The Tree Climber’s Guide. Jack Cooke
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Название: The Tree Climber’s Guide

Автор: Jack Cooke

Издательство: HarperCollins

Жанр: Природа и животные

Серия:

isbn: 9780008153922

isbn:

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      So it is also with trees, whose nature it is to stand up high. Though thou pull any bough down to the earth, such as thou mayest bend; as soon as thou lettest it go, so soon springs it up and moves towards its kind.

      Metres of Boethius (King Alfred’s prose version)

      This book will not tell you how to climb trees. You are, believe it or not, a natural climber, and the wherewithal to conquer nature’s scaffold lies deeply ingrained in your DNA. Rewind the clock to the first tree you ever climbed; can you remember where it stood and if it stands today? The intervening years may have stiffened muscles and added gut but the way into the trees remains open.

      Not long ago I found myself stuck halfway up a giant cedar. I had struggled up the bare lower trunk, wrestling with a thick covering of ivy. Arriving at the first branches and faced with the final ascent, I found my limbs frozen stiff. A friend, who had already nimbly picked his way to the summit, looked down on me through the fronds with a self-satisfied grin. I had one knee balanced on a branch, an arm wrapped around the trunk and my nose wedged in the bark. A buttock was braced against another bough and I was bleeding from a cut to my right ear.

      Climbing trees is an all-body pursuit that engages every part of your anatomy; it’s not unusual to find your forehead pressed hard against a thorny trunk, buttressing the rest of your body weight, or your legs locked off around a tree limb. The joy of climbing trees comes from their barely ordered chaos; branches balance each other, but every tree is its own bedlam. Getting hopelessly lost in this arboreal cobweb is the whole point.

      Inevitably, upper-body strength helps. If you can do seventeen pull-ups hanging from the little finger of your left hand, then you have an advantage over the rest of us. The skill-set of a seasoned alpinist can be applied to bark but the novice is not ill-equipped. When exploring trees, the finer points of technique are subordinated to the haphazard joy of the climb.

      This is a book with a strictly amateur philosophy. The closest many adults get to climbing trees in the 21st century is by paying for the privilege – even something so patently non-monetary has been ingeniously commercialised. You can be parted from your cash to be winched into the canopy, a harness tightened mercilessly around your genitals and a plastic helmet fused to your hair. With the overriding pain in your crotch, and your instructor swinging like an angry pendulum between you and the tree, there is little if any time for appreciating the scenery.

      Such equipment might be useful for conquering otherwise unclimbable summits, the coast redwoods of Oregon or California, but the amateur goes into the trees as his ancestors left them. The examples in this book are for the spur of the moment, to be climbed with no other tools than your own hands and feet.

      We live in a dangerous age in which some of our most natural and time-honoured pursuits have been rebranded. Swimming anywhere other than a plumbed and chlorinated pool and what you might have previously considered camping are now both given the prefix ‘wild’. There is no true wilderness left in Britain, so we can assume this new perception exists to distinguish between pool and pond, campsite and moorland. More disturbingly, however, the terms imply you somehow have to be ‘wild’ to partake. This could not be less true of climbing trees, an undertaking for anyone with the time and inclination.

      In London, gaining a branch takes perseverance. Many of the finest specimens are impossible to scale with the simple gifts that Mother Nature bestowed upon us. The city’s trees have been clipped and coppiced, pruned and pollarded, shorn of their bottom branches and trimmed to a fault. London’s councils and park keepers do a noble job of hair-dressing, often vital to the tree’s health but at a terrible cost to the aspirant climber.

      How many trees I have longed to climb and left regretfully: the silver lime by London Wall, high among Roman ruins, or the soaring arms of a copper beech in Kensal Green, shadowing the cemetery. Walking through Ranelagh Gardens or London Fields, I look longingly at centuries-old trunks, bereft of a single handhold. All across the city, countless London planes elude the climber, their complex crowns arching out of reach above the roof line.

      The first and greatest challenge is reaching the lowest branch of any given tree. This is the key that opens the trapdoor to the attic, and the toughest part of almost every climb is found right at the outset. In order to gain the canopy no method is too unorthodox. Grapple and grope, claw and haul your way in; I have used tooth and nail in desperate bids to ascend a coveted tree. Sheer bloody-mindedness will often prevail, and no true tree climber gives a damn about their dignity.

      The greatest single aid is a tall friend, a running jump being no substitute for a reliable shoulder. Pick climbing accomplices of a sizeable stature and you’ll transform your reach, elusive branches becoming easily attainable. Elevated from my humble five foot seven to the realm of a giant by taller men, hundreds of remote tree tops have fallen within my grasp. Many of these friends have no inclination to follow me into the trees, but for every unwilling climber there’s a committed pedestal.

      There are, however, benefits to climbing alone. Just as the solo walker absorbs more of their immediate surroundings, so too the unaccompanied climber. The triumph of helping one another into a tree is a binding experience, and I like nothing better than sharing a common branch with a good friend. Yet there is something sacred about being solitary in a tree top. On my own I’m more likely to escape detection, whether by man below or beast above, and there is no compromise over which branch to choose or how far to climb. Dissecting life’s problems with an airborne friend is a fine form of counselling, but the same can be said of a tree-unto-yourself, where there is no need to have the raw experience affirmed by another. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of walking: ‘You should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own pace.’ I have often followed ‘the freak’ into the trees, reliant on no other agenda but my own.

      I do not want this to be a technical manual. The decision to climb a tree is spontaneous and every encounter different. Rather than laying down a set of instructions, below are a few aerial insights picked up along the way.

      One of the principal advantages of climbing trees over rock or ice is that a straight drop rarely confronts the climber. Unlike clinging to a cliff face, a latticework of branches intervenes between you and the ground, offering a real (or imaginary) safety net. In high summer the leaves of a tree obscure the earth below, lessening our exposure to vertical falls. The ground is glimpsed but, climbing close to the trunk, a ready anchor is always to hand.

      Use the natural geometry of the tree to aid your passage. Branchless sections often provide other means of ascent, burrs for leverage or a woodpecker’s hole, and some species have bark sufficiently hard and fissured to act as a hold in its own right. The way is not always obvious and few trees grow straight. In the course of a single ascent sloped stairways can transform into vertiginous overhangs. The climber must adjust to their warp and weft.

      Exploring uninhibited by surplus clothing and gear is an essential freedom. You need nothing more advanced than the skin you were born in, and there are plenty of handy nooks for depositing briefcases and handbags on the way up. To further blend with a new environment, shades of grey and green lend camouflage to the climber, distancing the city below.

      There are many advantages to climbing trees in bare feet. We were all born with splayed toes, perfect for balancing on branches, but our parents’ insistence on stuffing infant feet into footwear undid this great gift, narrowing digits and flattening arches. A short stint of baring your soles to the elements and the old connection between skin and bark can be re-forged. Adopt a kind of ‘four-hands’ philosophy – our ape forebears retained opposable toes on their feet for good reason – СКАЧАТЬ