The View from Trees
A Story
Selected from:
So They Say
Stories, Volume 1
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Jack Andrew Urquhart
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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[1983, Colorado]
From near the top of his tree, Peter scans the valley all the way to the horizon. As soon as he’d heard the winds rising out of the south, he’d quietly tiptoed past his Grandpa napping on the window seat, and crept downstairs. Who knew when such a perfect opportunity would come again.
With his parents gone for the afternoon, the call of the wind and the trees had been irresistible. His escape unfolded in a heartbeat—a few seconds and he’d been racing across the meadow toward the aspens spreading up the first gentle slopes of Prospect Mountain like a green and gray bramble pierced by silver spires. There at the edge of his parents’ property, he’d scrambled up the rock outcroppings using them as a leg up to the branches of the oldest and tallest trees. In no time he’d been on his way to the top.
Peter knows well that the time just before a storm is the best time to be aloft; that is when the treetops sway the most; when the view from the top is, he imagines, most like what it must feel to be a bird in flight—perhaps even the closest thing to what an airplane pilot experiences.
Soaring. Peter loves the sound of the word.
That he isn’t supposed to climb this high is a detail left far below once he is in the treetops, once he is flying.
To the ones on the ground—his parents, his brother—who punish and worry, it would be impossible to explain what it’s like high in the topmost branches. Peter wishes he could. If he wasn’t certain of getting into trouble, he might tell them how sometimes he pretends to be an astronaut orbiting the earth, other times, a crows-nest sailor on the high seas, scanning the horizon for the New World. Letting his mind loose, that’s what it feels like when he climbs, when he gets way up high.
“Some people don’t like to let their imaginations go, ‘specially grown-ups,” Grandpa Joel tells him. “It scares them to death to think about where they might go, what they might do once they get there. Other folks’ll take the chance out of curiosity.”
Though Peter has only just turned eleven, he isn’t scared.
Hugging the tree trunk with his legs, he pushes higher with his feet until he has wriggled to within ten feet of the top; then, holding on with one hand, he throws all his weight hard right, lets his free arm unfold to a straight line until he is moving with the tree, swinging north like a compass needle. Today, he has climbed the second tallest of the old growth trees. It has taken him several weeks of climbing in secret to work himself this high, but then Grandpa Joel says sometimes you got to start little and take your time.
He’d begun with the smaller aspens, the ones well inside the colony, which is what Grandpa says you should call the aspen grove—a colony.
“They’re all related, those aspens. Come from the same roots. A little family of trees,” Grandpa says. “Don’t live too long, most of ‘em. One of ‘em gets canker, it can spread to all.”
Peter hopes the aspens at Prospect will keep good n’healthy. The young ones, twenty or thirty feet tall, grow in clusters so close together that they have to be climbed as if they were one tree by bracing yourself between them, stepping up one trunk and then another, like climbing a ladder. Over time, Peter has worked his way higher and higher, into the tops of the taller old growth trees, some of which soar up to sixty feet.
That’s how he’d gotten caught the second time.
“I don’t think those aspens are meant for climbing,” his Mom had said that day. The Fourth of July it was, when Grandpa and Lee, who works with Daddy, had come up the mountain for their barbeque. It had been Lee who spotted him high up in one of the taller aspens—Lee spying on him from the loft through Daddy’s telescope.
“Like we told you before, those branches are probably too old and brittle to support your weight,” his Mom said. And then Daddy jumping in, “And if you should fall, how would we know?”
Which shows how much either one of them understands ‘bout trees. Peter has climbed all kinds of them on Prospect: lodgepole and ponderosa pines, cottonwoods, and spruce with boughs so thick and prickly you could barely weave in between them; even a lone, twisty bristlecone, a midget of a tree that he’d found up near the top of Prospect. All of ‘em without falling even once. Thing is, none of them are as strong and light and bendable as the aspens. Plus, aspens don’t leave any tattletale sticky sap all over your hands and clothes.
Still, he hadn’t counted on Lee or that telescope. Or, for that matter, on Grandpa.
“I’d keep my eye on the other one, if I was you, Rex,” he’d overheard Grandpa Joel telling Daddy on the Fourth of July after he’d gotten himself caught. “Repeat cases like this, there’s usually some instigation. Sibling rivalry and all that. I ‘spect it runs deeper with twins. How’s that old saying go—‘If you can’t measure up, you manage’?”