№ 18: The Second Tree
There are only two trees that I can remember climbing prior to getting serious about my hobby a few years ago. It’s been many years since I’ve seen either, and I would dearly like to know what they are like now that I have two hundred other trees to compare them against.
The first is the tree in the front yard of the house I lived in until I was about seven years old. I wrote about that one in the very first letter on this site. I climbed it many times as a child, but a yellowed Polaroid comprises most of my memory of it.
The second tree was just as formative in my arboreal habits: a tall specimen on the Quad of my alma mater, Kalamazoo College. For this one, I have no photo—just a handful of memories.1
Until my late thirties, this tree was the subject of the majority of my climbs as an adult. It sat about twenty meters from Olds-Upton Hall, and from my perch at the top, I found myself level with that building’s fourth-floor windows.
I don’t entirely remember when I began to climb it, but I do remember how. This is a tree that has a difficult entrance, of a type I’ve not written about yet. The first branch is too high for me to reach. But, I was able to ascend it by
starting a short distance away and running at the tree,
jumping,
planting a foot on the trunk,
using that foot to jump higher off the trunk, and
grabbing the branch.
It was difficult, and I failed a majority of the time (and felt silly trying it in the midst of a busy campus with people all around me).
I did not figure out this entrance by myself. I remember a couple of other (presumably) students by the tree, one or both of whom showed me the technique.2 I do not remember what I said or did to prompt them to share this information with me—maybe I was trying without success to grab the first branch—but I am grateful.
Once I’d been shown the secret, I spent a lot of time in that tree, as it was a tree that was easy to spend time in. It had good areas for sitting somewhat comfortably; something relatively rare in my experience climbing nowadays.
I would go there when I needed solitude—a hard thing to come by when you share a dorm room, but easily found when you’re high enough off the ground that no one sees you. I would also go there to do classwork. I remember bringing my laptop and a bunch of books, and working on essays up there.
I also remember watching commencement one year from the tree. I believe it was the year after I had, myself, graduated. Graduation ceremonies were held outside when the weather was good, and the tree was positioned a few dozen meters from the stage and the rows of graduates. I could sit up there, out of sight, looking down on the pageantry. That worked one year, though the next year I was noticed by campus security shortly before the ceremony began and asked to come down.
I haven’t been back to that tree in a couple of decades. I couldn’t tell you much about what it looked like, or what species it was. But it was the first tree that I had a connection to as an adult. It was a tree that made me feel like climbing could be part of who I am; a part of the identity that I was forming in college.
Near the end of my time in college, I began my first relationship. My partner used to write down doodles and thoughts in a notebook, and one time she shared that notebook with me. Among other things, she wrote in wonderment about this person who brought a laptop into a tree. A person she fell in love with. That was the first external validation for that part of myself that I can recall.
I would very much like to go back and re-aquaint myself with that tree.
I tried to find a photo online, as I know its location. But, the best I could do was to find it in the background of some B-roll of the campus.
I am not sure I perceived it at the time, but in retrospect, those students had a manner characteristic of recreational marijuana enthusiasts.