather 2 Comments

Climbing the tree is so physically effortless at this point that I didn’t really think I would run into any problems with it. But thanks to a too-enthusiastic exercise program, apparently, along with a bit of bad luck, I have hurt my shoulder rather badly. Possibly a rotator cuff injury of some kind. By last Friday I realized that if I were going to climb the tree I would have to do it without using my right arm at all, so as not make worse whatever the injury was.

This turns out to be a good deal more difficult than one might think. It is an awkward business at best, and near the top it seems almost impossible, though I manage to make it up, my right arm dangling at my side. From the road I must look like some kind of injured bug, crawling laboriously up the tree. And this is in perfect climbing conditions: sunny, dry, and unusually warm for the season. It is wonderful to be up here against these odds, but as I stand surveying the world I begin to grapple with the fact that in rain, or dark, or snow, or even temperatures cold enough to require gloves, it will not be possible to make the climb.

I climb one-armed again on Saturday, on another perfect day. I enjoy the beauty of it, sunlight streaming through the tree and the bark warm against my hands, but inevitably, I find myself thinking about the possibility that I might have to stop climbing. About the frailty of flesh. About how fallible, how mortal, our bodies are.

On Sunday, we wake to a heavy, wet, greasy snow. In late morning I will be leaving for work, and returning well after dark. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, I put on ski pants, coat, boots, hat and gloves and go out and stand at the foot of the tree, looking up at the prayer flags. The snow is falling thickly around me and I put an experimental hand on the ladder. It is very slippery. I start up it. The ladder is easy to manage with one arm. I manage to haul myself up onto the wall of the tree house and then into the branches. Gloves make it harder to grip them securely. Somehow, branch by slippery branch, I finagle my body up the tree with one arm, the other dangling at my side or folded against my stomach. It is hard to keep from twisting when I pull myself one-armed up onto a new branch. That second hand makes all the difference, even if it only stabilizes and guides. The footing is greasy and insecure, and occasionally a boot slips a bit on a branch.

I finally make it up to the prayer flags. The snow is falling densely now, gigantic flakes drifting sideways in curtains across the meadow and through the open structure of the tree. It is breathtakingly beautiful, and it’s exhilarating to be up there. But I am also aware that I have done something inexcusably foolish–that I am standing forty feet above the ground in a treacherously slippery tree with the use of only one hand. I grasp this viscerally. And that the journey down the tree will be even more dangerous. And, above all, that my stubbornness in climbing the tree was a greater expression of human frailty than is my injured body.

I make it down without mishap, living to climb another day. But I am forced to begin grappling with the possibility that this other day may not be any time soon. In the vast scheme of things, is this a big deal? No. When faced with the specter of so much else possibly going so wrong with the world over upcoming days and months and years, this is trivial. But still, it is a fount of meaning in my life, and it is, in its own way, a form of protest. An insistence on holding on to something beautiful in a world not always so.

Sometimes saying yes to one thing matters as much as saying no to another.

But tomorrow I may not be able to say yes, at least not in this way.

Dogs and Trees

November 12, 2016 In Climbing Company Fall No Comment

A very Novemberish Friday. Veteran’s Day. No school for Emme, or work for me. The day is mostly cloudy, with occasional breaks of blue sky. Its most prominent feature is the wind, which is coming up the hill in gusts of 40 mph. Fallen leaves are whipped about in the air, a loose screen door slams open and shut until I pull it tight. And the temperature is dropping quickly. I climb in a thick fleece-lined sweater, which in the house seemed adequate but is no barrier up here to the sharp knives of the wind.

It is beautiful in the tree, I am rocked about by the gusts, I get cold very quickly. I climb down to the dogs waiting eagerly below me.

This ritual around climbing the tree has become one of the best things about it. I walk out the front door and move past the car onto the lawn—and the dogs go nuts. They erupt into a frenzy of excitement. Sometimes it starts even before this, when I am kneeling to put on shoes inside the house, and they think it’s likely that this is one of those outings, and I am not just heading for the car. If I pick up the camera they know they’ve got it made.

As I walk up the lawn towards the tree, they race alongside me, leaping and barking. They tear off in wide arcs, chasing each other, and circle back. Nutmeg nudges my hand excitedly with her nose, or my leg, as she trots beside me. And then lunges for Quillan, rolling him down the slope to keep me all to herself. He is on his feet in the blink of an eye, unfazed, racing back towards us. I rub their heads vigorously, encouraging their excitement because it’s all such fun. I wrestle a bit with Nutmeg. Sometimes we run towards the tree, all three of us together.

And then I am up the ladder and gone. Sometimes Nutmeg stands on her hind legs, her forepaws on the ladder, looking up into the tree. Early on in my tree climbing, if she caught sight of me among the branches she would raise the alarm with repeated staccato barks. Get down, you fool! That’s no place for a dog! It unnerved her that I would be such an idiot as to be up there, where the ground exists only in narrow strips and at irregular intervals, and with a chasm beneath. Our lupine and simian ancestries are never more apparent. She, descended from wolves and their grabless paws. I, fortunate possessor of thumbs and arms.

But now she is used to it, and they ignore me when I am up there. They race off together to explore the stone wall, seeing chipmunks and snakes invisible to me with their noses; or roam about individually, sniffing the lawn; or sit quietly and gaze off over the meadow.

When I come down, their excitement re-ignites. Nutmeg rockets over from wherever she is, Quillan racing along behind her. Because here is the payoff: if there is no other time in the day when they get things thrown for them, there is at least this. Nutmeg noses my hand, again and again, eyes bright, darting away and back, as we scour the lawn together for a stick or ball. If I see something and start toward it, she will lunge to try to get it first. I get a foot down and turn my body to block her.

If all I can find is a twig, I hand it to her and she tears it apart vigorously. A larger stick gets thrown and she goes bulleting over lawn, driveway, and more lawn to get it, with her preternatural ability to stay beneath it–is she following its sound in the air above her? Then I look for another stick for Quillan, he of the eternal grin, who runs over with his tail wagging so hard the back end of his body looks like it could hit him in the head. The first dog to knock himself out from sheer happiness. He seizes it from my hand and carries it off to a private spot to chew it into pieces.

Their sheer joy in these moments!

At least one of the reasons we love our dogs so much.

Especially in days such as these.

Blown Open

October 21, 2016 In Climbing Fall Tree Weather No Comment

Five-thirty. Kim has gone to collect Claire and six of her friends from a soccer game to return to the house for a sleepover. The already dark day begins to darken more. After days of rain, a wind has come up, spattering drops against windows and the side of the house. I cross the lawn to the tree and look up. The last two days I have been up there taking pictures in the rain, of fallen leaves that have clung to branches, yellow and watery against luminously green moss. The foliage had thinned already, even then, from the dense mantle of summer to a mass of leaves that was lighter and airier, but still uniform.

Today it is different. The wind has had its way with the tree. Only a scattering of leaves remain. The lawn in front and the woods behind are thickly carpeted in orange, yellow, brown. I start up the ladder of branches and it is like walking into a new world. The tree is open to the landscape, to the sky. A wind blows through it unobstructed. What leaves remain are isolated from one another, one here and another there and a scattering more over there, out on the end of twigs, on separate branches. They have lost their collective existence. No more the tree’s foliage, no more its mantle of leaves, they are now individuals, the lingerers, the hangers-on, the holders-out.

I climb carefully; the tree is slick from days of rain, a slippery organic film coating the branches. Mosses are vibrant against the impending twilight. When I stand at the top a damp wind blows up the hillside, through the branches, across me. There is a mist on the hills cloaking the subdued colors of what foliage remains. But mostly I look at the sky, at how much of it there is through the now-empty branches. Or rather: before, I would see the sky between the branches. Now I see branches against the immense expanse of the sky. A small shift in perspective, but one which entirely changes the experience of being in up there.

The tree has been blown open. It is no longer a place to shelter, to be in secret. It is no longer a space or entity that one can be inside of, as when in summer, while clambering among the branches beneath its dense cloak of leaves, I am profoundly, intimately, inside the tree. I recall writing this some past season: that now, however close I get to the trunk, I am still always only in the sky. That is it exactly. And this is new to me, that I have done this long enough that one season now can be charged with the reverberations of another.

But with loss comes gain, in the tree as everywhere. Intimacy has been exchanged for expansiveness. The door to the sky has been thrown open. The tree has changed from enclosure to threshold. From being a contained and inward-looking space to one that is full of wind and rain and sky–and, on the next sunny day, will be full of light. Drenched with light. Being up there then will be like being held up to the sky by a giant hand.

I climb slowly down through branches that now are just drenched with water, and return to the house to finish making spaghetti.

Joy; Or, Swinging From Branches

July 12, 2016 In Climbing Rumination Summer No Comment

[View with images] Of all the reasons I climb the tree, it would be easy for one to get lost in the shuffle. I climb, I write, I think, I photograph; I lose myself in the tree, the hills, the meadow, the sky; I embrace the adventure of climbing at night or in difficult weather; I try to listen to the world, to the different registers of meaning it and tree and climbing and I can offer me.

In all this, it is easy to lose sight of one of the fundamental reasons I climb: for the sheer joy of it. There is a primal and childlike pleasure in swinging from branches and clambering around in a tree. It would not be hard to be dismissive of this because it is so simple a pleasure; and it is not as easy to convey as the glory of light streaming through golden leaves in fall, or the adrenaline hit that must be involved in climbing a tree encased in ice. There is even something a little goofy about it, a little bit silly. Maybe even a little lunatic. But it is one of the underpinnings of the experience; and it makes me happy. We should all get to be kids again once in a while. Enjoy a brief return to that innocence. [View with images]

When Heights are Like Depths

July 5, 2016 In Climbing Summer Tree No Comment

[View with images] After work I take Emme swimming at the Town Pond, where she runs into close friends, and they have a blast horsing around on a huge inner tube–through which we all take turns diving, like tigers through a giant vertical hoop, off the end of the dock, before we leave. When we get home I climb the tree right out of the car, still dripping with water. The whole world is being baked in some celestial oven, it feels like, and the air in the tree is as dense and hot as everywhere else, but it is still somehow cooling to be up there. The draping greenery of the leaves on every side, even hanging heavy and still in the hot air, is refreshing. Like a pond for the spirit.

It often feels watery to me, being up in the tree. Leaves cascade down the length of their branches. The air washes over one like waves or a river. It streams through the tree. The green-gold light reminds me of the light striking down through mountain streams, onto the stones of their beds.

And above all, being in the middle of the tree, with depths below one and heights above one–rather than standing on the surface of something–feels like being under water. I think of teaching the girls to swim at Walden Pond when they were little, and then when they were older of swimming out over our heads to chase things dropping down through the water–of being down there and seeing shafts of sunlight come down through the hazy depths, of twisting and turning and looking up, down, in every direction. Everywhere a uniformity of substance and light. Suspended in the midst of it all. The liquid joy of swimming beneath the surface like an otter or an eel.

There is at least an echo of that in clambering around in the midst of a tree. How often do we really occupy a three-dimensional space, in which we can move 360 degrees, in any direction, as opposed to moving along a surface of some kind, whether flat or steep, level or variegated? In this way being in a tree is more like swimming under water than climbing a mountain.

But as I think all this I remember the brilliant sprays of water through the air as the girls played on the inner tube, of water splashing up into the sunlight against the dark background of the opposite, shadowed bank and its trees, and I think: Like but not that like! [View with images]

Kids in Trees

June 15, 2016 In Climbing Company Photography Summer No Comment

This afternoon and the next we have a spare hour, and on each of them we climb again. The first day we bring up the Canon as well as the iPhone, and spend even longer up there. It is another magnificent day of perfect greens, blues, and golds. We pass the good camera back and forth between the trunks. The pictures get sillier and sillier. From the other trunk I hear cries of “Work it, Claire, work it!”, as Emme snaps away. I take a series of ridiculous selfies to pass the time while, mainly, enjoying the girls, their goofiness, the spectacular day, and our arboreal camaraderie.

Kids in trees. It’s the way to go.

Wood Spirits

June 14, 2016 In Climbing Company Photography Summer No Comment

[View with images] Claire’s birthday. I work in the morning and am back by mid-afternoon. We have a few hours before we meet Kim to drive up to Montpelier to go out to dinner to celebrate. Claire suggests we go outside to roam around for a bit, and inevitably we drift toward the tree. We make our way upwards in a kind of vertical caravan. Emme and Claire end up on the trunk I usually climb, where the high prayer flags are, and I settle myself in the other trunk, across from and a bit below them.

It is a ravishingly beautiful afternoon, sunlight and deep blue sky and an intermittent breeze. The leaves are emerald and washed with light. Patches of sky between them are like the Mediterranean. Every once in a while a stronger wind comes up and pushes through the tree, and the branches bend and leaves foam and the trunks rock back and forth, and we laugh and hang on more tightly. I have my phone and take a lot of pictures, and they do, of ourselves and one another, and of our green cavern. Mostly we just laze and talk and hang around. Again the image of koala bears comes to mind. Spending time in a tree does with the girls exactly what it does with me alone: it shifts one into a different state of being, one that is more free and more open, the world turns to us a fresh face once again, and we do the same to it. Talking is different, somehow; being thirty-five feet above the ground predisposes one to bat ideas and reflections around more playfully.

So more silly pictures, and more talking, and a high wind, and laughter. When I embarked on my summer of tree climbing–that turned into a year, and more–I didn’t foresee that it would also turn out to be one of the most pleasant ways to spend time with my daughters.

They are comfortable enough in the tree now that I remind them that this is when it becomes most dangerous, when you feel as safe as if you are sitting in a chair in your living room.

After maybe an hour in the tree we climb down and roam through the meadow, and eventually find ourselves in the strip of trees along the stone wall at the back of our property line. There is a marvelous, ancient beech tree there, hollow and bent-trunked, and I have been wanting to play around with taking black and white photographs of the girls curled up in the hollow tree, or emerging from it, or sitting on it. So we spend another 45 minutes or so playing around with pictures, and having a blast. Eventually we turn towards the house to transfer the pictures to a computer to examine the results of our photographic play.

On the screen: marvelous images of spirits emerge from gnarled and knotted wood. Youth curled up in an ancient tree. Primitive masks of stone. The woodland broken up into mottled patches of light and dark behind.

Head Full of Lichen

June 8, 2016 In Climbing Summer No Comment

I climb in the morning. Later in the day, six or eight hours afterwards, I pull a bit of lichen from my hair. I feel around. My whole head is full of crumbled lichen, dislodged from branches as I reached above me.

This, I find myself thinking, is a not unreasonable definition of a good day: a day in which one finds lichen in one’s hair.

Evening Climb

June 1, 2016 In Climbing Company Evening Summer No Comment

I get home from work late in the evening and by the time I have a quick bite of dinner it is close to nine. Emme, who is in high spirits, asks if we could go climb the tree, and Claire jumps at the chance too. We go out into the late twilight and head for the tree.

I have already climbed it today, only about half an hour ago, when I arrived home. It always feels slightly incongruous to be climbing a tree in dress shirt, nice pants, and black leather shoes. I feel like a nineteenth-century hiker climbing a mountain in a tweed jacket. Something about the experience is kind of fun–whimsical and slightly surreal, to be wearing such clothes in the branches of a tree. Maybe I’ll add a jacket and tie sometime. A tuxedo?

But it feels good to be out here again in more comfortable clothes.

I warn the girls to be careful. It is dusk and the world is dim and begins to blend together. It is easy to feel more comfortable in a tree than is safe. Emme goes up first, followed by Claire. We make our way in stages up the tree, enjoying the sensation, unlike any other, of being up among the branches when the light is soft and everything is turning gray. We assemble up near my perch. Claire has made a seat of a branch where it meets the trunk, Emme is standing out a ways on another branch and stretching one leg agilely above her head like a ballet dancer. I am nearby. We are like three koala bears, just hanging out forty feet in the air, talking a little and looking around the interior of the tree in the dusk. Although not, it is true, feasting on eucalyptus leaves.

After a while we make our way down, first Claire, then Emme, and then me. Claire swings down with alacrity and is in the tree house quickly; some of the branches are further apart, relative to her body size, for Emme, but she climbs down nimbly; and I follow after, thinking about how differently I negotiate the branches than they do–how body size dictates the kind of movements required to lower oneself from one branch to the next, or how one must turn and duck beneath another branch to reach the one that will allow one further progress. Each of the three of us would look like a different kind of animal if one analyzed our paths down the tree.

We reach the ground and walk through the twilight toward the house, Emme cartwheeling across the lawn.

Company

May 28, 2016 In Climbing Company Night Spring No Comment

Trish and Jeff and Tristan and Finnley are up for the weekend. It was intensely hot today, near 90, and we had an early dinner with Doug, Anne, and Rob. I grilled chicken, sausages, hot dogs, and asparagus, and felt like I was being grilled myself, from sun above and embers below at the same time. It was wonderful later in the evening when the heat finally dropped. Jeff and I were having a little Scotch when I realized I hadn’t yet climbed the tree. They, having just heard about the tree, wanted to come out to see it, so we troop out into the dark and feel our way across the lawn toward the tree house. I climb carefully, feeling the Scotch only slightly, and it is strange to hear voices coming through the blackness from below. Usually the night is empty when I climb, except for peepers or fireflies or woodcocks, and maybe the wind, or the moon, or a billion stars. It’s kind of fun to have people down there beneath me in the dark.

Inside the Tree

May 8, 2016 In Climbing Rumination Spring Tree No Comment

[View with images] I climbed early today, 6:30 on a Saturday, the rest of the house still sleeping. I slipped out to the car to retrieve a Mother’s Day gift and flowers to hide them away in the mudroom for later in the day. It will rain later too, and so I slip off socks and shirt and go back out. It is chilly, only in the upper 40s, so I am not sure why I am out there in just pajama bottoms. In fact, I realize, it is my first barefoot climb of the new year.

There is not much change in the flowering of bud into leaf; the rains of this afternoon followed by the warmth and sun of mid-week will stretch them out from their calices, like pulling veined green taffy from an acorn cup. But only by degrees, still only tiny emerald growths on the immense gray-brown body of the tree.

Today I find myself thinking about the inside and the outside of the tree. I have a single rule for the photographs I take as part of my climbing practice: they must be taken from the tree itself. They can be of anything: tree, horizon, leaf, ground, sky, moss, me. But I do not take pictures of the tree from outside. Part of the intent of climbing is to recapture the strangeness and intensity of experience; and we all know what it is to look at a tree. It is being in the tree that is novel, that lets us see things afresh. We are used to being on the outside of trees, not the inside. The farthest away I can get from the tree to photograph the tree from within the tree is out on one of its branches–as far out as will support my weight. I am on its margin, but its inner margin. I am well on this side of the threshold between tree and world.

The inside of a tree and the outside of a tree have only a barest hinge of reality in common to flex around. They are two different entities in the world; two different modes of experience. I would like to say they are like a piece of sheet music and the music played; but that would be going too far. Perhaps they are a little like the inside and the outside of a person. We see the body, the face, the expression, the clothing, from outside. But the interiority of a person, sensory experience and feelings and values and thoughts and fears and hopes and desires, is much more variable, much wilder, see-sawing in scale between the vast and the microscopic.

We can’t say quite so much for a tree. But while from the outside, a tree is a thing–beautiful and interesting and varied, to be sure, and even symbolic of things other than itself–but nonetheless, a thing standing over there; from the inside it is a world. It becomes the eyeball seeing, or at least we, among its branches, become so, looking out. It is a microcosm of the universe, micro and macro in one, immense trunk and tiny mosses, light and wind and sun and snow; heights and depths and distances among the latticework of branches, the unreachable and undesirable and the infinitely desirable; silence and music and stillness and motion, tiny crepuscular movements of life in crevices of bark, leaves drinking sunlight, a human being leaping from branch to branch; snowflakes piling up silently in white mantling masses along the boughs.

The tree is hills and stars and morning light and sun-bleached meadows and moonlight and back-lit draperies of sheltering green all around; the tree is the flock of chickadees that hopscotch among its branches; the tree is the sky that arches overhead and is its roof–but only if you are in the tree. From outside, it is not hills and stars and sunlight and birds; it is just a tree. This is the strangeness of experience. It is like the difference between a book lying over there on a table, and a book that one is inside of, reading deeply; I am immersed in a good book, we say. And that of course is when the book gets inside of you, and begins to read you. And so it is also with a tree. And it is a good thing to have a tree growing inside of one. [View with images]

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