Thoughts on Trees

Sept. 28

"Hey, I need a tree climbing buddy. You in?" Erin asks me over Facebook, and I respond with a simple "Hell yeah. You should call me." A few texts and a phone call later, we've set a time- but we change it again later with a couple of messages sent through wireless signals.

As we've decided through our electronic contact, Erin and I meet at 7:45 on Jackson Plaza, armed with our phones and Erin's digital camera. Our first tree is outside 'Smulton': I scramble up it, climbing as high as I dare until I'm more than 20 feet up and Erin looks like a toy beneath me. Up here, I can forget everything: the people, the computers, the phones. All I know are the tree and sky, and my relation to them - if I forget that, plummeting to the ground is a simple matter. I'm not wearing shoes, and I can feel the bark beneath my toes. I can smell the moss, the moist skin of the tree, the animals that dwell here. For a beautiful moment, I'm one with this solitary ecosystem... and then the click of a camera brings me back to reality.

Erin tells me to move into a better position, and I'm happy to do so, laughing as I literally go out on a limb. I climb down soon, and we move on to another tree, this time switching positions: I have the camera, she's in the tree. The sun is setting, and the flash makes her picture look like some sort of deranged zombie, or werewolf creature. She's a wild thing up in that tree, or so it seems to me, blending into the foliage and watching from above. But again, the moment is quickly lost, and she climbs down. We curse the poor quality of her camera and the bad lighting, upset that the zooming makes images blurred and that it's not so nice a machine as that of Carmelle, who has joined us and is now avidly taking pictures of mating squirrels with Erin's camera. The squirrels leave, and Carmelle does too, while Erin and I go on with our hunt for the perfect tree to climb.

We don't really find it. Sure, we climb more trees - one of the best is situated by the Law School, and I snap some pictures of Erin posing on its limbs. We make a full circuit of the campus, passing by the Mill Stream, Westside, Eastside, and multiple school buildings. But there are so many more to climb, and we've only just begun. We wonder if we could, by the end of the semester, climb every tree on campus: would Dave give us access to ladders? Would anyone else be interested?

I see saplings popping up in secluded corners. Some of the trees we've found are still too young to support our weight. In twenty years, how many more trees will there be to climb?

How many of the trees we found today will be gone?