I was perhaps fourteen-years-old and, if not confident that I could reach the hawk’s nest, desirous to get as close as possible to it, even though it crowned the top of a colossal pine tree. To get to it, I would have to cross an abandoned, overgrown horse pasture behind our back yard, to the front edge of a shallow forest separated from the pasture by a measly barbed-wire fence.
Only by looking through the scope on dad’s .22-caliber rifle could I see the nest closely and, if lucky, the hawk, too. My mom would have thought me deranged if she saw me shouldering that rifle and pointing it at the back door window. She knew I was no hunter. My older brother and dad were the huntsmen of the family; in fact, it was probably because of their being in the woods, hunting, that I could get away with pulling the rifle out of the closet in the first place.
Two things I knew without having to be told: one, I knew it was a hawk, not a common turkey vulture, by its underside coloring when it soared, more white than black. Two, I knew I could get very close to it—quite possibly right beneath it—if I was careful in climbing the tree in which it was perched. If you had asked me what the particular threats to trying to get close to that hawk’s nest were, I could not have told you; at most, I would have murmured a wish that the pine tree not be so tall.
I was indeed acrophobic, but mine was a nuanced acrophobia: for instance, have me stand at the handrail of the observation deck atop the Seattle Needle, and I would begin to tremble, for this is raw, open acrophobia. I know this because I have been there. In such a case—so small a barrier between my body and the ground, and so small a reward for having got so high (and that without effort)—the imagination needs no assistance in portraying in vivid detail what might happen if I slipped past the railing and over the edge: the thought of that doom is nauseous. By contrast, invite me to climb a sprawling live oak, like the tentacled giants along Aiken’s South Boundary Road, or an elm whose branches, like Atlas, attempt to bear the sky, and not only will I not tremble, but I, like Peter, will accept that invitation without a moment’s delay. In this case, the imagination needs no help in depicting the delight of a possible encounter with another realm—where elves abide, or where Tarzan treks. The thought of such a boon is joyous.
I would not, therefore, merely get close to the hawk by climbing this tree. I would meet it.
So I set out for the other side of the horse pasture. This was no unimpeded jaunt, for the pasture hadn’t seen a horse in at least five years: in that time the steadily sloping ground had developed, with the help of erosion, many narrow troughs and gullies; because of this, a young boy could not simply dash from one side to the other. Even if it had been flatter, the entire field was overgrown with weeds and briars of every sort and impassable stretches of blackberry bushes; and, on the far side, near the barbed-wire fence, stood a screen of pine saplings. Usually on an outing into this pasture I attired myself in shabby jeans and t-shirt and accoutred myself with my mail-ordered bolo machete: I never knew whether I would see a snake. Whether I would actually kill one—with the machete, anyway—I do not know, but I felt prepared (if not like a big man) wearing it on my belt. I did not mind the uneven terrain because some of the gullies had become repositories of interesting rocks and other curious finds. Once, when rambling about in the pasture, I came upon a stash of pornographic magazines nestled against a large rock. They must have lain there for a few weeks at least, for they were sodden and stuck together, and unreadable. If someone had wanted to protect them from the elements, to visit them later, then it was a foolish place to stow them.
I was in no hurry because there were other entertaining distractions in that pasture, such as all the holes. Perhaps because of its dormancy, the pasture invited burrowing animals to make their homes in it. I reckon everyone has seen a golf ball-sized hole and stopped to wonder what could have made it, or whether it was still an active home, or maybe even jammed a twig down into it to find out; after a few seconds, however, the wonder subsides—the small hole incapable of truly charming the fancy—and the observer walks on. This pasture had many such holes; I did not stop for these. I did stop at the large burrows, though—large and oblong as a football and often dug into sloping ground. These burrows were fewer but endlessly fascinating to a fourteen-year-old. The overgrowth pressed down around one large hole clearly meant that something was making it its home—something bigger than a mouse and probably as big as a rabbit, maybe bigger. We had seen plenty of cottontails in the field before, even harvested a couple with our pellet gun, but this hole could not have been the work of rabbits, could it? Then, what? It occurred to me that it might not be a wise thing to find out, so I sauntered off.
My parents did not refer to the pasture as a pasture. I suppose that was too romantic a term for it, especially after the departure of the horses and the tract of land fell into disrepair. They called it a field instead—a common term, with no hint toward the idyllic or pastoral. And they were right, in a way. Most obvious and relevant, no animal was turned into the place to feed there. But it was the condition of the land that most erased any former hint of its being a pasture: it simply was not a place one strolled to pass the time or to exercise, as if in a park. If you weren’t careful about your step, you could end up in a fire-ant bed, or twist your ankle in a hole. Mom said there were ticks out there. No flowers grew there, except dandelions, which my dad considered a bothersome weed. To him, the field had only one redeeming quality, its blackberry bushes. The old man took blackberry-picking seriously, for it gave him another way to prove his legacy, a farmer’s industriousness. He would gear-up for an epic blackberry-picking-fest early in the morning and return before noon with two milk jugs of them—as in, two gallons! He made blackberry jelly and mom made blackberry cobbler.
I skirted around dad’s blackberry bushes, looking for rabbits hiding in the prickly fringes, and came to the small screen of pine saplings. I was very close to the other side of the field now, which meant I was so close to the hawk’s tree that it looked unfamiliar: I usually looked at it from afar, and therefore not from an angle that required me, as now, to tilt my head back. Doing so, I could not see the nest; there were far too many branches in the way. And now that I had come all this way without using my machete, I decided to lop-off the top half of several saplings, just because I knew I could. The sap dried black on the blade and, later, my dad asked me what it was; I told him and he said I shouldn’t have done it—that it was wasteful. The sad truth is that I knew it was when I did it.
I sheathed my machete and, standing in front of the barbed-wire fence separating the field from the woods, looked up once again to get my bearings—to locate the right giant pine tree. My heart sank a little as I saw that the hawk’s nest sat atop a pine whose branches did not begin until at least a quarter of the way up—roughly equivalent to the height of a two-story house. I knew because I had climbed into the rafters of such a house on our street when the framing crew had done everything but sheathed it. I remember the height. What was I to do now? How would I ever get close to that hawk’s nest? Those initial branches in the pine were pretty few and far between, it looked, but that was neither here nor there if I couldn’t get to them in the first place. But then I saw my way!
Adjacent to the pine, a smaller tree grew, whose upper branches barely exceeded the height of the lowest ones of the pine. Remarkably, this smaller tree grew toward the pine: the higher it went, the closer it came to it. I could not tell from the ground, but an experimental climb of the smaller tree would apprise me of the truth: it might be possible to jump from this tree to the branches of the pine! I was an athletic kid—maybe the most athletic in my small class. Only my best buddy could do as many pull-ups as I could for the Presidential Fitness Test in P.E. class. I was pretty sure that if I could reach the first branch, I’d be able to pull myself up to stand on it and proceed to the next one, and so on. At the worst—if I fell—I reckoned that (and, carefully measuring the distance with my eye, I was confident) I could grab the branches of the adjacent tree, either preventing or else retarding my fall. But I would have to climb this tree to find out.
It grew so close to the barbed-wire fence that its middle wire had been absorbed by the tree: it disappeared on one side of the trunk and reappeared on the other. I didn’t even have to cross over the fence to begin this climb; I merely had to step on the fence and grab hold of the trunk. The tree was practically designed for climbing: its branches were not cramped together and grew in alternate junctures at the trunk. I scrambled up as high as I thought the scaffold branches would support me and perched not uncomfortably in an intersection. Only a few lateral branches were higher. From here I could see the field from top to bottom; I could see, directly opposite me, our backyard, and even the five-gallon weed bucket beside the side-door to the garage. If mom had looked from the back door window, she could have seen me, I’m sure. More important, I had guessed right. The first pine branch was within reach. All I had to do was jump an infinitesimally small gap between the two—
Not even a true jump, really. Of course, my feet would not land on the branch; I would have to grab hold of it with both hands and, as if on the monkey bars at school, pull myself up. I knew when I saw it that I could do it. I needed no oracle to tell me that.
But knowledge is different from feeling. My acrophobia invited me to scan the distance from the branch to the ground a few times, as well as the distance from my tree to the pine branch—not to find out whether I could do it, but to latch onto the feeling that I would. I looked up to the top of the pine tree. It was why I had come here. Imagine what view I would have closer to that nest! Not to mention the company.
I made up my mind to make the jump. For the moment, however, I would take-in the view and enjoy the breeze that played through the trees, swaying their tops. I closed my eyes and lifted my face toward the sunlight; without looking, I could tell that dappled leaf shadows danced over my face and body. I was momentarily and inarticulately aware that I was at a boundary—not merely between field and forest, or between one tree and another, or between sky and ground. I was between the feckless fun of youth and the staid concerns of older age, between the pointless and the pointed. Besides the quiet chorus of leaves, I could barely hear the exhale of traffic on three-lane 232, less audible than the susurration of my blood. The peace I had found at this height—not very high—bore itself into me, made me its home. If only for a moment. I opened my eyes and saw things as if I’d been swimming, eyes open, in a chlorinated pool: they had an aura about them. I took in a deep breath and exhaled. “Let’s get to work, buddy.”
Standing on the branch on which I had just been sitting, I balanced myself with my left hand on the small tree’s trunk, thinner at this height than the barrel of baseball bat; with my right arm I experimentally reached out toward the pine. Two feet, maybe three, was all that separated my hand from the branch—and from my topmost satisfaction, a way to the hawk’s nest. I now leaned back and swayed forward to see how much spring my small tree would give me; the gap closed by a foot. “Anybody can do this!” I thought. I looked carefully at my feet: no impediments there, no accidental snag on a twig in sight. That coast was clear. I then trained my gaze at the pine branch, studied its flaky bark, considered its girth: “I can get my hands around that, no problem.” In fact, I was close enough to use an alternate grip—the palm of one hand facing me, the palm of the other away from me. As a good athlete does, I envisioned my success, mentally rehearsing it: I would lean back in my tree, sway it once toward the pine, and then, after a second sway forward, push off my left foot, extend my right arm toward the branch, grab it with palm facing me, and follow through with left hand grabbing the branch, palm facing away. If the pine’s trunk had been thinner, I would have planned to wrap my legs around it, but that could not be done. I knew that the surest course was to lock-hold that branch.
Rehearsal over, I leapt.
I held onto the branch for a few seconds, batting my eyes at the bark, and then looking down at my feet dangling above the pine needles below and the barbed-wire fence. I started to raise my feet to the trunk, to give myself a little boost as I pulled up. They got no traction on the flaky bark, so I let them dangle again. All right, then: I would have to pull myself up. No problem. It was then that I saw some black ants marching in the creases of the bark on the trunk. I followed their course to the branch I was hanging from.
Splinter. Splin—CRACK!
I screamed on the way down. It was probably less than two seconds before I stopped, somehow wedged between the two trees, caught mostly by the denser branches of the small tree beside the pine. I was facing the giant tree, my legs jacked up toward my chest, as a hurdler’s after landing. My back was against the small tree’s branches, which had ruffled my shirt up my backside and scratched me a little. But they had saved me from a worse fate: just below me was the old barbed-wire fence. As a small shower of bark and wood dust had fallen on me, I spat a bit and dared to move my hand toward my face to brush away the debris. Blinking several times, I got my bearings and gingerly managed to twist myself back into the safety of the lower end of the small tree. Then, I lowered myself onto the forest side of the fence.
A few steps away lay the pine branch. It was broken in a couple pieces and ants were crawling on it, and coming out of it, too. They had been having it for their meal; if I hadn’t have brought it down, they would surely have pruned it from the tree soon enough.
I looked up at the pine. Far above the place where this branch had been, the next limb projected out on a plane much higher than the top of my little savior tree. Without the aid of a ladder or some other man-made tool, I could not get into that pine tree. My journey had come to an end. Nevertheless, as I stood at the base of the pine, my eyes climbed it, all the way up into its murky green. I was at another boundary—but the price to cross it, too steep. Maybe some other day I would pay it. For now, I climbed over the barbed-wire fence, stabling myself on the small tree, and made my way across the field toward home.
On the back porch, I looked over the field, shielding my eyes from the setting sun, to see if I could recognize the boy-catching tree, the rigging at the base of a towering mainmast. I could not tell. The fence-line was walled with so many pines just like the one I had dared to climb. And below them grew other smaller trees.
Just before I turned to go inside, I saw the familiar soaring silhouette. I stood there and watched it for many minutes. With each broad circle, it came lower to the tree tops. Like a flame atop a birthday candle, it perched on the top of a pine. I knew, then, where I had to look to see the small tree. “There it is,” I said to myself. Another glance at the hawk, barely a bird from this distance, and I opened the back door and went inside.