If I’ve done my math correctly, the only time I ever watched my grandfather climb a tree, he was over sixty years old. He and my grandma, cousins Billy and Brad Band, and I were on a walk in the hills surrounding their house in Westport. It must have been summer, and the trees would have been blocking the light and cooling the path as we wandered up the trail, such as it was. We came to a section of smaller trees, with trunks just a few inches across. Young trees, growing fast and thin, racing each other towards the light. He wanted to show us something he’d learned to do as a boy, and pass it down the generations. He walked from tree to tree, touching trunks, evaluating them with the experience of an Eagle Scout with a degree in Forestry. When he found one that suited, Gramp shimmied up, more like climbing a rope than a tree, using what few branches there were for extra grip. He climbed up two-three-maybe four times his height, as the tree trunk flexed. All eyes were on him, which means I can only speculate upon the look on my grandmother’s face. Would it have been the same look of joy and amazement that I felt? Would her eyes have been full of worry, her body as strained as the tree, watching her husband of forty years, with his polio-weakened leg, acting like a fool boy? At some point, his six-feet, one-hundred-seventy-five pounds exceeded the forces keeping the tree upright and the canopy began to lean towards the earth. He added to it’s tilt, by leaning his spidery frame out, away from the trunk. As it bowed more and more toward the ground, he descended back to terra firma, letting his feet hit the ground. He smiled as he let go of the trunk, sending it catapulting back towards equilibrium and verticality. “Who’s next?” 

We all were.

If you haven’t seen it, this guy isn’t doing it right 🙂