In the Trees

I can be sure that I was very young, I played little league baseball just that year, and so I stuck to easy prey. Younger trees gave the best leg up. It grew just over the stone wall, not our family’s land, even though we’d buried an old couch there, and was full, too, of many years worth of moldering leaves. My brother started a fire in there once. Maples thrived in the humus, saplings yearning up by the rotting stumps and trunks. That kind of woods. Someone had cleared it years before us and then stopped caring. I was careful to find that spot on the trunk just before bend becomes break. I flew in the wind~I spun in circles for I don’t know how long, the skinny tree swaying and jerking like a tweaked spring. Identifying my first memory strains me too much, like assembling a puzzle whose slots and tabs seem to change each time we touch them. I know, however, that day, conquering the sky, must be the most joyous of things~my whole world conspiring to imprint elation. That stuck fast.

A couple of years later, in third grade, some foolishness found me down in the grass, one bone in my left arm in the caret shape signalling full-on fracture. All I remember before getting in the car to go to the hospital is walking down to the house carrying my left arm before me like a last-place trophy. A bunch of kids had been climbing with me then. Brothers, at least one of my sisters and the six or seven kids in the houses we could see and whose names I still remember. I know some of them are dead now. Besides the pain of it all, my arm in a cast gave me the sort of celebrity possible in a parochial school room. Sr. Catherine allowed signatures with only the black colored marker. No doodles or nonsense were tolerated, a line formed. How the idea for such a ceremony came up I don’t remember, but I sure didn’t ask for it. Sometime later during my tenure at Assumption school, Dutch Elm disease took the dogwood that broke my arm, and all the others dividing the ‘in’ and ‘out’ sides of our street. That was fine, though all the parents mourned the missing white blooms.

Still at Assumption, I snuck through the apple orchard in front of the Wilkinson’s yard to a stand of evergreens in their side yard. With the logic of childhood, at least mine, I chose to find the best and highest of them, and climb as high as I could. They’d done with the spraying trucks weeks back and I was allowed to be outdoors. I wore a belt so as to lash myself to the trunk when I’d reached just as high as anyone ever could. The needles were soft but the sap seeped up into my clothes, skin and hair and I just cared that it smelled that way. That I did. I stayed until dusk threatened and was in before dark because that’s how we were, most of us. It may have been fifteen minutes or two hours, but for me, it was enough for me to understand what ‘right now’ means.

After we moved to Broadview, where one brother and I still had to share a room, I found much of my alone time up in the trees. I was a gymnast then, strong handed and sure enough. I can’t say why, but I decided to see what I could see of the inside of the house. From a tree. Only the sun room, called ‘the Florida room’, and my parent’s left-side bedroom window were not obscured. I’d watch television in their room sometimes, just for the choice of channels among two brothers, two sisters. Of course, you had to get there first. I found a pine near the hammock that allowed an ideal view of the television on the dresser opposite my parents’ bed. I saw partial episodes of “James at 15” and “Fantasy Island” that way~my choices broadcast to an empty room, awaiting the interruption of some seeking sibling to end the show. None of them got to see TV the way I did.

The maple in the way back of the yard offered different things. It was a leap for a long time until I could easily catch the lowest limb. Once up, my ascent was not so important as the canopy. Mid-way I’d stop, leaning against the trunk in a side hug. My own attempts to peer into the leaves always proved that in that thick bloom, I could be alone. People could be in the yard or on the porch or even looking out the window and they wouldn’t find me. Again, it could have been minutes or hours. That part doesn’t really matter. I never did it when folks were in the yard, but windows de damned, I’d take off my clothes or bathing suit. Then I’d stand there in my air bath, secure, alone and alive in the world, my clothes sagging on the branches. I’m not even sure how close to puberty I would have been, but I streaked on the maple at least a couple summers running. It wasn’t sexual or self-examination, but rather a quiet, contained declaration I struggle to articulate even decades later. Even if no one sees, both tree and climber stand to be counted, no matter the year, the season, nor the welter of the forest.

As I grew with the trees I wandered much further, finding new ones to conquer and finally share with a friend. A school friend shared his special tree with me. We carried our plastic-handled pocket-knives up with us and carved secret things~meaningless, happy faces and cruel words whose real meaning was lost to us. We read the cryptic messages of those before us. One day we carried some White Owl cigars with our cheap pocket knives up into the arms of the tree. We decided it was correct of us to do so~my parents had just made public that a new baby was on the way. I met my friend’s neighbor that day as she cut her way through the woods back to home under our crassness and cigar smoke. Soon after, she was the first girl I kissed, tongue and all, in my friend’s back yard.

My whole life changed. Torrid love notes filled with borrowed words were passed, and phone calls for hours when I could steal them on the ‘kids’ phone’ my parents had installed during all that adolescence. When we parted, she and I, it was badly. It stung. When it was warm outside, sometimes I’d climb my friend’s tree as I cut through the woods from my bus stop to my own final leg home. I watched the back of her house, hoping just to catch sight of her again. Despite my efforts, I never saw her again from that tree.

I went to forbidden places for climbing.   Private property places. I found a wilderness skills course among the trees near the YMCA camp where I learned to swim in a frigid, tree-shaded pool years before. I could do only some of the obstacles on the course alone, so out of boredom and habit, I found a tree to climb. Like the others, my tree was bare and my breath fogged the air. While I carved or lost myself in thought, a group of children straggling behind an adult walked and gathered in a circle some ten or fifteen feet from the base of my trunk.

Some sort of nature lecture took place, though I couldn’t hear the words for the distance, and because all of my effort unified quickly to ensure my absolute stillness. Two brothers from school sat among the group, listening to the lecture. One of them was in my class. It can’t have been long, and thank god they didn’t go near the wilderness course. I couldn’t stop breathing, sending up signals, and my previously secure position became almost impossible to maintain as I watched the group in horror. All of the peace, the safety I’d achieved twisted there with me in a light wind. It wasn’t age that stopped my climbing, and not gymnastics practice or too much homework. Hanging there alone in that tree, exposed, above people I would have liked to join, that did it. My illusions of privacy, mastery and enough time to think had blown away with my breath.

I love them still of course without climbing, for their majesty, for cleaning my air, for the flowers and shade and birdsong. Mostly, though, I think I love trees becase I married that girl who caught me smoking up in that tree. If it still lives, that tree has 35 more rings than it did the last time I was in it. We have two rings now, and one of us.