I have always loved climbing trees. We used to have one outside of the house I lived in as an elementary schooler, and my brother and I (although I more often than him) would frequently climb the tree and just hang out there for hours, sitting and enjoying the nice day. I did this pretty much everywhere I went where there was a tree, and often when I invited friends over my first offered activity was, “Do you want to climb the tree?” (If my friend was a wuss, this suggestion was often followed by an offer to play Barbies or walk around the block instead.) Even at my church, my I would frequently climb the trees in my nice sunday clothes, until tree-climbing got banned because some kid climbed too high and didn’t know how to get back down so he fell and broke both of his wrists (because his inability to climb a tree also extended into an inability to land.) After that tree climbing was banned at church. When my family was moving my only request was that we move to a house with a climbing tree, and yet I didn’t get it. Our house was surrounded by trees, but really tall oaks with no good branches at all, and so, I fell out of the practice of my favorite hobby of climbing trees.
Years passed, and eventually I got invited to a picnic at my aunt’s house. She lives in a pretty outdoorsy area, where there’s a lot of land as well as trees. Now, after years of lost practice, I had fallen out of recognizing good climbing trees (I used to walk around the neighborhood and identify them for my parents) and failed to realize that all of these years, sitting in her back yard was a perfectly good climbing tree. My little three year old cousin, however, was on it. I spent much of the family picnic watching him attempt to get up into the tree using the structure of an old swinging bench, and always falling just short. I remember he even picked up a long piece of bamboo that his dad grows and sticking it in the tree, attempting to crawl up the bamboo and into the tree. After about an hour and a half of watching his attempts, I decided that as his older cousin, it was time for me to show him how it was done. Without much effort, I climbed onto the structure, careful not to break it, held on to a branch and pulled/walked myself up to sit in a tree. The look of amazement on his face was borderline hysterical, as he uttered “Howju do tha’?” and then ran to his mother to tell her “Amy’s in the twee!”
I was overcome with pride and joy as I sat atop my perch, overlooking the party. After about five minutes I was ready to come down and rejoin the adults so that my cousin could have his turn in the tree. I looked around and was met with a horrible realization: I was stuck. I could not get down. I would have jumped down, had it not been for the fact that if I missed I’d land on either a couple of outdoor chairs or a pole used to support a swinging bench, or my other little cousin who was speeding around like Tasmanian devils. I couldn’t come back the way I came, because I had had to jump onto the tree to begin with, and even if I hadn’t my cousin with the tree fascination as already climbed on top of it to get ready for his next attempt. There was no convincing him to move off either so I could try to make my escape. He was fairly certain that should he get off, someone else would beat him to his spot in the tree.
“Uhhhh guys?” I called. My brother was the first to see my dilemma and he just laughed. I hadn’t expected him to be of much help anyway. He did hit my dad however to show him the funny sight. My dad laughed and when my mom saw, she did to. “I’m stuck. Can I get down?” I had to face a variety of teases and taunts about being stuck in a tree at my age, one week before I was supposed to go to college, before finally my dad came over to help me out of the tree. I guess this just goes to show the importance of practice, and why I should have had a climbing tree in my backyard my whole life.
