Up High and Down Low
As a kid, I needed to climb, the higher the better. Stairs, ladders, elevators, towers, trees, lighthouses, hills, and mountains all called to me, loudly. I would take every chance I got to get up higher than just standing or sitting would allow and crawled out onto more than one forbidden rooftop just to see what I could see.
Trees got my attention right from the beginning. Big and strong, loaded with scratchy branches and sweet fragrances, they seemed an obvious place to start testing how I fit into things. The minute I started climbing trees, my world got bigger. Who doesn’t want to know whether the world can support her weight? The whole point of those early episodes of tree climbing—in addition to exhilaration—was to reach into the huge natural world. I wanted to get my little body into that tree.
That first handhold, finding the right branch, tests our strength to pull ourselves up. Once we do that, the trick is to find the next branch close enough to grasp. With a bit of agile squirming and twisting we manage to reposition our bodies so that we can, hopefully, pull ourselves up to the next accessible notch in the tree. We feel our muscles, our own strength in a whole new way. Tree climbing offers a chance to see a new view of the world, a world grown larger in a matter of minutes. Mountains appear in the distance that weren’t there a moment before. Trees give way to rooftops, rooftops reveal new features. I can remember the fabulous feeling of sitting in a tree, breaking free of the solid ground and suspending myself up high over people and cars and houses below.
Holding on involves balance, learning how to balance our bodies the right way so as not to fall. Our feet have to learn their role in tree climbing, they must find the next safe, strong platform. Even trickier is inching our way back down the tree, a journey in reverse. The same tree, yet the descent is entirely different. Going down requires a new set of skills and a different sort of courageous curiosity. Watch how easily a cat can jump and scamper up a tree, yet how skittishly and hesitantly it descends.
The whole point of holding tight to the tree’s branches became abruptly clear to me when I fell out of a tree. I was about six years old. Since it wasn’t a very big tree, I didn’t fall more than seven feet before I landed on my back. What a shock. The most terrifying thing was that I couldn’t breathe. I had fallen with such impact I had knocked the breath out of my lungs. But by the time my mother arrived, I had already struggled to my feet. Nothing was broken, just a few scrapes. But I had learned a lot about the dangers of not knowing my own limitations—and the vast scale of nature. I also learned you actually could survive some bumps and bruises and that you can only learn by making mistakes, ones as common and ordinary as failing to grip a branch tightly enough.
I still longed to be up high in that tree. I wasn’t going to be denied the pleasure of climbing higher, and the next day I found the nerve to climb that tree again. This time I held on tight. I was rewarded with a confidence in my body’s abilities and some outstanding views of the immediate world around our apartment on Andrews Air Force Base. Hard to imagine how much I would have missed if I had never tried climbing a tree again.
As an adult, I have climbed up to the towers and domes of monuments and cathedrals. I remember lugging a shopping bag from the Louvre Museum up the stone bell tower of Notre Dame Cathedral, an arduous ascent of 300 steps that was quickly forgotten once I savored the view of the River Seine and all of Paris stretched out below. The cramped spiral staircase of Barnegat Lighthouse was worth a climb recently. I could watch New Jersey flatten and the Bay stretch as I climbed, until I emerged at the top into gale force winds and a sublime panorama of the Atlantic. Climbing to a perch at the top of anything has never let me down.
Looking out tiny windows every few steps, I watched the world below grow smaller. The air became bluer, distances receded, until emerging onto the rooftops I feasted on the sight of the town and countryside. Up high, I could trace rivers, examine the rooftops and the different styles of architecture. Fields, valleys, and forests acquired new magic as they became almost doll-like in their new miniature sizes. How all of these man-made and natural landmarks fit together made more sense to my eyes—the interweaving of everything I saw. I could see how far away the road was from the town. If the sky was clear, I could catch the sun glinting off the ocean on the far horizon. Here was a living map of a world I’d only known close up. And now it acquired new possibilities. I could take a certain road knowing that it would lead to the mountain. As my eye followed a road, and stayed with it as it turned and straightened, I could read how it had been laid down, the logic of its path. I could immediately grasp why it had to bend sideways because of the river and then straighten to go past the center of town. That knowledge was no longer something abstract, existing only in words or maps. It was now mine, known to my eyes and in my body.
The view from the top unfolds in so many ways. Even getting on a ladder in order to pick some fruit from the top of the tree lets you become another creature, a bird perhaps, and see how things are arranged below, rather than simply next to, your body. From above, the world appears to organize itself around my body at its center. It flows in every direction around me; wherever I turn and look, there is more to see, more trees than I ever could have seen from ground level.
Seen from Below
Another way of understanding our bodies in relation to the size of the world is to crouch down on the ground and look up. As a kid, I would squeeze into caves, or burrow into culverts or storm drains, those corrugated aluminum tubes used to divert water away from streets. From there I felt like an unseen secret viewer—a hidden voyeur—as the world went about its business above me.
How exciting the world looked when viewed from below. All the more exciting since I was using secret eyes, and as I looked up at the world, it acquired a special sort of organization. Feet were large and close; heads were smaller and farther away. Those altered vantage points expanded my mind and body’s notion of the world around me. Nothing, it turned out, was actually “ordinary” at all.
View from the cellar window: feet moving around in the garden; tall grass substantial as emerald forests; the neighbor’s cat lying in wait, stalking some hapless bird, a bird simply going about its business unaware of the danger that I could see from my hidden vantage point. Weeds, logs, garbage cans, the neighbor’s driveway across the street, all of it newly strange and focused like the iris lens on an old film camera. Standing on tiptoes, peeking out through the narrow cellar window, I was invisible and hence possessed the supernatural powers that accompany invisibility. I learned something about being still and watching, about how the world offers many views, depending upon where you sit, stand, jump, or lie.
The world is a varying multiplicity—it isn’t just one thing after all, it is a multiverse. From all these different vantage points, the ecology of a place and its surroundings become something like visual music. I didn’t yet know all the words but I could hum a few bars.
