I’m up a tree, and I like it

Do children still climb trees?

When I was a kid, many decades ago, I couldn’t stay out of them. A sycamore grew in front of my home. At the age of 10 I was just tall enough to reach its lowest branch and hoist myself into its embrace. Standing on that first limb, I was able to reach the others and monkey my way up, up into the loftier recesses until, taking in all of my neighborhood from on high, I wondered if this is what it felt like to be a king.

I wasn’t the only climber. Sometimes two or three of my friends would join me in the sycamore, or in the maple down the street. Or (with her permission) Mrs. DiMarco’s gnarled old peach tree, some of whose stout horizontal branches allowed us to sit shoulder-to-shoulder, munching on the achingly sweet fruit, moaning with delight as the juice flowed down our chins.

Climbing trees allowed us to enter another world. In fact, it was a world within a world: We took our imaginations with us into those heights, which by turns were a fortress, a pirate ship, a spaceship, or a mountain redoubt. One summer, we spent so much time in the sycamore that my dad rigged a rope-and-pulley system with an attached basket, so my mom could send ham sandwiches and Twinkies to us on the wing. (There are few things as pleasurable as eating a Twinkie while aloft in a tree.)

Having related these memories, I still have the question: Do kids still climb trees? In my small Maine town there are some lovely maples, lindens, and oaks, their branches spread wide, open for business. But I have not yet seen a taker. Perhaps computer games have supplanted tree climbing, or maybe the activity went the way of monkey bars, which came to be viewed as too risky and have largely disappeared from playgrounds. 

It is a sad loss. I have always believed that, since low-hanging limbs provide no benefit to the tree, they must be meant for the child. Robert Frost understood this when he wrote:

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

My only disagreement with Frost is his inference that tree climbing is a gender-
specific undertaking. Both boys and girls have what it takes to make a joyful ascent (my kid sister will attest to this). 

Kids in general instinctively know what they are capable of: their agility, energy, and strength, disproportionate to their size, are distinct advantages over us lumbering and risk-averse adults, who are more inclined to conjure a reason not to climb that tree.

The campus of the university where I teach is lovingly landscaped with all sorts of trees, some of great age. During a recent walk, I found myself ducking under the limb of an immense spruce. Ducking? If I could duck, I could reach. So why not? 

I grabbed the thing, used my feet to scrabble my way up the trunk – none of this as easy as it once was – and a moment later was sitting on a bough. Then the memories came flooding back. The old sycamore, the friends, the long view of my neighborhood, the Twinkies, and finally, the reluctance to return to earth when the parental call to supper came.

I was so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t hear the student calling to me from below. He asked what I was doing. I didn’t waste time on explanations. “Come on up,” I said. “The air’s fine.” But he only laughed, waved me off, and continued on his way. 

He didn’t know what he was missing.