In the Trees

By Stephen O’Connor

The first tree I remember climbing was the apple tree in our small backyard in the ‘Acre’ section of Lowell. There were no great trees in that yard nor on that street—no oaks or maple or pitch pine, but from the branches of that crooked tree, I could see across the railroad tracks to where the marching band practiced on a field at Lowell State Teachers’ College and hear their thundering brass, and I could wave to the man in the caboose as the train roared by. Ensconced above my tiny world, I inhaled the fragrance of the nearby lilac bush,  and felt myself every bit a prince of that domain. A tree can do that for a child.

When I was seven, our family moved to a house in a leafy and oak-crowded neighborhood in the ‘Highlands.’ My father hung a small print of the O’Connor coat-of-arms in our new house; its central device was an oak tree on a shield. I thought it must be because any O’Connor is liable at some point to pick up the nickname “Okie,” but I learned that in fact the oak tree, or darach in Irish, was sacred to the Celts, as it was to the Greeks, the Romans, and the Norse.

I remember lying on the ground in our new oak-wooded yard in my favorite sweatshirt, on which was portrayed a football player in a Heisman pose over the words: “I’m a Notre Dame Halfback.” Above me, the branches were nodding and the yellow and orange leaves shushing in the air; leaves were beginning to rock and spin and swirl earthward on the gusty autumn winds. I was as happy as I’d ever been or ever would be, and the sacredness of the oaks was something I instinctively felt.

I made friends in the neighborhood and at the local Catholic school. This was in the blessed days before video games and phones and wi-fi or cable connections. We were connected only to the people and the world immediately around us and disconnected from everything else. A boy’s life was lived out of doors, playing tag football in the street, basketball in a driveway, or running around the neighborhood in long-vanished games like Relievio.

We climbed trees carefully, but fearlessly. Robert Frost describes a boy climber:

He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

The branches of the great oaks were too high for us to reach; only the squirrels could  trace those branches and leap with acrobatic skill among them. Still, the oaks provided us with ammunition for our acorn fights. We blew between our thumbs into the crowns of acorns stored in our pockets to produce a piercing high-pitched whistle. But we were happiest as we rose into the branches of pine, maple, beech and of other trees whose names I didn’t know. Every climbable tree was an invitation to what Robert Burns called the “lofty groves.”

In front of the old Marlborough Hotel on the suitably named Pine Street was a magnificent old American Elm that beckoned. With a Boy Scout knife, we carved our initials somewhere near heaven, and watched like invisible angels the passers-by in the neighborhood from our leafy perch. The hotel burned down some forty-odd years ago, and the tree was destroyed along with its shell, but it stands in memory.

Tree branches were prime seats, but we longed for some finer arboreal situation—the aerial nirvana of boyhood: the tree-house. Dan Webster and I built one in a tree behind his garage. It was merely a platform with some rails to keep us from falling out. We had to mount a ladder and then grab hold of a branch to pull ourselves up, but on that platform we found absolute contentment, chewing our Bazooka bubble gum and reading Justice League of America or Superman comics, while his mongrel dog, good old Ginger, sat at the base of the tree looking up. Our conversations are largely forgotten, but I know we discussed what we would do with super powers, which kids were the toughest, our teachers, and whether one day, the two pretty sisters who lived on Florence Ave. would let us be their boyfriends. Dan might bring up his transistor radio, in which case we might be listening to Lulu’s “To Sir With Love,” the Boxtops “The Letter,” or Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.”

The Blithedale Romance is my favorite book of Hawthorne’s in spite of the popular preference for gables and scarlet letters. In a scene that immediately captured my attention when I read it as a younger man, the narrator ascends high into the branches of a white pine to a pleasant spot he calls his “hermitage,” a “leafy cave,” and “a hollow chamber of rare seclusion,” where he loved to sit, “owl-like, yet not without liberal and hospitable thoughts.” From that vantage, he overhears a consequential encounter between two other characters who arrive below to speak. The scene stuck in my mind, I suppose, because I identified so strongly with the perfect serenity of the man in the tree, and because I believed the scene. People rarely look up or suspect that there is any creature larger than a squirrel in a ‘leafy cave’ above them.

The modern concept of “tree-bathing” or “forest-bathing” has fostered a new interest in the healing power of trees. Scientists and arborists believe that trees communicate with each other, something like Tolkein’s “Ents.” They surely communicate with us through sun-mottled leaves, creaking branches, windy sighs and whispers and the great sudden whooshes that presage a summer storm. Above us, invisible among their verdant branches, as Christopher Marlowe wrote, “Melodious birds sing madrigals.” I’m a bit too old to climb trees these days, but I still spend as much time as I can walking among the trees.

Sometimes I stop to gaze up at a great pine rising into an azure sky, and I recall Thoreau’s words: “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” He was outraged at an editor who removed those words as somehow heretical, but who among us can imagine a heaven without trees?

The autumn beauty of the trees is now fading fast, leaving, as Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 73, “Bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” I hope that there is a heaven and that there are trees there, and maybe Ginger the dog, too, along with all the people who’ve been dear to us. Who knows? Certainly not me. But I take to heart the advice that Shakespeare offers at the conclusion of that sonnet: To love that well which thou must leave ere long.