Essay: Tree Climb
By Nancy Miller Herbert
People need trees. Trees need people. That's the message of the Trees & People Coalition, an important group working to hold Seattle's leaders to their commitment to protect and grow our tree canopy to cover 30% of the city by 2037. At a May 31st fundraiser co-hosted by Newground, I read aloud the essay below about the origin of my own deep love for trees. I hope you enjoy it – and that you'll join us in supporting this vital organization. – NMH
Do you remember your first tree?
Do you remember its moist, earthy smell as you stood below and gazed up, up, into its outstretched arms of green finger-leaves and wildly twisted, knuckled branches?
Do you remember your first tentative, awkward 7-year old’s jump and swing-of-an-arm to reach that first beckoning branch?
Did you jump twice, maybe three times, and with absolute joy and wonderment manage to grab hold and swing your gangly leg up over that almost-out-of-reach branch to become the tree’s newest wild visitor?
Did you feel the invitation into its friend group of birds and bugs, and thrill at the close-up investigation of crenelated bark and its tiny rivers of sap that even tinier ants busily harvested in their conga line of antennae and sextet-marching feet?
Did you lick the sap now on your fingers and wonder why the ants relished this bitter-tasting tree juice? Did you prefer to nibble on cherry blossoms like I did?
Did you climb, up, up, up until the musty smell of dirt and petrichor left your child-nostrils, to be replaced by the crisp, clear, Everest-like air between widening branches, now bowing precariously under your 40-pound frame?
Did you feel like Hillary, but better – more free – no crampons, no ropes, no boots – just free-climbing with hands and bare feet, outfitted only in a t-shirt and flared blue jeans?
Did your bird-friends scold as they sensed the odd bulkiness of your untested, wingless body in their midst?
Did you, like me, feel the rush of heart-pounding excitement and slight terror, as a sharp snap from your new tree-friend warned that you had tested its patience – gone too far, too high – and it was now time to go home?
Did you find miraculous handholds and footholds that led carefully down the thick, decades-old trunk to that very same sturdy branch that only an hour earlier you had struggled to even touch?
Did that final jarring, thud-of-a-jump off the tree reverberate through your bones – that here, nearly 50 years later – you still remember the pain and sharp in-breath as you wondered if that leap had been a good idea?
For one moment, did you feel the bittersweet sadness friends share when they say goodbye?
. . . And on that auspicious day, did you become the explorer of all things great and majestic, and of things simple and yet not-so-simple, like my cherry tree?
Did you, too, cross that child-line of easy existence and glimpse and feel something – although 7-year-old you would not have had words for it – something ancient and timeless, something powerful and life-giving, something so irreplaceable that in your bones and in your heart you knew it was worth protecting, no matter what... because that’s what friends do?
Do you remember your first tree? I do.
Nancy Miller Herbert is Newground's Director of Operations.
Note: This material is intended for educational purposes only. As with all our public writing, blog posts do not constitute tax or financial planning advice; likewise, they are neither an offer to sell nor solicitation to buy any investment or security.
