“These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the
sublime and moving space between them, as if, with their growth, it too increased.”- Rainer Maria Rilke

Katherine E. Bash

As a child I wore a white tee-shirt with purple trim that read in fuzzy purple letters: “World’s Best Tree Climber.” Lauren gave it to me for my birthday. My favorite and most accessible tree to climb was a red oak in front of our home at #13 Chatham Court. I would build peoples’ nests where I would perch and spend some time with LorLor, a friend that others did not have the ability to see, except for Lauren, of course. Many afternoons, I spent sitting in certain areas, defining geographic territories, Africa, Europe, South America, etc. – some more accessible than others. I watched the tree-top touch the sky and wondered how we might have understood infinity differently, if somehow we were trained in another way from birth. Neighbors and other friends also climbed the tree with me. In fact it was required in order to play at my house. And, given the geographic distinctions, I would often be found giving around-the-world tours.

Years later I returned with my friend Heather to pay a visit to my favorite tree, to climb it once again. I was not expecting it to be so large. Its enormity was confusing as its existence was much smaller in my memory. My arms could barely fit around the branches that I used to mount so easily and the acorns blanketed the ground. Standing back, it was by far the largest and most beautiful tree on the block. When we left after our climb, felt a certain kind of pride of having known such a good tree when we, the tree and I, were both young. When we left after our climb, I felt as if the meaning of my meeting place had grown with the tree.


William L. Fox

Lover's Leap is a six-hundred-foot-high cliff of dark granite in the central Sierra Nevada. Its extruded dikes, which crisscross almost every foot of the crag, provide hand- and footholds ranging in width from stair treads to a fingernail. Almost every foot. There is one climb where the dikes disappear a hundred feet below the summit, leaving nothing but a shield of somber and unbroken face. To finish the climb you have to lean far out from the rock, let go, and fall into the limbs of a Ponderosa pine, the trunk of which will take you up to where the dikes reappear.

Every rock climber I know started out as a tree climber, and to regress into that pine, a living and breathing habitat, a warren of shadow and warm scent after the harsh crystalline rock--that is to be reminded that our arms and legs are named for the branches of the trees. That we share limbs. It is restful in the Ponderosa, and never easy to leave its embrace to engage once
again with the rock in order to finish the climb.

There are no rocks to climb in Marfa, Texas, a town in which I have found myself happily in residence as a visiting writer. But there is an Arizona cypress with which I have developed a relationship, a forty-foot-high
specimen planted in mid-20th century that offers a way up over the horizon.

On flat ground a person of average height can see about twenty-five square miles of the surrounding terrain. By climbing that tree I can encompass very nearly a hundred times that territory. I say territory instead of terrain because now I can claim a memory of that space. It has started to become a place for me. Nothing owned, nothing claimed, but a complex of stories in which I have begun to participate.

I sit in the cypress, as careful as I can be not to bruise its thin bark, and listen to what voices are brought me by the wind in the afternoon. The tree sways in response, sings and sighs back and forth. It is not the easiest thing to do, climbing back down to the solid and unmoving ground. What is left to the earth and my skin are shadows, the moving traces of sun and wind and tree, writing and rewriting the day.