№ 12: Cycles
While I worried prematurely in last month’s letter about my age beginning to take trees out of my reach, a far more real threat is the chainsaw. I was reminded of this during a recent visit to a neighborhood park, when my search for a particular tree ended with the discovery of its remains embedded in the ground.
When out and about on foot, or when climbing, it’s easy for me to think of trees as permanent fixtures. They are large, they are solid, and their slow growth takes decades. But they are living beings, and I have already outlasted several of my leafy climbing partners.
I do not know what happened to this specific tree. I ascended it once, back in 2020, and had not gone looking for it again until now. It may have been felled last week or three years ago, for any number of reasons. Maybe it was badly wounded in a storm, or by a fungus. Maybe it was planted in a place that someone deemed inconvenient.1 Or maybe it simply was too old.
I’m not accustomed to thinking of trees as perishing due to their age, but they are as susceptible to senescence as most any other living organism. While many trees can live hundreds of years, a boxelder’s (Acer negundo) lifespan is measured in decades. I’ve climbed a lot of those, and many will be gone before me.
Cycling Out
This is not the first time this summer that I’ve sought out a familiar tree and been disappointed. In July I sought out a tree that I had noted as “Very generous … maybe the easiest 40′ [climb] I’ve seen.” But it was no more.
I’ve had more dramatic encounters. Last year I went looking for a certain tree only to find the entire thing laying horizontally on the ground, freshly cut. I remember being struck by how it looked so short. Once it had soared above me, now it felt like another ordinary thing on the grass.
But trees do not necessarily need to perish in order to slip from my grasp. There is one other reason that I must occasionally remove them from my roster: with or without human intervention, they often shed lower branches. I was once able to climb this swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor), for example. But the lowest branch is now gone, and everything else is out of my reach.
Cycling In
And yet, on this particular tree, new branches have sprouted near the knot left by the old one. I have no idea how fast they will grow, but on some future day, maybe I will climb this tree again.
If you look again at the stump of the linden tree I showed earlier, note the saplings in the background. One tree comes down, but others rise in its place. All of this is being carefully managed by the city parks department, of course, but it’s not so different from a natural cycle.
So as some trees recede from my range, others enter. The same recent afternoon that I discovered the remains of Tree 57, I climbed a green ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica). I only made it about 14 feet (4 meters) off the ground before I ran out of useful branches. And yet just above me, I could see some small twigs that might, in a decade or two, grow large enough to become future rungs to the ladder and let me explore more of this tree. I’ll be keeping an eye on them.
September Summary: I made a total of 25 climbs, on 22 different trees, with a total climb height of about 781 feet (238m). A slowdown in my freelance work left me with a lot of opportunities to take advantage of the unseasonably warm weather.
My mind turns again to The Great Oak, which is located on a vacant lot held by a land company; it will likely come down someday for being “in the way” of whatever gets developed.