The Tree Climber’s Guide. Jack Cooke

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The Inner Gibbon

       A Short History of Climbing Trees

      A house in which rain does not fall, a place in which spears are not feared, as open as if in a garden without a fence around it.

      The Ivied Tree-top, unknown Irish author, 9th century AD

      Not so very long ago you and I were both exceptional climbers. We breezed through the trees, living, hunting and sleeping in the greenery. Bridging the gap between branches was second nature to our ancestors, and they wouldn’t have thought twice about jumping the void to secure a good breakfast.

      This continued for many tens of millions of happy years. Then, one fateful afternoon, we stepped down from the heights and began our life as ground dwellers. Soon to become the baldest of the apes, we abandoned the very thing that had sustained us for countless generations, deciding instead to seek our future on two feet.

      Whatever forced this great transition, climate or curiosity, the outcome has clearly been a terrible mistake. We traded brawn for brains, opposable toes for stilettos, and sacrificed instinct and sustainable habitat for an intelligence that would culminate, roughly thirteen million years later, in the ability to doubt ourselves.

      Even after making the era-defining choice of no longer living in the trees, our ancestors most likely returned to them in times of need. Where else would you flee when being chased across the African savannah by the larger of the ground-dwelling predators? Indeed you might only be reading this due to the climbing skill-set of your very great-grandmother, which enabled her to escape the jaws of various ravenous beasts (or at least those unable to give chase up trees).

      But there came a time when we no longer needed to ascend to survive. The invention of fire, tools and, more recently, television has made climbing trees largely surplus to human requirements. Although a number of diligent tribes continued to seek food and shelter in the canopy, living exclusively up high became a rare lifestyle choice; those still clinging to the branches in the 21st century are few and far between. Our relationship with the trees has changed from one of co-existence to increasing exploitation.

      In spite of our great descent, the lure of climbing trees has persisted. Throughout history, thinkers and dreamers have returned to the forest compelled by a shared ancestral memory. Trees bring out a powerful homing instinct in many of us and we gravitate towards them, a part of us, perhaps, longing to return to our former existence. The poetic image of the dying soldier comes to mind, dragging himself to the base of a tree before expelling a final breath. Trees remain linked to our concept of a life cycle, their death and rebirth analogous to humankind’s own measurement of time. The Green Man of pre-Christian symbolism, a kind of arboreal divinity, is an enduring mark of this tie to the trees. Living faces and hollow skulls sprout leaves from mouth and ears, a relic of our former union with the vegetable world.

      If we search for tree dwellers down the millennia we find curious instances of men and women climbing back into the canopy. Consider the druids, most venerated of ancient Britons and the policy makers of their day. If we credit Pliny’s Natural History, one of their sacred rituals was running up an oak tree under a full moon to cut down fistfuls of mistletoe. Only the druids were permitted to climb the hallowed trees, a sure sign of the ancients’ veneration for this noble art.

      In AD 436, a slightly awkward teenager called Simeon decided to climb a pillar and spend the rest of his life sitting on top of it. Although historians have immortalised him as a man seeking spiritual enlightenment, I think Simeon was following a nagging instinct to nest. Hounded by other lost souls, he chose to escape the world by climbing above it.

      Simeon’s life up high inspired a cult of pillar-squatting Christians known as stylites, ‘pillar dwellers’; others took to the trees, hiding away from the world in hollow trunks or climbing branches to nest like birds in the tree tops. Early icons display barefoot monks perched happily in the canopy, with various followers bringing them food and drink. These men became known as dendrites, ‘people of the tree’, and most famous among them was David, more formally known as Saint David of Thessalonika. He spent three years living in an almond tree, nominally talking to God but also enjoying the nuts and the view. Spend long enough in the branches and you too may find yourself beatified.

      Scaling trees was certainly still commonplace in the Middle Ages. The Fates of Men, an Old English poem of the 8th century, provides a fascinating list of fatal misfortunes that might befall your average Anglo-Saxon. Most of these we can readily accept as unremarkable for the age: being devoured by a wolf, being pierced by a spear, dying through storm, starvation or war. Some of the documented fates even have modern-day parallels, like the man ‘maddened with mead’ who dies in the Dark Ages’ equivalent of a bar brawl.

      In among all this misery is death by falling from a tree. It seems an odd fate to include in a list of everyday dangers:

      One from the top of a tree in the woods

      Without feathers shall fall, but he flies none the less,

      Swoops in descent till he seems no longer

      The forest tree’s fruit; at its foot on the ground

      He sinks in silence, his soul departed –

      On the roots now lies his lifeless body.

      The СКАЧАТЬ