Epilogue
New Forest—England
I am sitting in my hammock, eighty feet aboveground, halfway up Goliath. To my right is a swooping branch thirty feet long. To my left is Goliath’s huge trunk, the thick red bark swirling in patterns as it flows up toward the top of the tree, ninety feet above me.
The early spring sunshine is streaming through the delicate foliage, and the air is alive with birdsong. As I write this, firecrests flit through the branches around me, searching for tidbits, and a tree creeper is hopping up the trunk next to me. To sit back and watch the natural world carry on around you as if you weren’t there is one of the real joys of being in the canopy. Mornings like these are what the New Forest does so well.
I first climbed this tree twenty-six years ago—although I didn’t quite make it to the top that time. In three days I’ll turn forty-two, although I don’t feel it. Well, not mentally anyway. Various minor injuries have taken their toll on my ability to run up trees in quite the same way as I used to, but I’m still the kid who loves to get up into the branches and idle away an hour looking at the view. I guess I must have changed a lot since I first sat on this branch ninety-five hundred days ago, but that’s the thing about getting older, isn’t it? You’re always the last to know, thank goodness. Besides, I have no intention of hanging up my harness for many years to come. Not with so many other wonderful trees in the world to climb and explore. The canopy, and filming the wildlife within it, has lost none of its fascination for me—quite the opposite, in fact. Next month I’ll be heading out to film birds of paradise in New Guinea, followed by four weeks with orangutans in Borneo. I can’t wait, although leaving my family for such long stretches of time doesn’t get any easier.
Goliath is now several feet taller than when I first met him, and the faint, healed-over rope burns on the branches around me stand testament to the fact that two and a half decades is also quite a long time in the life of a tree. Cambium savers, designed to protect bark from rope abrasion, hadn’t yet been invented back in 1991, so our ropes left friction marks around the base of branches as we hung from them to abseil. These days, things are different. Climbers take a lot more care not to damage the tree they are in. Generally speaking, I feel that people are now much more aware of how their actions might affect nature and the countryside around them. When I was growing up here, the thought of seeing an otter in the forest, or hearing a goshawk chanting from the depths of a wood, was a wild fantasy. Buzzards were rare, and you had to go very far afield to catch a glimpse of a peregrine or a raven. Yet only this morning I was greeted by the strident kek-kek-kek of a goshawk as I walked through the trees with the ropes on my back, and then watched the feathered black silhouette of a raven fly directly above Goliath as I started to climb.
Despite all the controversy and negative press surrounding environmental issues, I actually believe we are now living in a time of great hope for British wildlife. I’m not saying we should get complacent, but the uproar with which the public greeted the government’s attempts in 2010 to sell off protected woodland into private hands was a heartening example of just how much people do care. As long as the trees still stand, it seems, there is hope.
As I’ve suggested before, trees are often the constant by which we measure the passing of years and the events of our own lives. We project our own memories onto them, and looking down through the branches below me now, I can still see my grandfather, my father, and me standing there, looking up, and can almost hear the excited yapping of my dog, Buster, as he is hoisted up to me by my mates, with head poking out the top of a kit bag. (He greeted me with enthusiastic kisses and wagging tail, then tried to climb out onto a branch, at which point I realized he was much better suited to a life on the ground and lowered him quickly back down to safety.)
The year I finally made it to the top of this tree for the first time—1994—was also the year that I met my wife-to-be. Yogita and I were in the same course at university in Derby, and I can still remember the first time—the very first moment—I ever saw her. Twenty-three years, three children, and a lot of joy and some sadness later, we are closer than we’ve ever been, but she has yet to climb Goliath with me. In fact, when I’m not working in some jungle somewhere, I now do most of my climbing on my own. Alongside my job as a wildlife cameraman, I also run my own company, training others how to climb trees. I love it. But the incessant desk work that goes with running a small business would soon suck the joy from the job if I wasn’t able to escape back to the trees regularly. Thankfully, Yogita understands this and happily banishes me to the canopy, knowing full well that when I return, I’ll be more relaxed and easier to be around.
So I arrived here in the forest at dusk last night. Getting out of my van and placing my feet on forest soil was like reconnecting to everything that had gone before. I was on home ground and surrounded by memories as I walked through the gloaming toward Goliath, passing the huge Sitka spruce I’ve been promising myself I’d climb since I was seventeen, and the Douglas fir I so clearly remember climbing in my early twenties. Stepping out into the open, I was somehow relieved to see Goliath still standing where he had always been—silhouetted against the dark-blue western sky. Just as silent, lofty, and stoic as ever. What a tree.
As I got closer, I noticed that someone had carved initials on the trunk at breast height. The letters had been crudely slashed into the laminated red bark with a long-bladed knife. At first this made me angry, then disappointed, then just plain sad for the person who’d done it. The bark was way too thick for a knife to hurt the tree, and the letters would soon be lost to time as the thick cambium healed over. But it got me thinking about why someone would do that in the first place. It struck me as a rather desperate act of insecurity. But then maybe this is the point: human beings are fundamentally insecure creatures by our very nature. Most tree graffiti, however mindless, can usually be seen as a crude attempt to graft part of ourselves onto the future of another organism that is almost guaranteed to live far longer than us.
Elsewhere in the forest there is an old beech tree that carries this poignant inscription: “T. B. James,” followed by a U.S. military star and the year, “1944.” The tree has done its best to heal the wound, but the silver-gray skin of a beech is a lot thinner than a sequoia’s spongy bark, and the letters were still legible after more than seventy years. They had been carved into the tree with a knife, or perhaps the tip of a bayonet, by an American soldier stationed in the area on the eve of D-Day. Now that I can understand. And whether he made it through the landings alive or not, his memory is entwined with the tree, which has, in my mind, now come to symbolize an individual’s hope for the future and the immortality of self-sacrifice.
I shot my line up into Goliath’s branches as the last of the light was fading, then returned at dawn this morning to climb, reaching the very top just in time to watch the sun rise above the Solent and kiss the tops of the tallest trees around me. Wrapping my arm tight around Goliath’s neck, I felt the rays dispel the chill of a night spent in my van, and watched sunlight—glorious, golden, sparkling sunlight—flow out across the canopy, while listening to Bach’s prelude from his Cello Suite No. 1 on my headphones. The first time I listened to that piece of music in a tree, I was moved to tears; this time I closed my eyes and swayed gently with the rise and fall of the cello, opening them again to look out over the forest in time with the final soaring cadence. I felt like I was flying, swooping down from Goliath to skim across the tops of the oaks far below. Floating like a bird.
This view from the top of Goliath is still my favorite of any tree I’ve ever climbed. A few years ago I visited California to climb redwoods on their native soil. Some of those trees were exceptionally tall, growing on a different scale to any others I’d ever climbed. More than twice the height of Goliath, almost a hundred feet taller than Roaring Meg even: just magnificent. But the view from the top of a 350-foot-tall coast redwood couldn’t compare to the one I experienced this morning from the top of a tree that held so many wonderful memories for me.
As I looked out over the New Forest, I remembered the time I found myself climbing another, very different tree, which turned out to be the favorite of someone else, someone far more illustrious. That too had an extraordinary view from its top branches.
In the grounds of Buckingham Palace stand two beautiful London plane trees growing side by side, close to the queen’s private apartments. They were planted by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and were given their names accordingly, although I have no idea which is which. What I do know, however, is that they are both absolutely stunning—just beautiful trees, with the strong, open-limbed canopies so characteristic of mature planes in their prime. While climbing one of them to rig cameras for a documentary, I happened to glance up at the palace. The queen was reputed to be away from home that morning, so I was more than a little taken aback to see an extremely familiar silver-haired lady standing by the net curtains of her balcony window, watching me intently. I had just reached the top of the tree and stuck my head out of the leafy canopy, and there she was, less than a hundred feet away, just staring at me in disbelief. I had no idea what to do or how to react. Resisting the temptation to smile and wave, I suddenly became very self-conscious. Her Majesty’s rather stern expression spoke volumes, and it was immediately obvious that no one had mentioned anything to her about what I was up to.
After ten of the most surreal minutes of my life, the palace door opened, and a small pack of corgis bundled down the steps, accompanied by a smartly dressed man in a gold-buttoned waistcoat and pinstriped trousers. Realizing that I had better explain myself rather sharpish, I abseiled down, to be greeted by the corgis yapping up at me from the base of the tree.
“The boss would like to know what you are doing in her favorite tree,” the man asked while reining in the dogs. Apparently no one had mentioned to the royal household that they might expect to see some random bloke clambering around in the canopy outside their windows. I made my apologies and reassured him I wasn’t there to hurt the tree in any way, but it just goes to show how much certain trees are cherished by people from all walks of life. Even Queen Elizabeth II has her favorite, and I find this heartening for some reason. It seems somehow symbolic of the depths of emotion that trees are capable of generating in all of us—whatever our background.
The other day I tried to count up how many trips I’ve made to rainforests since 1998. I lost count at seventy-six, ranging in length from two weeks to three months. That’s around eight years so far. But even after all that time in the jungle, Goliath has come to represent everything that is wondrous about tree climbing for me. In truth, he is an easy climb. But then, for me, this is the whole point: the older I get, the less I want to be scared witless. Comfort and familiarity have taken the place of adrenaline-fueled thrill-seeking, and I now place far greater emphasis on nurturing one-to-one relationships with the trees I climb.
The most gifted tree climber I know, a friend called Waldo, has his own special tree near his childhood home in Dorset. Although it is a beautiful tree, it isn’t a particularly hard climb, nor particularly tall or challenging. But the point is that Waldo feels at home in its branches. Feels free to let his mind wander as he swings from limb to limb, arriving back on the ground somehow rejuvenated, and all the better for it. Most tree climbers are just like this—most of us have a favorite tree tucked away in our back pocket, ready for the days when we feel the need to spend a little time rediscovering ourselves for a few precious hours beyond the reach of other intrusions.
So in this respect, Goliath for me is still a place of refuge. I also found that becoming a father for the first time nine years ago heralded an almost overnight aversion to taking extreme risks. We have very little control over many events in our lives, but in the instances where I felt I had a choice—particularly while at work in the rainforest canopy—I have deliberately shied away from doing dangerous things. Life is full of enough unexpected challenges without intentionally courting disaster. And with regard to tree climbing, I now try to pick my battles very carefully, endeavoring not to drift unconsciously into risky situations if I can help it. As much as I love them, trees are extremely dynamic living structures, and there are never any guarantees that branches won’t fail or that there aren’t any hidden dangers lurking up there.
Near to our home in the southwest of England is an ancient gnarled yew tree that could easily be a thousand years old. It stands in a quiet corner of a long-forgotten wood and looks out over a beautiful valley. When times get tough, I leave my ropes at home and climb into its upper branches to sit there thinking, watching the world go by far below. Sometimes this is enough, and after a while I climb back down to the ground, feeling calmer of spirit and somehow all the better for having spent time in its branches. On other occasions I begin to talk. Not necessarily to the tree; more to the world in general. I voice my sorrows, fears, and concerns, letting the wind carry away what it can as it flows through the canopy around me. I’m not saying this always works. Some sorrows run too deep to heal completely. But it certainly helps by offering somewhere calm to retreat to—a space beyond the borders of busy modern life within which I can reflect on what’s been lost, or focus on what lies ahead. As living entities, trees have their own energy, and yews in particular have a power that is hard to describe. Spending time in those branches, surrounded by this energy, often helps me cope with life’s challenges. When things grow almost too dark to bear—as they can for anyone, on occasion—it helps me on the journey toward coming to terms with events, making me a little better able to offer the support and help my family needs to move forward.
That yew tree is where I go to look for answers when things get rough, but also where I go to say thank you for everything else that is wonderful and positive. There is so much to be grateful for in this life, and I feel that to give gratitude for the good times is just as important as mourning one’s sorrows, if not more so. Life is to be celebrated, and I find that a few minutes spent focusing on the positive goes a very long way toward maintaining a personal balance.
I have an extremely open mind when it comes to spirituality. The more I travel, the more I realize how little I know and how much there is to learn from other people’s beliefs. I grew up Christian, lived for two impressionable years in a devout Muslim society, and married into a loving Sikh family. Over the past two decades my travels have brought me into close contact with dozens of different religions and philosophies, all of which contain profound elements of truth that I respect very much. But I have also come to realize that spirituality is where you find it, and I find it most easily when up in the trees.
Looking to the future, our boys will soon be of an age when they can start exploring the wonders of the canopy for themselves. They are already swinging around the branches of the oak in our garden, so it won’t be long until they accompany me on a proper climbing trip somewhere. A dream is to one day return here to the New Forest and climb Goliath alongside all three of them. Perhaps in another twenty-five years’ time. Although I expect I’ll need to take things a little slower by then.