by Jon Cohen
“Are you having a bad day?” Beth had called up to him.
Harry, twenty-two years old, looked down at her. He was sitting on a branch, holding a handful of dried catkins, harvesting them for lab class, where he would test them for all sorts of things that were fascinating only to a forestry graduate student. “No, I’m having a good day,” Harry replied.
“You’re in a tree. Usually, guys your age climb trees only when they’re drunk or they think they’re squirrels.”
“Funny you should say that. I saw a drunk squirrel, last week.”
“Friend of yours?”
Harry smiled. “He was in the apple orchard, south end of campus, near the Aggie center, sitting on a limb eating a fermented apple. Chomping away, and then suddenly he just tipped over and fell into the grass. Lay there with a big smile on his face, staring up at the sky.”
Beth laughed. Although he didn’t know her name until a day later.
What had happened that day, that first day they met, was both very small and very large. Harry climbed down from the hickory tree, and they simply talked. It intrigued her that he was in grad school for forestry, that he was the kind of guy who climbed trees and knew that squirrels got drunk.
Harry was not intrigued by Beth, he was dazzled. She was beautiful, a grad student in social policy, and she laughed a lot.
She suddenly glanced at her watch, and said, “I have to go.”
“Don’t go,” he said, and blushed that the words came out so emphatically.
“I have to. I’ll be late for class.” She looked at him and he looked at her. The look that changes everything. “Will you be in this tree tomorrow?”
Harry nodded. He would be in this tree every day, if that’s what she wanted.
“What kind of tree is it, anyway?” she said, patting the trunk.
“Carya cordiformis. Prefers mollisols on a fertile surface horizon.”
She regarded him. “Thought so,” she said, in a very serious voice. “Said to myself, this friggin’ tree is a Carya cordiformis, and it prefers mollisols on a fertile surface horizon.”
Harry fell in love right there.
Beth laughed, and waved goodbye, and he whispered after her, “Don’t go.”
But he wasn’t in the arboretum on campus whispering those words, he was whispering them from the top of a bitternut hickory in the middle of the Endless Mountains.
“Don’t go.”
But Beth was gone, and she was not returning to this hickory to look up at him and smile. She was long ago and far away, and now he was atop a very different tree.
He stared at his hand, at the white skin where his ring had been for so many years. The ring was off, Beth was gone. A terrible wind had blown across his life.
“Windfirm,” he said. Because it occurred to Harry that he was still standing. After that terrible wind, still standing. And even more important, he was standing high up in a tree.
He looked around. There were a lot of trees in this forest. He had a lot of climbing to do.
* * *
When Oriana was running back toward the house after telling Harry about The Plan, she turned and looked over her shoulder and saw him starting up the bitternut hickory.
“He’s climbing a tree,” she reported to her mother as she got into the truck. “The bitternut hickory by the spring.”
“Don’t be out there bothering him,” Amanda said.
“I wasn’t. I didn’t even talk to him,” Oriana lied. “I just wanted to make sure he was still there.”
Amanda, too, was glad Harry was still there. Last night he said he didn’t know exactly what he’d be doing, but that he needed to be in the forest. Needed to stare at trees. He’d made it through what had to have been a long night. He could’ve taken off, but he stayed. Good. It would be good for him, and good for Oriana.
But something was worrying Amanda. She hadn’t expected he’d be climbing trees. Then again, that’s what he’d done with the sugar maple. He’d started to climb it, going after the Snickers, and the limb broke. That bump on his head? Was he in any shape to be climbing?
It was Amanda’s day off. She had a ton of chores around the house, but when she got back from dropping off Oriana at school, she grabbed the bird-watching binoculars and slid into the forest. Just to check on him.
She peered from around a fat sycamore, scanned the leafless trees of the spring forest. She saw a flash of bright white and green and focused on Harry’s Forest Service cap.
Harry was sitting on a branch halfway up a bitternut hickory. He wasn’t doing anything, in any forest management sort of way, taking core samples, or examining the bark for beetle borers. And he wasn’t searching for more Snickers. He was simply...sitting.
She watched him for several minutes. He’d look down at the ground, he’d look up at the sky. Sometimes, he’d just stare straight ahead, staring into a distance far beyond the boundaries of a forest.
Amanda knew what he was looking at. Himself. He was a man lost in thought. Harry climbed—Amanda had walked. When she was overwhelmed by thoughts of Dean, especially in the early months, she walked up and down the gravel road in front of the house. She had walked. A tree man would climb.
She lowered her binoculars and left the forest as silently as she had entered it.
* * *
After the hickory, Harry climbed two more trees, a Norway spruce and a white ash.
He stared up into the ash. It was a beauty. They make baseball bats out of the tight, hard wood of the ash because it is highly resistant to shock. But this ash would be spared because it lived in a protected wilderness area that would never be lumbered. It would never be turned into a tool handle or flooring or the legs of a chair. Like the bitternut hickory, it was a young tree, and it would grow to a medium size of about ninety feet. It would live for ninety years. Ninety feet, ninety years. When the buds opened, in about four days, Harry guessed, rolling a swollen apical bud between his fingers, it would flower, leaf out in a glaucous green, and in midsummer produce single-winged seeds that birds loved. Harry loved them, too. When he was a kid, there was a white ash in the Magnusons’ yard, and he would gather handfuls of the winged seeds and throw them into the sky, then stand very still as they helicoptered down around him. They made a faint whir that only a child could hear.
Harry sat midcanopy and imagined, in a time-lapse film in his mind, the lifespan of this ash, from seedling to its toppling death, decades from now. It had picked a good spot to live and die, just as the hickory had picked a good spot beside the spring. He had walked a half mile to get to the ash. It was not near a spring or a creek, but the spot was good in a different way, because it was an eastern slope and there was just enough competition from the surrounding sugar maple, yellow poplar and gray birch to reduce branchiness. Branchiness was an actual arboreal term.
The structural dynamic of a tree is interesting (at least to me, Harry thought). Again, he had that lovely feeling, a kind of slow return to certainty he hadn’t had in a very long time. I am certain about trees, he thought.
He looked down through the limbs of the ash, to the ground. The spot where the ash had taken root, twenty years ago or so, was loamy, and a tree that is not branchy casts its mass down its central column into its taproot. It’s like a tent pole, driven deep. The taproot would grow toward water just as its upper branches grow toward the sun.
Harry liked the thought of that, life reaching in two directions, toward dark and light. He wasn’t thinking spiritually, just in admiration, that a tree knows what it needs, and goes where it must to get it. Food and water.
He suddenly wanted both. Climbing the ash tree had made him very hungry. What an odd sensation. Hunger. He wanted a sandwich. His body wanted food and, specifically, a sandwich. When he got back to the tree house, just before noon, he made two large cheddar cheese sandwiches and downed them with thre
e glasses of spring water.
He looked over at his cot. He was tired in the same way that, earlier, he had been hungry. His body tired, because he’d been using it. He stretched. His back muscles were sore. His arms and legs were sore. And he thought, Good. He’d forgotten he had arms and legs.
He wanted to lie down, but he went back down the spiral staircase and out into the forest again. He wanted more of what he was feeling, and he didn’t want to lose it to sleep.
He certainly felt the Norway spruce he climbed—too much. But he had committed himself to it, and he would climb. A spruce is a tough tree to navigate, a tree intent on making itself unwelcome to visitors. Foresters like to say a Norway spruce puts the “hard” in hardy. Its brown-black bark is coarser than 24-grit sandpaper. Great traction, but wicked on his vulnerable skin. By twenty feet up, dots of blood began to appear on his palms. The dark green quadrangular needles, though they smelled spicy and wonderful, poked and scratched, and made repeated attempts to spear his eyeballs.
Harry stopped to catch his breath. “You’re a real mean son of a bitch,” he said admiringly. Sap stuck to his skin like glue. He dabbed a little on a deep scrape on the back of his hand. He’d learned this trick his second year of grad school, when he spent a month in the woods during his semester in sustainable forest management. His teacher, Professor Gibbons, a grizzled old man who was part scientist and part wood elf, tripped and cut his knee on a rock when he and Harry were hiking back to camp in the Trimble Wilderness Area in southeastern Ohio.
It was a nasty cut, but the professor’s eyes glittered at the sight of it. “Going to teach you something extracurricular, Harry.” He touched his finger to the blood and worked it between his fingers. “What is this stuff?”
Harry paused a second, but what other answer could there be? “Blood,” he said.
“But what is it, Harry?”
The old professor worked a smudge of blood between his fingers until it dried a little and became tacky. He smiled, because he could see the light coming on in Harry’s eyes. Professor Gibbons was leaning against the trunk of a Norway spruce. Harry’s gaze fixed on an ooze of amber glistening in a gap in the bark. A recent wound, a single long gash, as if a bear or a badger had dragged a single claw across the trunk. The Norway spruce was bleeding.
“Sap,” Harry said.
“Sap, yes! Same properties, blood and sap. Similar properties, anyway, don’t you think?”
Absolutely, thought Harry. Like blood through veins and arteries, sap flowed through the body of a tree via xylem and phloem. It was a medium of transport, carried sugar, amino acids, minerals, water. When exposed to air, its viscosity increased, until it clotted and hardened. Sap and blood, essential to life.
“Amazing stuff,” said the professor. “Especially pine sap. Better than blood, actually.”
Harry touched his finger to the edges of the wound in the tree. The sap was hard, but pliable, too.
“Like a scab,” the professor said. “But while our blood can’t fix the injured tree, the sap can fix me.”
Professor Gibbons touched his finger to the pine sap and brought a shiny glob to his bleeding knee. “Probably could use a stitch or two, but we’re out in the middle of nowhere. You can always count on a tree to get you through, Harry.” The old professor dabbed the sap onto his cut, and almost immediately, the slow bleeding stopped. “Pine sap is antiseptic, astringent, anti-inflammatory and antibacterial. Best damn Band-Aid in the world, Harry, remember that.”
Harry, sitting now in the Norway spruce, remembered that. The pine sap he’d applied to the cut on his hand had stopped the bleeding. He continued his climb. The limbs of the spruce were springy, the wood not dense like the ash and the hickory. As he neared the top, he cracked a limb or two. Time to stop. It was late afternoon. He carefully climbed back down. He stood at the bottom looking up through the swooping evergreen branches.
“Thank you,” he said. He patted the raspy trunk of the spruce. A sharp edge of bark gouged his already pocked and tenderized palm. Yet another dot of blood appeared. “You are one ornery bastard,” Harry said.
But a forest needed a few ornery bastards.
* * *
After the Norway spruce, he went for a long walk. Every tree seemed to vibrate with the pent-up energy of spring. And all the animals, too. He spotted the shiny quivering black nose of an opossum sniffing the air from the O of a knothole in an ancient white oak. Skittering around and around the base of a sugar maple, a pair of squirrels. A white-breasted nuthatch hopped headfirst down the trunk of a maple. Bullfrogs along the edge of a stream spoke to one another in slow, ratchety groans. Harry listened and watched and walked. Though his arms were tired, he picked up two chunks of rock, gripping them in each hand and raising and lowering them like he was working out with weights. He raised the rocks up and down until he got back to the tree house, then placed the two stones at the bottom of the spiral stairs. He was so exhausted he barely made it to the top.
It was dark now. Before he went inside the tree house, he stood on the deck and looked toward Amanda’s house. It was a half mile away, and in a few days, when the trees leafed out, he would not be able to see it. Was she looking in his direction? Oriana certainly was. He could feel her impatient gaze. He entered the tree house and lit the kerosene lamp. The orange flame flared and settled.
He was too tired to eat, but he was too hungry to sleep. He sliced off circles of meat from a salami, squares off the chunk of cheddar. Chewed slowly. The spice of the meat, the sharp tang of the cheese. What an odd thing, to taste his food. He ate two apples. Sour. Sweet. Crunch. Juicy. He ate a third apple.
He sat groggily in the Adirondack chair and listened to the wind blowing through the beech. A low branch clicked against the skylight. Way, way up, through the dark tangle of the massive tree, he could see the moon.
When he stood up again and looked out the triangle window, Amanda’s house was dark.
He lay down on his cot. He had forgotten this kind of tired. The spring peepers began their shrill chorus. The tree house rocked in the wind.
As he drifted into sleep, Harry’s thoughts were uncluttered, peaceful, ordinary. A hickory is windfirm, he thought. A white ash is strong against sudden shock. The sap of a Norway spruce binds a wound.
He slept.
* * *
The next day, he sat up in bed and winced. He took stock. His back hurt, his biceps hurt, his shoulders hurt, his knees hurt, his thighs hurt. His nose and eyebrows hurt! It all hurt, and it felt...good.
He ate a large bowl of oatmeal. Bathed in the ice-cold stream. Pulled on the same clothes he’d worn yesterday and set out into the woods.
He climbed two trees. Two was all he could manage, because his muscles were so worn out from the day before. A northern red oak and an American larch. It took a long time to reach the tops.
Again, on the way back to the tree house, he picked up two chunks of rock. They were slightly larger than the ones from the day before. He raised them up and down as he staggered home. When he got to the beech, he placed the rocks beside the other two rocks.
That night he slept dreamlessly.
* * *
It’s just that he climbed so many trees; Amanda hadn’t expected that. And so many different types. After the third day, she and Oriana began to compile a list of the species they saw him climbing. It was human nature—Harry was a puzzle they wanted to solve.
What was his system for selecting certain trees? They cataloged his choices as best they could, though of course there would be some they missed because Oriana was off at school and Amanda had to go to work.
At first, they thought that the pattern was obvious: Harry was going to climb one of every species of pine and hardwood tree in the forest. But very soon, they saw that wasn’t it. He never climbed the same tree twice, but sometimes he climbed the same species of tree he’d climbed before.
He climbed two different red maples, three different black walnuts and so on.
Bitternut hickory (1)
White ash (1)
Norway spruce (1)
Northern red oak (1)
Sweet gum (1)
Red maple (2)
Flowering dogwood (1)
Black walnut (3)
Box elder (1)
White oak (2)
Eastern white pine (1)
Yellow birch (3)
Osage orange (1)
Red bud (1)
Sweet birch (4)
Black birch (2)
Pin oak (2)
Paper birch (1)
Eastern red cedar (2)
Balsam fir (1)
Virginia pine (1)
Horse chestnut (3)
Black cherry (2)
American larch (1)
Sycamore (3)
Cucumber tree (1)
Norway maple (5)
American linden (3)
Black locust (1)
Tulip poplar (2)
Scarlet oak (2)
Slippery elm (2)
Red alder (3)
Quaking aspen (3)
Jack pine (1)
Black oak (4)
Bigtooth aspen (2)
Silver maple (2)
Shagbark hickory (3)
Whatever he was doing, all these trees, Oriana was certain that climbing was his way of “thinking” about the plan.
How long will this thinking take? she had asked him. Now she wondered, How many trees is this going to take, Harry? The list kept growing.
Amanda had her own belief: Harry was processing.
It was a huge deal getting that wedding ring off. It would take a good many trees, and a lot of thinking to reshape the meaning of his life.