Trees and kids go together.

I climbed them to heights that now dizzy my head and would survey all the lands around my childhood home. I may as well have been a seafarer high on a mast sighting distant land for the excitement and freedom these perches radiated through my heart.

Smaller trees fell to the bite of my hatchet or machete when the allure of chopping overrode any young sense of preservation. I was a child in the forest, surrounded by trees too many to count, too many to miss one here and there. Children sometimes tear down.

Girls and boys both do this, I know.

But gosh, boys… We did some damage.

I grew up in the era of “Hug a Tree” education programs. I suppose it goes without saying I also grew up in a place where getting lost in the forest was a likely enough prospect to warrant an education program to improve our survivability in the face of such a fate.

Hug a Tree could be summed up as, “Stay put, don’t just wander off aimlessly if you don’t really know how to get back to civilization.”

At the time, I fixated on the very literal image of wrapping my arms partway around a huge fir tree and pressing my face into its rough bark. I remember feeling unclear on how hugging the tree was really, truly going to keep me safer than just, you know, sticking around the same general spot in the forest and listening for voices or the helicopter that would surely be dispatched to find me.

But, who am I kidding. I would definitely have wandered off trying somehow to find my way somewhere.

I prefer movement over not.

The tree I have climbed most in all the world is a cedar, tall and red, soft bark torn free around the lower trunk by our cats’ sharp claws, branches worn soft by my feet, hands, and bottom on thousands of trips skyward and back down so fast I might as well have been shimmying up a ladder or bumping down a flight of stairs.

I could see my mom in the kitchen window far below. Cooking, washing dishes, within view through that window a surprising amount. Peering up in the way I now see was cautious supervision tempered with the determination to let me climb. To let me be a young boy in the woods.

My spot was high up, about even with the top of the telephone pole. I could look down on the rounded metal roof of our home, onto the tarred black surface of the square living room addition sloping away toward the yard on the opposite side. Chimney and vents. The garage farther off, its grooved metal roof on this side facing up toward my perch, its exterior surrounded by sawhorses, parts of cars, boat hulls, mechanical detritus of all sorts that defined the space to either side of our driveway.

My overriding memory of this perch was ease. Carefree comfortable ease of mind and spirit. Ease of warm summer evenings where the hot day’s breeze wafted a greenish-Rhone cedar spice aroma mingled with wildflowers and the bright green smell of lamb sorrel so sour to eat, yet so irresistible because we knew we could eat it and risk no more than the stomach ache that comes with too much sour.

These days in my memory remain forever long, freeing, relaxed. Days marked by opportunity to do anything, go anywhere, be whoever. Wide expanses of forest that begged young intrepid explorers to probe deeper and deeper, passing the same trees, swamp, beaver dams, and logging roads in search of far-flung adventure over the next hill, the next property line.

This life seems faraway.

We now live in a city, my family. Lots of trees. In the back yard and the front. A whole “green space”-y valley across the street winding through our neighborhood. Real woods are farther flung, though still a matter of minutes not hours distant. But…

Where will my son explore?

Climb?

How high?

Cant’ even think about that now. Right now it’s the back yard and playgrounds and realizing that maybe I don’t have to climb all the way to the top of the play structure behind him with a hand out like the coaches you see on TV who step onto the gymnastics mat before the gymnast does that tricky release move.

Hardly ever necessary, but there just the same… In case.

And that must end soon. Other safety nets will remain. Other kinds of vigilance.

Life is both hard and soft. Like the trees.

Some barks are soft to touch. Leaves, too, and fuzzy new buds that shoot forth each spring. Buds and tiny white flowers that are out now, surprisingly early, on the neighbor’s plum tree that overhangs our front yard. From which we will eat in months to come. From which Jakey would gorge himself if only we would continue to pluck plum after plum for him. Insatiable.

Tonight he fingered the buds with a gentle hand and I wondered at how most of a year had passed since this tree hung low with maroon leaves and lush fruit and Jakey could barely walk, barely talk, but still said, “Plum? Plum!”
And juice ran down his smooth chin and over his tiny fingers.

For all their soft parts and the gentle waving way a bough moves, trees are also hard. They hold their ground against car bumpers with horrific ease, against rough climbing children, pocket knives, bugs, and woodpeckers. They withstand the test of time and nature better than most living things.

Jakey likes trees. He likes being outdoors.

The tree pictured at the top of this post is outside the preschool by the playground where we played this afternoon. It is not just ornamental. The tree is part of the school. Far more alive, filled with infinitely more magic than the asphalt covered in two-dimensional sidewalk chalk drawings like any old playground. No, this tree is an inviting canvas like no concrete or blacktop.

It says notice me.

Not all ears hear its invitation, but the important ones do. The ears we most want open to the call of the Earth.

The tree says I can hold your art. Give it to me and I will show it proudly long after these sprinkles of rain already falling wash away the last hints of chalk below on the unprotected pavement.

We go together.

I can hold your art.