Rabbit Box Blog

It is hard to be alone when you are sharing a 10 by 10 foot bedroom with two younger brothers. But I was often determined to try.

Not that I disliked Gary and Charles, of course. We played together exceptionally well, sibling rivalries being something we watched others practice with quiet surprise.

But they were younger, and at times I needed space to exercise my independence. When playmates my own age were available, I would sometimes leave my brothers to fend for themselves.

At other times, when no playmates were around or I just felt a need to be alone, I turned to other strategies. That is how I developed my fondness for walking in the rain or snow. Even today I can barely resist a chance to walk through snowy or rainy woods.

Climbing trees was perhaps my ultimate strategy for getting away, though. Both of my brothers were pretty good climbers, too, but as the oldest and strongest I was always able to find a tree they couldn’t – or wouldn’t – climb. Gary was particularly worried about snakes and other varmints, so I could usually send him scurrying for home just by mentioning that there might be a snake in that tree.

Trees played a much more important role in our lives than they typically play in most lives today. Many people burned firewood to heat their homes. Both sets of grandparents did. Grandma Estie built a fire under the wash-pot in the backyard every washday. Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Iva depended on a wood-burning cook-stove. 

I helped both grandfathers cut down trees on their farms and cut them up for firewood. Or, rather, I helped Grandpa Nelson and watched Grandpa Charlie. Charlie rarely trusted “young’uns” to help with potentially dangerous tasks. He did allow me to stack the split kindling in “pig houses” for drying, as long as I remembered to put a “pig” inside each stack.

I knew quite a number of trees as friends, though. These were the trees I climbed and spent time with.

My first climbing friends were chinaberry trees – we called them “Chaney berries” and assumed there was a Mr. Chaney somewhere who was responsible for their development. They were usually small and relatively easy to climb, although the bark was rough and the wood was soft and easy to break. You had to be careful not to go too far on a limb or it would snap and send you plummeting to earth.

Very early I advanced to the Red Cedars in our yard. About ten of them formed a straight line from the road through our backyard, all the way to the chicken house, following the path of an old barbed wire fence that had once marked the edge of the pasture that became our home site. 

Straight rows of cedars marking fence lines are common in our area. Birds love the small blue seeds of the cedar, and after failing to digest some of them, sit on the fence and deposit the seeds with a dollop of starter fertilizer. 

A native red cedar is a difficult tree to climb. First, the foliage is quite dense, with lots of little prickly limbs growing in all directions. I learned to overcome this problem by “cleaning them out,” or breaking and cutting off all the interior twigs to make climbing less painful. As a result, our cedar trees were much more open than “wild” cedars. You could tell which trees we climbed most often – you could see more daylight between the branches.

Once you had done the “cleaning out,” the limb structure of most cedars was good for climbing – evenly spaced, straight limbs at right angles to the main trunk, parallel to the ground. The limbs tended to arrange themselves in even rows all the way up the tree, leaving triangular shaped passageways that were ideal for quick climbing, or for running a rope elevator we used to pull up supplies, or the occasional terrified cat that wandered too close when we were loading the elevator.

But even after the prickly branches are removed, a cedar is a tough climb. The bark is made up of thin, fibrous layers that peel away easily in narrow strips, allowing thick, sticky sap to escape. We called it “rosin,” although it bore little resemblance to the pine-derived stuff baseball pitchers used. The bark was not a big problem, but the rosin stuck to everything. After you got it on your skin, it attracted and held dirt and debris of all kinds. Often I would find my hands looking brown and furry with strips of cedar bark stuck to them.

My mother hated the cedars we climbed – the rosin got all over us and our clothes, and it was almost impossible to wash off. 

“That will have to wear off,” she would say in frustration after we showed her we had no luck trying to remove spots of rosin.

We didn’t care, of course. The only thing that bothered us was that if it got into our hair Mom would just about “snatch us bald-headed” trying to get it out.

Down in our woods were lots of climbable trees of a number of species. Maples were hard to climb and hardly worth it because the lower limbs were almost parallel to the trunk, so getting a foothold did not mean you could go much higher. Most of our maples got one or two climbings, just so I could add them to my “Climbed” list.

Oaks and hickories were probably my favorites. They offered evenly spaced, strong limbs that were easy to climb. A good oak deep in the woods would get me higher than almost any other tree, and it was strong enough that I could sway wildly back and forth even near the very top without worrying, as long as Mom didn’t see me.

She almost never came into the woods, though, so I was safe. The only time I got in trouble with her for tree climbing was when she saw me sitting above my favorite cedar in our backyard. A storm had broken off the trunk right at the top. I found I could sit on the top remaining limbs so that my head was completely clear of the treetop. Somehow the sight of me sitting that way unnerved Mom. She yelled at me to come down before she had to climb up to get me. I knew that was a bluff – she wouldn’t climb onto a kitchen chair unless she thought she saw a mouse – but I climbed down anyway. I couldn’t see any advantage worth having her mad at me. Besides, I could go right back up once she calmed down and got busy elsewhere.

A big black gum at the edge of our garden was an extra challenge. Its trunk was so big I couldn’t reach around it, and there were no limbs within reach. I finally convinced Dad to let me nail a few boards to the tree to get me up to the first limb. I sat in the tree and read Ivanhoe and Robin Hood for a few days; then I decided that particular tree wasn’t very comfortable, and I abandoned it. Dad made me remove the nails, but I didn’t care. I had added the black gum to my “Climbed” list, and that was enough.

Eventually I climbed every tree of climbing size on our property, in addition to many others in the surrounding woods. But there were two trees in our neighborhood that I never climbed – in fact never attempted to climb. They seemed too sacred for my list.

One was a tulip poplar tree halfway between our house and the Hovis’s next door. Even though it stood in a slight depression, it towered over every other tree in the woods. I could see it from my school, three miles away. In the other direction, it was visible from certain spots on the road several miles to the west and north. I once used it for a geometry project and estimated its height at approximately 120 feet. To me it was the tallest living thing in the world, and thus I called it.

Of course, standing that tall above all else has its hazards. The poplar was routinely struck by lightning. We never were quite sure whether it served as an effective protector against lightning striking our house or whether it made us more vulnerable. But lightning fried our appliances only occasionally, so we assumed the best.

But the lightning took its toll on the tree, and about the time I went off to college, it snapped off in a storm at a height of less than twenty feet. I visited the remains a few times, but there was little to suggest the magnificent tree that had once stood in the place where the splintered stump lingered.

The other tree that seemed too holy to climb stood in the middle of Lee Stroupe’s field, a quarter of a mile north of our house. Apparently when early settlers had cleared the field, they left this oak, as was a common practice. It could provide shade to the men and animals plowing on a hot day, so the farmers ever since had left it unmolested. 

By the time I became the tree’s neighbor, it was gigantic, covering more than an acre of farmland. In fact, it was the largest oak I had ever seen or have seen since. Because it did not have to compete for light or water, it was beautifully symmetrical. Being in the middle of a large, mostly flat field, it suffered from an occasional lightning strike, but the taller poplar on the other side of our house proved an effective deflector, even at that distance.

For a few years, the oak held a tree house built by Lee’s son Tim. But he and his friends quickly tired of the difficult climb up the trunk, especially because their tree house was in plain view of the road and offered only a panorama of his father’s crops. The tree house was abandoned and eventually fell to the ground, board by rotted board.

Once the poplar succumbed to repeated lightning, the oak became the preferred target for our neighborhood, and the same fate befell it some years later. Too, Lee took his field out of cultivation and planted pines. Eventually the pines grew tall enough to swallow the remains of the oak, so now it exists only in the memory of those who knew it when it ruled the farmland.