Rite of passage - viewing nature from a treetop

American Forests, March-April, 1994 by Matthew Dale

Life takes on a special clarity when you're 17, way up a tree, and everybody's watching.

It looked easy enough. I would just climb up there, move along, and come on down. No problem. Still five kids in line ahead of me. But my turn was coming. Maybe it wasn't actually as easy as it looked way down here on the ground.

I finally finished tying the harness around my waist. The man in charge inspected it and didn't approve. Thought it was unsafe, I guess. He retied it so tightly I felt neutered. Apparently it met his approval now, so he moved on to the next individual.

Only three kids in front of me now. I could still back off and lose myself in the crowd of those who had already endured this stupidity, but I had to do it. I had always had a real problem with heights, and this exercise, I told myself, would show me who was boss. Maybe, though, it would be better to start on a smaller scale than playing on a jungle gym 50 feet in the air in the middle of a forest.

I nervously watched my warm breath spew out of my cold body. I fumbled around in my jacket pockets for my gloves. They didn't help my already frigid hands.

One kid now.

I let my eyes climb the rope ladder almost in front of me and bounce along the cables. A boy, younger than the rest of us, was having some kind of trauma way up there in the tree-tops. Well, at least it would stall the one-man line a bit. Two older kids were consoling the boy with the height problem. Immobilized, he desperately clung for dear life to a clump of tree limbs. I began to worry that this would happen to me. But, hey, I was two years his senior, how could it? Deep in the back of my mind, though, I could see myself frozen way up there, too.

Hey, where did he go? The boy in front of me had shot up the rope ladder and given me the sign to climb on up. The kid behind hit me, urging me to get moving. I could still run off into the forest and forget about this insanity. While I was thinking about this, my body somehow started me up the ladder. It was impossible to climb the way it swayed in the wind. I looked down. This was the stupidest thing someone like me could do. I felt like lead, and it became very difficult to move.

Eventually I reached the top of the ladder. People were yelling at me to speed up, but the yelling only made my situation worse. Well, I was there. At the top. I fumbled around with my safety ropes and attached them to the first taut cable, about five feet above the cable I was supposed to tightrope along. As I gripped the upper cable befriending my safety ropes, my feet inched along the lower cable--a five-millimeter-wide sidewalk for crazies.

God, was this high. What was I thinking when I agreed to do this? Currently I was spread-eagled between two little wires, 50 feet up in the middle of the forest, in the dead of winter. My gloves slipped around as if foreshadowing a tragedy. I was going to fall. I was going to plummet to my death while my artificial friends laughed. I took the gloves and tossed them, one and then the other. It took them five seconds and a thousand years to reach the frozen ground.

I was at the next junction of my idiot test. The cables I was on ended where they were bolted into the tree to which I now clung. The same tree--now that I had time to think--that the young boy had embraced some minutes ago. Now it seemed that I, too, had turned to stone as if some evil little fairy having as bad a day as I was having got ticked off and struck me with its evil wand. God, I hated that rotten little fairy. It was the same one who had nailed me on the world's highest ferris wheel only two years ago. The same little shmuck who had paralyzed me atop the Eiffel Tower in Paris last summer. My fate had been sealed. My destiny was to forever cling to this tree and become one with the forest.

A sharp pain stabbed my rigid back as the boy behind struck me again. I popped out of my trance and attached my safety lines to the next set of cables. Once again I found my body moving of its own accord. I was only a passenger now. I hate when that happens. And now I realized that the ground below was rapidly sloping off into a nothingness. My relative distance up was now much higher than when I had started. Great.

I had reached the fun part--the swings. I now had the pleasure of leaping from swing to swing, some 70 feet off the ground.

Of course, I slipped and fell. My scream caught everybody's attention. About 20 people now watched me. I had become entertainment. My safety lines had me, though. I regained my position soon after, eager to finish.

Finally, I was attaching my ropes for the grand finale--a 300-foot plunge to the ground along a zip line, hanging onto a two-wheeled device like something in a James Bond movie.

But here was the doorway to safety. I stepped through it. The forest became a blur, and my shriek of terror drowned out all other sounds. JOY! I slammed into it--my friend, the ground.

Dale is now in his freshman year at the State University of New York at Oneonta. He didn't tell us what his major is, but he could do a lot worse than creative writing.