In June of 2019, after four years of climbing virtually every day, I had to leave the tree. Someday I will find the words for what this creative project–and this tree–meant to me. There are many kinds of love, and this was one of them.
Miscellanea
The Bangalore region of South India is parched. There is virtually no visible water anywhere and the landscape is mostly stone and dust and the heat of the sun.
But there are trees. Trees perched on distant promontories of stone, trees on dusty rural roadsides, trees on urban streets rising above endless streams of rickshaws and buses. Trees used to tether animals, to hold up awnings, to lean scooters against. Trees heavy with jack fruit. Trees growing out of piles of trash. Trees that are marked with pigment in worship, sites of the sacred, themselves sacred. Trees along the roadside from which hang ropes with great clusters of coconuts at the end, discarded piles of coconut shells drifting down the embankment behind. An towering Aurai cookii rising up behind women in saris, planted by Queen Elizabeth II. An immense White Silk Cotton Tree that dwarfs all humans around it. Trees swarming with monkeys. Trees with roots like blades. Trees with impossibly wide canopies in a brilliant shade of new green that my camera fails to capture.
And then the stone: immense outcroppings of stone that rise above the plain. Pillars, courtyards, carvings, from a temple in the Nandi Hills that dates from the 900s. Everything baking in the heat, paving stones almost too hot to walk on in the requisite bare feet when visiting a temple. And then to pass between pillars and beneath the shade of the temple is a blessing: to stand on that cool stone refreshes like standing in a stream.
It is almost impossible to imagine my tree, buried in snow, raked with freezing rain, rising from a frozen landscape of white and gray. Unvisited and unclimbed. Cold as iron.
But life swirls on, and there are lunches on banana leaf plates, flower markets, street scenes. The extraordinary assault of colors, sights, sounds, smells.
It will be easier to remember my tree when I am wearing a down jacket and back among its branches.
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It is late and I step out into the night and head for the tree. I move across the darkness of the lawn, navigating mostly by the slope of the ground, and then freeze about twenty feet from where I guess the bottom of the ladder to be. I have walked into a wall no less impenetrable for not being solid. The air is dense with the overpowering reek of skunk. “The rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril,” I believe Shakespeare wrote somewhere, about something; and that doesn’t even come close. I take a few steps forward and the stench seems to increase exponentially. This is fresh; and ground zero is somewhere nearby. I remember the burnt-rubber chemical-weapon smell left on the dogs when a skunk hit them at close range a year ago, and hesitate. Can a skunk spray twice in quick succession? If it’s lurking just inside the darkness of the woods, still irritable at whatever disturbed or attacked it, is it spent, or ready for another round? It doesn’t seem like the time for theoretical inquiry. I turn and book it back to the house.
A notable day, then. In nearly three and a half years of climbing the tree, with the sole exception of three days when I forgot, and climbed it 25 times the following days, I have never missed a day (unless of course we were out of town). That is, nothing has ever prevented me from climbing the tree. Not a fever, or a broken toe, or a busy day, or a tree sheeted in ice. Not getting home from a trip at 2 am, nor leaving for one at 4 am. Nothing has stopped me from climbing. Until now.
At the porch I stop and bow to the darkness and the formidable power of the Mephitis mephitis nigra; then turn and enter the brilliance of the house.
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Twice this past week, once on Wednesday, after school and before work in the evening, and once late Sunday afternoon, Emme and I, and on Sunday Claire as well, walk a mile or so in from a local road to a place along a river where acres of Jerusalem artichokes are in full bloom. Thousands of sunflower-like blossoms about three inches across, massing at the top of six- to eight-foot stems, nod and sway in the breeze. The grassy track leads through them, parting this ocean, and in places they lean in from both sides, creating archways of green and gold. We carry in Emme’s hammered dulcimer and its stand to take some video of her playing there in the slanting late afternoon sunlight. It is a scene of surpassing beauty.
On the walk back to the car the trees are shot through with light, and the smell of the dried leaves crunching underfoot is enriched in places by that of fermenting apples. A black and seed-filled mound of bear scat at the side of the track suggests that a feast of them was enjoyed not long ago.
And walking along here, among the trees, I am suddenly replete. I don’t know how else to put it. I am full, and overflowing. The trials and tribulations that life inevitably brings vanish; and all is brimming and bounty, in a quiet, deep way.
This is one of the reasons I climb the tree, for moments like these. They don’t come often, but they wouldn’t come at all if I didn’t climb. The practice of climbing is like casting a net to see what it will catch. That moment when woodcocks and barred owls are calling at the same time, or brushing snow off the branches as I climb feels intimate and sacred, or the tree blazes with light in fall, or Claire and her friends are singing in the tree; and one is, unexpectedly, replete. The world brims. Fullness is its gift. But always an ephemeral one, for we were not made to hold so much; not always or for long.
Maybe this makes climbing a different kind of practice than the practice of an instrument, or a sport, or a martial art. Those forms of practice are directed at mastery. Maybe it’s more like the practice of writing, or of prayer: waiting to see what comes. Waiting to see what will be caught next in its weave of days and nights.
This tree, my net. Catching me, again and again, in this brimming world. I think of last winter, the later months of it, and early spring, and the barrenness of climbing, day after day after day of making my way up among the branches and not knowing why, but not giving up; and of the intermittent riches that have followed.
And I’m not sure why, but I think of a short poem from a book on my desk, Sky Above, Great Wind: The Life and Poetry of Zen Master Ryokan, by Kazuaki Tanahashi:
I don’t regard my life
As insufficient.
Inside the brushwood gate
There is a moon,
There are flowers.
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It is late at night and the rain is steady, soft. I pull on a raincoat and step out of the house into the darkness. As I cross the driveway a fat toad hops slowly by, mottled and bumpy. Hop. Hop. Hop. It disappears into the shadows of a stone wall. I continue toward the tree, watching the horizon. The lightning is nearly continual—not bolts, but flashes that light up masses of cloud from the inside. I try to avoid climbing the tree when there is lightning, but it is growing late and the risk seems reasonable, and, more to the point, it’s an extraordinarily beautiful night and I want to climb the tree.
Lightning flashes twice in the time it takes me to climb the treehouse ladder and step into the branches: first to the north, then to the northwest. It’s warm out and the rain is so inviting I shrug off the raincoat and drop it to the floor of the treehouse. I stand there a minute. There is a quality of fullness to the night, of things near my face, of falling water and moving air and a flashing sky. The darkness is thronging with things I can’t quite see, but everything feels alive: as though if I put a hand in front of my face I will touch something that will shoot away. Is the air full of insects? Am I brushing against leaves? I start up the tree, moving carefully among the wet branches, climbing upwards through the rumbling air.
The sky luminesces four or five more times as I make my way up, and each time I pause to watch the black silhouette of leaves and branches against the white clouds. I think of a line by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: “Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black / Ever so black on it.” There is something dragonish about the shape of the branches, reaching out from the trunk, heavy and bristling with leaves.
When I reach my perch I stand and lean back against the trunk. Every few moments the sky flashes and thunder shakes the air. The toad has stayed with me. For some reason it has evoked a visceral sense of a specific character from Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Spirited Away, in which the night is thronging with strange spirits and spirit-animals. This deepens the feeling I already have of the night being inhabited, of being as alive with beings as it is with water, sound, electricity. Perhaps Toad was a gatekeeper who handed me off to the world of spirits, here in this tree that on other nights is just branches and me, serene but empty.
I am learning to trust these experiences. I think that in their way they may be as true as any other.
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Weeks go by and the weather is monotonous, the landscape bleak, the tree uneventful. It would be easy to stop climbing at times like this. The practice feels empty of inner inspiration. But I carry on, waiting. Life can be like this, too. Sometimes you just have to shoulder through the rough spots, with patience, and a sense of openness for what might come.
And I am reminded in these weeks that the tree is not just the tree. The tree is everything that neighbors it. In the world, in time, in me. It is like a magnetic pole that stands up from the earth, bending meanings around it; and in turn can receive its meaning from things not itself. In a short span I enjoy three instances of this.
Claire and I, on our way to community chorus one Thursday night, and again coming home, late, become deeply absorbed in conversation about the music of Bob Dylan, listening raptly to the whole of Mr. Tambourine Man three or four times, and talking about Carl Jung and archetypal images in music, in culture, in dreams. In the midst of this, rehearsal: the intent absorption in parts, in melody and harmony and lines fitting together. When we finally get home, I head for the tree—and the tree is saturated. I stand at the top, and the wind blows anciently through the branches in a way it would not if the prior hours had been spent differently.
I spend a recent weekend immersed (and unquestionably, if joyously, out of my depth) in the ocean of music that is the Village Harmony Winter Weekend on Lake Morey: Corsican, Appalachian, South African, Sardinian, English rounds, American shape note, Balkan, Gospel, and on and on and on, eighty or ninety of us. Singing until my throat is hoarse, hour after hour, barely keeping my head above these glorious waters. Since I am there for two nights, on Saturday I am in need of a tree to climb. I slip away from lunch early and set off down a path into the woods. It is gray and the snow has rotted into puddles of slush and all the trees along the track are forest trees, with no branches for dozens of feet off the ground. I finally find a smallish yellow birch and make my careful way up among branches no bigger round than quarters, hugging the slender trunk as I go in case one of them gives way. Fifteen or twenty feet off the ground there is nowhere else to go. And so I stay there a while, in an awkward half-crouch among the branches, wrapped around the trunk.
And it is good. It is good because my face is pressed into a trunk ruffled with curled golden fringes of bark. I have never climbed a yellow birch before. Its dust is on my cheekbone. And it is good because I am full of music, swimming in it, and so I don’t need to get forty feet off the ground to get high. I would like to say that the tree is music and music is the tree, and that they are one and that is why I am happy, perched in this ridiculous sapling fifteen feet off the ground—but maybe that would going too far.
Another night I get home from work late in the evening. I park the car and drop my bag in the driveway, heading up the slope of the lawn over icy snow to the tree. I make my way into the branches, climbing upwards through the empty night. The solitude of climbing at night can be mesmerizing, but tonight it is late and I am tired and I want to get inside and eat. I reach the top and stand for a minute, inhaling the breeze, when I am startled to see a dim light below me and off to the right. It takes me a minute to grasp that it’s Emme, sitting on the garage roof in the night and listening to music on her phone. I had parked two stories beneath her. I call down and she calls back.
And I suddenly feel, at the same time, Emme high up on the roof overlooking the world, and Emme far below me—and the delight of this disjunction in space and perspective, and the delight at finding I have company, and the delight that Emme is the kind of person who sits on roofs late at night to listen to music, renders the tree joyful in a way it has not been for some time.
And so I keep on climbing, taking comfort from these things: that I do not know what my next climb will be like, or what may rescue a given day from the banal; that people and music and conversations and the night can make a tree; that everything we do takes its meaning from everything else; that this interweaving in and of our lives is what makes us human; and that all these things are the grounds for the continual possibility of hope, however dark the days.
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Back when the world was warm and golden, when grasses stood tall in the meadow and apples still hung on the trees, Emme stepped out of the house one morning and came back inside to get me. We went out together and there, close to the porch, on its side, was the body of a woodcock, immaculate. Not a quill out of place. Its feathers as rich and warm as the world around it: chestnut brown and gray and black on head and wings, shading to hints of gold down its breast. Its long beak lay against the ground, its days of browsing for earthworms in the leaf litter over for good.
I imagine the way the world holds the memory of this creature, circling high above the meadow in spring, calling, hurtling out of the sky in search of a mate; that the world still holds this imprint; that at least I do.
Early last spring, earlier than I thought possible, I heard a woodcock calling, and worried for it; days later we had a hard snowstorm and the earth froze to iron again. I couldn’t imagine how it would survive deep snow and impenetrable ground. If this is that bird, and it did, it is dead now. If that was another one, then the season has been framed by two small deaths.
We surmise that it was one of the dogs that got this one and laid it at our door. Sometimes climbing the tree in summer I would hear it rustling among the dried leaves in the undergrowth beyond, and once, walking towards the tree, I startled it up and it flew into the ladder, flailed a moment, then winged into the brush behind the tree. That was the closest I’d ever seen a woodcock, until here by the porch.
I buried it close to the foot of the tree at the edge of the lawn, just into the woods. I placed a heavy slab of stone over it to prevent it being exhumed by animals wild or domestic, and set a stone on top as a small monument, and on that a round white river pebble, which later in the fall fell into the leaves and disappeared.
It is late in the day now, growing dark, and starting to rain into the snow; there is a chance of freezing rain later. As I walk to the tree, the grave catches my eye, a small crown of white snow on the black rock where a white pebble once was. A curled beech leaf has fallen and caught in the snow, a tiny bronze ornament. I haven’t thought of the woodcock in months, but now I imagine a green world at twilight, and a bird circling invisibly in the clouds above.
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I am sitting on a couch in the Green Mountain Rock Climbing Center on a Wednesday afternoon, watching Emme and her friends scale the walls, when it suddenly hits me that the day before, for the first time in over two years, and only the second time ever, I forgot to climb the tree. The presence of an active shooter at Kim’s workplace, the subsequent lockdown and conflicting news reports, and relief that things didn’t turn out worse, wiped everything else from my mind for the evening.
The last time I forgot to climb the tree was in July of 2015. My act of atonement was to climb it 25 times the following day. This was a fairly demanding task, and no doubt helped keep my memory sharp for the next two years. As I sit and wonder when I will find the time today for this ritual act of atonement, I register the fact that my entire body is sore–I happened to have exercised strenuously the night before as we all watched some show or another. Legs, arms, shoulders, back, all have the fatigue that plagues recovering muscles. I will have about an hour and a half when we get home to make dinner–and climb the tree 25 times–before heading back out for an Irish flute lesson later in the evening, after which time it will be dark. This should be be an adventure!
And now it is early evening and I am standing in the grass at the foot of the tree. I drive a thumbtack through an index card into one side of the ladder and balance a pencil on a rung. I step onto the ladder and begin my first climb, more slowly than usual, pacing myself. Up the ladder, into the tree house, onto its wall, and up into the branches. Foot, hand, lift, pull, step, rise; turn, reach, pull, lift, step, stand. Repeat a few times, step left foot out onto perch, pause to admire the view, turn and descend. This won’t be so bad after all! I think.
At the bottom of the ladder I take the pencil and make a single hash mark on the index card. Twenty-four to go.
It is a warm evening, and humid, an unusual weather pattern for mid-September in Vermont that will stay in place for several weeks. I take my shirt off and hang it on a nearby bush. I start back up the ladder.
Half way up the tree it hits me. I feel the fatigue in my shoulders and arms as I lift from branch to branch, in my sore thighs as I push upwards. I climb laboriously into place, breathe for a minute, and start back down.
At the bottom I stand in front of the ladder, slightly winded, and make my second mark on the index card.
It’s going to be a long hour.
After ten climbs I am sweating profusely and I go inside for a cold glass of water.
After a few more climbs I am bushed. My muscles, which started out sore and fatigued, now burn. Climbs 14 and 15 are not fun at all, my body wearily negotiating familiar handholds, braces, branchy steps.
And then I hit a rhythm. On climb 16 I move slowly but steadily, and the world goes still and quiet around me, sliding down as I move upwards alongside the trunk. The heat and humidity of the air feel good on my torso, and every twist of body and grasping of hand is sure. The tiredness of my muscles is pleasant now. I am dancing–slowly–up the tree. Time slows down (Is this delirium? Am I dehydrated? I wonder), and everything becomes extremely beautiful. The sun is close to the horizon now, light shining sideways through the tree. Clusters of leaves luminesce, emerald touched with gold, among the branches.
Hash mark.
Step, turn, lift, pivot, push, turn, step, glance at the hills. And back down: dangle, step, turn, dangle, step–down into the rich smell of dried leaves rising from the forest floor. Hash mark.
Lichens rough on the branches. Hash mark. The deeply corrugated bark of the trunk. Hash mark. The hills receding soft in the late light. Hash mark. Skin moist with heat. Hash mark. Late leaves eaten by insects. Hash mark. Air brushing chest and back. Hash mark. Moving, where moving is just being. On and on and on. Hash mark.
And I am done. I stand in front of the ladder, drenched and breathing hard, and collect my shirt from the bush.
I must remember to forget to climb the tree more often.
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It is Labor Day weekend. The nights have been cold, in the high 40s, and a steady rain on Sunday, but Saturday and Monday are sunny and dry. The air is no longer summer air. The world has opened out into a kind of clarity. Meadow and woods are still green, but with an inner hint of gold.
Emme has been spending hours in the tree. The last several weeks she will disappear from the house, and if I go out after her later I find her perched on a branch looking out over the meadow, or doing pull-ups thirty feet above the ground, or just roaming about among the branches. That she has found a place like this to go for a bit of tranquility, to be by herself, and be nourished, makes me deeply happy. Like Claire slipping out of the house at night after the rest of us are in bed to go walking down meadow paths in the moonlight.
Saturday afternoon I’m playing around with the cajon and I see Emme walk out of the house carrying a book. I practice for another half hour, then grab a book and head out after her. As I guess, she is up in the tree in her favorite spot, book open in her lap. She says she doesn’t mind if I join her so I climb up and find a spot of my own.
I like the juxtaposition of grainy paper and print against the rough bark of the tree. The stark contrast between black ink and cream paper, all sharp edges and definition on the one hand; and on the other the softly shaded grays and textures of trunk and branch, and luminous green leaves behind. I read for a while and then fish my phone out of my pocket and take some treebook pictures.
We spend the next hour or so exploring the best places to read in the tree–some are uncomfortable, some are very uncomfortable: all are wonderful. At one point i am lying back on two branches where they cross and Emme is seated about six feet above me, facing the trunk. We read, we talk, we laze. We look up at the sky and laze some more.
It’s glorious. Why had I never thought of reading in the tree?
It is the quintessence of summer, its perfect culmination, coming at its very end. And the seed of fall already planted in its heart. Already sprouting.
Before long we’ll be able to climb this new tree.
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The Stone of the Apostles, carved in the eighth or ninth century, on display in the beautiful Dunkeld Cathedral, situated on the banks of the River Tay and dating to 1260. There is an ancientness to stone that wood and water cannot match, especially when time erodes stone to some of the organic softness of water and wood.
The River Tay, on whose banks stand Dunkeld Cathedral, and whose shores were the playground of the young Beatrix Potter, who spent the summers of her childhood here. Much of her inspiration came from this river and the surrounding countryside. The river, seen here in a steady light rain, is full and fast-flowing here. In other places it is wider and slides idyllically along.
Also on the banks of the River Tay stand two magnificent trees, the last living remnants of the famed Birnam Wood of Shakespeare’s MacBeth. The first is this stunning sycamore, which despite its massive size is a mere three hundred years young. ‘Tis but a sapling, really.
And just past it, a slightly smaller but far older oak tree. It’s age can’t be determined exactly because it is hollow–Claire, Emme and I all fit inside at once, with me standing up–but it is well over five hundred years old.
Shakespeare is thought possibly to have traveled to Perth with a troupe of actors as a young man, and could well have walked beneath the branches of this oak tree. It’s certainly easy to imagine it; both trees look medieval, but this one earns the name.
And of that forest of Birnam Wood, just these two remain.
And at 5:00 tomorrow morning we hop on the shuttle to the airport, and our Scottish odyssey is done. It will be back to my tree, reverberating now with new resonances, tapped with deeper veins of water, wood, and stone.
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Among the trees in one of the most beautiful places I’ve been, a beechwood above the ocean on the Applecross peninsula after crossing the Cattle Drover’s Pass in a driving rain. From the harrowing to the sublime!
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Nary a tree in sight but stunningly beautiful. Hiking among thistles, sheep grazing everywhere, and rabbits bounding up the slopes around us. Just the bones of the earth, water, light.
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A magnificent knotted tree, who knows how many hundreds of years old, in the churchyard of Beauly’s ruined priory from the 1200s. A handful of immaculate crow feathers on the ground, and among the highest branches of this immense tree at least three large crow’s nests (or ravens?). I collect a few feathers to bring home.
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Glorious concatenations of wood, water and stone! Neolithic standing stones at Kilmartin Glen; Loch Melfort; and a tree at the entrance to Arduaine Gardens, all in Argyll.
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Every day should have a tree, and this spectacular dripping dark-barked beauty was the one! In Arduaine Gardens, Argyll.
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What a welcoming tree! I’ve never seen so many trees full of character as I have in two days of driving through Scotland. Huge and craggy or slender and elegant, weather-beaten or jeweled with moss, along hedgerows, in open fields or at the edge of woods, I want to stop and visit nearly every tree I see. I could spend weeks just driving around and hanging out with trees. We came across this particular tree while walking in to see the Glenfinnan viaduct, now famous for being the bridge the Hogwarts train takes in the Harry Potter movies. That was a hoot and well worth the walk even without this wonderful tree!
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In a several hours of walking up this valley we see only one tree, except for two or three others not much larger than shrubs. It leans over the river we walk along and it is caked with mosses. Wood over water with stone all around. This landscape is breathtakingly primal in its bones and its openness. It is wild and we exult. It is a gift to be in a tree here.
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Queen Anne’s Garden, Stirling Castle, Scotland. And a very nice beech tree. Beautiful!
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In half an hour we are leaving for Boston for our flight to Scotland. I do the day’s climb in the company of Emme and Claire. We bring up a container of gooseberries Emme and a friend picked from our patch yesterday. They are chilled from a night in the fridge and are extraordinarily refreshing on this warm and humid afternoon. What a treat to enjoy one’s own gooseberries thirty feet up in a tree! It will be hard to see summer go.
For kicks I have decided to try to “climb” a tree each day in Scotland and post a photo to the blog by email. In some cases this may amount to hanging briefly from a branch in an urban park, or standing on a bit of highland gorse with nary an actual tree in sight, but it will add to the adventure of it all!
Stay tuned.
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I often catch myself thinking of the tree as having a front and a back. It stands at the edge of the woods, and the side of the tree that faces outwards, across the lawn and toward the driveway, house and meadow, is, to me, its front. The side that faces away, toward the woods, is its back. When I am in the tree I often look back, into the woods, as I am climbing up, but when I have reached my spot I usually face to the front, out over the meadow and toward the hills.
It is impossible for me not to have this feeling, that the tree has a front and a back. This is to see the tree in human terms, of course, but then I am hopelessly human.
If the tree were in the middle of an open field I couldn’t sustain this illusion. It would stand like a kind of inside-out theater in the round. A thing that reaches out and exhales and eats and drinks in every direction equally. Is this one of the defining differences between plants and animals, that all animals are unidirectional, all plants pandirectional? That animals have a front and back, while plants face in every direction at once?
We critters are so directed along an axis. Almost everything we do, we do more easily forwards than backwards: reaching, bending, seeing, smelling and hearing, walking and running, embracing. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like to engage—see, act, move, or think—equally in every direction of a full 360 degree surround. Would we think about progress differently if we had no front? Would we imagine a different God? Janus was the two-faced Roman god, and the Hindu god Shiva is often portrayed with three. But imagine an every-faced god! A deity in the round, with as many faces as the leaves on a tree.
But of course my tree is not in the middle of a field. It may not have a “front” and “back”—my human construction—but its two sides are in fact very different from one another, and engage with different worlds. I want a better way to refer to these two sides, one that acknowledges how different they are without anthropomorphizing them into ‘front’ and ‘back.’
I remember years ago reading an essay by Wendell Berry on margins, on the idea that wherever two domains meet there is a greater variety of life than there is within either domain alone. Shores are richer ecosystems than dunes or deep water. Hedgerows, and other meeting places between wood and field, are richer than either alone. The banks of streams are denser with life than the grassland beyond or the stream bed itself.
One side of my tree stands at the margin between wood and meadow (or, more immediately, lawn). It participates in and constitutes a transition, from dense branches to open space. It is a threshold between one kind of ecosystem and another. There is an abundance of sunlight and open air on this side of the tree. Birds alight in the tree more often from this direction. There is grass above its roots on this side, and the soil is probably poorer from decades of supporting a monoculture which gives back little. This side of the tree spans the forest and the lawn—a world of branches and a world of open air—reaching from one into the other. It exists in, and constitutes, this transition. What I used to call the front of my tree I would better call its margin side.
I think about the other side of the tree and decide to call it the matrix side. Here the tree is interwoven with others of its kind. Branches cross with branches, roots with roots, and sometimes it is hard to see which is own and which is other. Shade and sunlight mingle and dapple in a pattern that is irregular and uniform at once. (On the margin side of the tree, full sunlight and stark shadow form large and separate blocks.) The ground is richer from decaying leaves. Water approaches the tree from the matrix side, from upslope, and drains away from the margin side, downslope. Everything on this side of the tree is enmeshed with more of its own, with others of its kind, forming a rich connection of exchanges and interactions.
Matrix and margin. Web and threshold. Vastly more evocative, more encompassing, and more precise, than ‘front’ and ‘back.’ And less dependent on a human’s sense of what counts as the orienting features in the landscape (cleared areas, a house, the road). I wonder if the tree thinks of itself (if trees could think) as facing the wood—others of its kind—with its back to the lawn. Matrix in front and margin behind.
And then I wonder if matrix and margin are words that I could use to think about myself, and my relation to the world around me. Maybe it’s time to turn from anthropomorphizing the tree to dendromophizing myself. Which parts of me me open onto a web, and which constitute a threshold? Where do I engage with like, where do I open onto other?
Food for another day’s climb, and another day’s rumination.
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Today I cool off in the tree after finishing a trail maintenance hike. I am dropped off in the early morning, make the long wandering climb up to Whitcomb Hill, continue along the trail that Claire and I walked during a snowstorm a few months ago, come out on Alger Brook road, and walk home from there. I go with loppers in hand, and at certain points, especially on the final stretch up to the hill, I clear small sapling growth from the edges of the trail extensively. I bring a folding saw in my backpack but never need to remove anything over an inch and a half across, aside from a few fallen logs that need to be persuaded off the path.
Doing this same hike a year ago I had a simultaneous and slightly uncanny encounter with a deer and a hawk. This year offers its own unexpected, if somewhat less profound, experience.
I sit on the stone slab at the top of the hill, have a snack and some water, and remove five or six ticks from my clothing, and two more from my scalp. The top of Whitcomb Hill is a cleared meadow, with a magnificent view to the east out over a valley to rolling hills and mountains falling away behind them. Several apple trees dot the steep slope of the hill as it falls away, and they are bursting with flowers against the hazy blue of the horizon.
When I’m done eating I stand on the slab to enjoy the view. It’s gotten hot and I’ve gone shirtless some time back, and the air is flowing deliciously and steadily over the top of the hill. I decide to walk the circle, an energy-gathering practice from Bagua that involves walking the perimeter of a circle about eight feet across, back-weighted and low, with the torso and arms turned toward the circle’s center.
After about ten minutes of this when I swing back around toward the view and the apple trees, I am stopped in my tracks by a deer head. It’s framed beneath the flowering branches of one of the apple trees, and it is perched on a long neck and staring straight at me. The neck ends at the ground because of the steepness of the slope. I am frozen and the deer is frozen and we just stand and stare at each other. Well, I stand. It has no legs, it’s just a neck and a head. The effect is comical and unnerving at the same time, and eventually I laugh out loud. I think this will startle it away but it doesn’t. It is so motionless it doesn’t look real. So I go back to walking the circle. It watches me for one full circuit and when I come back around the second time there is only greenery between ground and branch.
I never see the thing move. It isn’t there; and then it is, like a statue; and then it isn’t.
And now I stand at the top of the tree, backpack and lopper leaning against its trunk, awash in the wind again, shedding accumulated heat before I go in to shower and shed more ticks. For some reason I think of the hundred or so young trees I just dispatched in the name of creating a tick-free passage through the woods. My own version of the trees I wrote about in In Memory of Trees Not Mine, the stumps of which I just walked by on my way home.
I think of trees that are planted and trees that are cut, trees that are wild and those in rows. Trees that grow untrammeled into forests, and those that blossom singly on top of hills. Trees that make houses and trees that make wooden flutes and trees that heat stoves on a cold January night. Trees to sit under, and trees to look at, and trees to walk between.
And trees to cool down in after a hike.
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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.
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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.
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March 1. It is my first climb to the top of the tree by night since my shoulder injury. It is moonless and dark. The sky is a winter sky, black and brilliant with stars, but the air and soundscape are those of spring. The breeze is soft with moisture and almost—but not quite—warm on my face. From an unusual high of 60 it has dropped to 40 degrees. And Alger Brook, in the ravine across the road, is in full spate. Swollen with rain and snowmelt, it roars in the night, leaping over rocks and down channels.
And then, unexpectedly for the first day of March, I hear the first woodcock, earlier than I thought possible, chittering in the darkness somewhere high above the meadow. A stray, cresting ahead of its migratory wave?
Two so different wild cries break the silence of the night. Brook; bird. Constricted water; constricted air. The syrinx of the stones; the rushing channel of the throat.
When I close my eyes it is spring; I open them to hard stars above, and below me snow, and Christmas lights still strung along our porch.
Winter and spring jostle and abound. Briefly.
In a few days winter, for the time being, wins out, tying a tourniquet of cold and ice around the brook, which grows quiet; and the ground is frozen hard by subzero nights as wind blows snow up the hillside. It is hard to imagine a woodcock plunging its beak into the mud for earthworms now, and I worry for it.
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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.
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I love the inversions that occur in climbing the tree—such as being up in the branches and watching a bird on the ground below me that has no idea it is being observed from above.
Another is putting up a Christmas tree. To have a tree inside our house for a month—and me spending lots of time out in a tree—is kind of a hoot. Every time I come into the house from being in the tree and encounter another one in our living room, I get a little burst of delight, the kind that comes from a sudden and unexpected cognitive shift.
Like a category mistake, but a good one. I’ve traded places for a little while with a tree. I’m out trunking and branching and sky-rising in the frigid twilight, and it’s inside sipping a little well-water, enjoying the warmth and the light. Practically putting its feet up and having a cup of tea. Its branches thronging with ornaments and lights, my head ornamented with snow and darkness.
So it is with multiple layers of regret that I take the tree down, returning ornaments to boxes, unstringing lights, and dragging it out to rest on our deck beneath a bird feeder, providing another sheltered access point to sunflower seeds for the local birds.
But having a tree in our home for a little while also gets me thinking about the inversion more metaphorically. It is not just that I am in the tree and there is a tree in our house. I am in the tree and there is a tree in me. Figuratively speaking. It can’t not be. I have been up there so many times, experienced the world from that point of view so often, observed the tree in so many seasons and weathers. And it gets fed and watered, grows a little, gets another dose of psychic chlorophyll, every time I go out to climb.
I like to think of this tree that grows inside me when I take it with me up among the branches of the tree out there at the edge of the woods. The two of them resonating, calling out to one another across the threshold of me.
And unlike our Christmas tree, this tree doesn’t have to be taken down—at least until I am.
On the other hand, our Christmas tree gets to throng with chickadees. I can’t imagine a better way to go.
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[View with images] This is in memory of trees not mine. Not that any tree is mine, of course, even the one I climb every day. But in a way these felt like mine too.
There is a posting to the town listserv that the next day our dirt road will be closed from a little ways above our house to its far end, for the removal of trees. I suspect I know which trees are slated for removal. There is a place where our road becomes quite narrow—it would take some work for two cars to pass—as it climbs a hill, and there are high banks on both sides. Along the left bank, going up the hill, a series of old birch trees lean out over the road from the top of the bank, and much of the earth has been eroded out from underneath them. Their roots run alongside the road in a tangle at about shoulder height, and, since the earth is hollowed out from underneath, you can look at them from below.
Their roots and trunks hold countless rocks. Some pebbles, some fist-sized, others the size of a human head, they are suspended in this tangle of roots, either resting on it, deposited there as the earth sifted down through this bent and twisting meshwork, or tightly gripped by roots from above. In some cases roots have wrapped around rocks and grown half over them, stones now suspended by the long, jointed fingers of the tree. Others have been enveloped by the tree at ground level and are embraced by the trunk itself. It looks like the tree is giving birth, laboring to thrust half-born creatures out into the world—or as though it is reluctant to let them go, a too-protective mother holding them back with powerful arms.
The effect is ancient, chthonic. Wood and stone, root and rock. It’s like a door to the underworld. It stirs the imagination. The universe could not have conspired to create a better place, for example, for hobbits to hide as Black Riders menacingly traverse the bank above, threading among the trees on stamping horses.
It is Christmas vacation and I propose to Emme and Claire that we go up the road to visit these trees, in case they are indeed the ones to be taken down the next day, when there will also be a snowstorm coming through. Emme has been sick since Christmas, has barely moved from the couch for days, but she is game and we decide to mount the expedition. We bundle up and drive most of the way, and walk the rest.
We spend some time scrambling about, examining the intertwining of roots and rocks, crawling part way under the embankment to look up at them from underneath. There is a thin snow over everything and the light is flat, gray, and chilly; it is not the most beautiful of days. Immaculate snow, brilliant sunshine, and deep blue skies would have been nice. But we enjoy being there, and roam about exploring and taking pictures.
In the lush growth of summer, this part of the road is an entirely different place. It is almost luminously tunnel-like, the banks green with vegetation and moss, trees nearly meeting overhead. It feels enchanted, shimmering with life. In this pared-down world of snow and tree trunks, roots and stones, other marvels are evoked: the exposed bones of the earth and an ancient sense of depths.
Last summer we made some videos of Emme playing the hammered dulcimer on this bank, beneath these trees, and now I am glad we have them. Because when we drive up the road a day or so later, when the snowstorm has passed, all the trees are lopped off about six feet above the ground. The lower trunks I assume will be taken later. There is a strange and uncomfortable sense of openness above the road. It is hard not to feel that the lopped-off trunks are like amputated digits or limbs.
But birch trees age quickly, and not well, and while this was part of their charm, they would not have lasted much longer, especially perched precariously on top of a scooped-out embankment. We need our thorough-fares. We can’t fare through without them.
When all three of us have taken as many pictures as we want—as always, pointing a camera at something is a great way to observe it more closely—and we have spent enough time with the trees that our visit feels complete, we make our way back to the car and drive home.
The embankment is still there, for the time being, the trunks and roots and rocks, but no life springs from them now. The stones are no longer gripped and suspended by living beings. The bank doesn’t breathe. No rafts of foliage will be held up to the sky in summer. The meaning of it all has changed. In time the roots will rot and the embankment will collapse.
I am glad we made our little trip.
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[View with images] Everything is wet, soaked through. Leaves are beginning to come down. The floor of the tree house is covered with them. When I climb, I find fallen leaves clinging wetly to branches. They are tiny, a lot of them, almost miniature, just an inch across, or two. It had seemed to me that the leaves on the tree were smaller this summer than last. I had wondered if the drought had shrunk them, if when they had needed to be replete with water the tree had been thirsty and unable to siphon enough through to them. Next summer I will know to compare.
But they are beautiful, these tiny leaves, golden-yellow, spotted with brown, collecting droplets of rain on their veined surfaces. The mosses along the branches are vibrantly green from days of rain, the branches themselves are dark against the carpet of yellow foliage beginning to gather on the lawn beneath. I perch on slippery branches, do my best to shelter the camera from a downpour, and take pictures.
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Today, arriving home with Claire, I invite her to join me for my second one-legged climb. Though sick, she agrees with alacrity. She shoots up first while I make my slow, laborious way behind. I bark my shin on the ladder, then knock my forehead on a branch hard enough that she hears it from fifteen feet above. She is amused.
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