DAY 347
03.16.08
TREE 176
I woke up this morning at that house on the River in Indiana not feeling so good. I drank a little too much at the party and didn’t drunk enough water because it smelled like sulphur. Norman and I got a ride back to his truck then Norm drove me to mine. I said farewell and drove home. I tried to eat a little breakfast then sat nauseated at the computer for a while. Then I just watched a lot of television.
Finally, by dark I felt good enough to get out and climb a tree. I drove down the road to the public pool
and playground
and parked up on the gravel lot.
A hint of light hovered over the distant horizon as I walked to my shaggy-barked tree. I heard a few people down at the basketball court playing a pretty rough game. I looked up at the trunk of the tree and remembered the difficulty of that first step. Only a few subtle bumps to help in my shimmying up this thick trunk. I picked my position, grabbed a hold and liftedboth feet off the ground. The inching upwards was quite a struggle and my fingers felt numb by the time I could reach the lowest branch. Then I had a hard time getting my foot up on another limb to the side. I was just an inch off using my leg muscles. I had to figure out a way to hold myself so I could free my right arm to lift my leg up by the knee to get my foot on top of that limb. I was able to do it, then moved on.
As I continued up the tree it became easier and gave me the freedom to think and not just purely focus. My thoughts were about my grogginess. I didn’t feel whole. It made me realize my hang over hadn’t fully dissipated quite yet and I made sure I was really concentrating on each hold of the climb. As I reached the top and my pink ribbon the sky grew even more dark.
I took out my camera to try to capture the last of the dark blue of the sky.
I did my best to hold my camera still on the tiny branches I was on but many of my shots turned out blurry.
So I finally gave up, put the camera and ribbon in my pockets
and just stood up in the tree for a while.
But this point the night sky was black and the state penitentiary lights in the distant field shined brightly.
The guys playing basketball had left and I mistook a grill by a picnic bench for a person for a few minutes. When I realized I was actually alone in the park I relaxed. My foot, which had been jammed in the crook of a split limb, was hurting so I decided to climb back down. I grabbed a small twig with new buds forming and stuck it in my mouth. As I went down branch to branch I had to stop every once in a while to take the twig out of my mouth, spit out any bark, and swallow the collecting saliva so I didn’t drool. Then I would stick it back in and continue. Climbing down had been easier and I hung from the lowest limb and dropped to the soggy, muddy ground. I felt much better now. These few minutes at the top of this tree really wore the rest of the hang over off.
3-25-09: I think I’ve confused those black grills in parks as people in the dark a few times. I just did it the other night thinking it was a man laying on a picnic bench. I totally freeze, get quiet, and them my eyes adjust, focus, and I feel stupid.
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March 16th 2009. The weather was nice and I wanted to go for a bike ride and climb in Cherokee Park. I went up to Dog Hill and hopped off my bike.
I walked around scouting for trees and one large tree caught my eye.
There was something very strange about the growth structure of the limbs. There was one main trunk but with a very large branch that grew off the trunk very low. Many of the smaller offshoot limbs grew out one direction, then made a sharp, angled turn and grew the opposite direction.
I could see this if there was a tree growing just next to this one and it blocked the sunlight forcing these limbs to grow towards available light. But there was nothing very close. Possible at one point there was, but it seems unlikely in a field of planned and pruned trees. This oddity drew me in and I knew this was going to be my tree for the day.
Once I climbed up onto that first large low branch I planned my climb up. There were a few limbs to go up the main trunk and I had to use this one large hole as a hand hold to get up. There was a man in scrubs on a nearby bench and I could tell he was watching me. I felt I had to be very careful to not break any branches or call undue attention to myself so I went slowly considering every move in detail. When I put my hand in the hole I moved some dirt and saw little bugs running all around.
This tree was getting eaten from the inside out. Once I got past the few small limbs on the trunk to where it splits into large leader branches I could see many more holes
and dead limbs.
This tree is large and strong, but is losing it’s life one branch at a time. I was surprised by some of the decaying limbs that held on through the last wind and ice storms.
I kept climbing further and further up and saw that the man still watched. I reached my high point
and started to take pictures.
When I finally went to take a picture of the man he was gone and another woman was there who had no idea I was in the tree.
I was almost a little disappointed he didn’t stick around to see my whole climb. As I shot pictures of my view I saw a squirrel climb into my tree. He soon saw me and was gone to another tree before I could get a picture. I did manage to get a picture of some animal’s poop.
It seems animals love to treat decaying trees as their toilet.
When I was done shooting I started to climb back down. When I got to the bottom large branch I again was drawn in by the strange limb growth. I stepped over and decided to climb as high as I could on the branch. I got pretty high but not as far as minutes before.
Satisfied with this extensive climb, I went back down and dropped to the ground. It was a very good, slow climb with a lot of interesting observations.