14. Trees & Safety

14/14 Things I Wanted to Say

There is a tree in our backyard we call the Totoro tree.

It’s a huge 40 foot blue spruce, the tallest tree for a few blocks, and countless swallows and mourning doves find homes in its branches. Last summer a Cooper’s hawk made a nest among the boughs, swooping down to target rats and small rabbits from our yard. A cluster of pinecones weighs the crown of the tree—new seeds ready to fall at the start of summer.

My Neighbor Totoro | Studio Ghibli | 1988

The landlord next door wants to cut down the Totoro tree—maybe a few months from now, hopefully more like a few years. It’s too dangerous, he says, to have such a large tree so close to the house. Sturdy trunk, strong pine-coned shoulders, steady limbs: I see the tree as a guardian of our street and our family. But come large storms, my neighbor sees a liability shadowing an asset.

This is the way of so many things—between beauty and security, freedom and security, hope and security, privacy and security, communities again and again choose the promise of safety—even the possibility of it—over other values, personal values, values that make us who we are. We give away so much for perceived safety, but I wonder what we’ll be protecting after we compromise everything for it.

What is there to keep safe if safety is the only thing that matters?

---

We had a climbing tree in my backyard as a kid, and it was my favorite place in the world when I was in the third grade. I would tell my parents I was running away, pack a backpack full of Nutrigrain bars and books, and grab a leash for my golden retriever Dylan. We would crouch, Dylan and I, under the amber branches of the forsythia bush near the living room window where my parents sipped coffee. And once Dylan was settled into a nap in dappled sunlight, I’d climb my tree. It was spindly, all too thin branches and a crookedly curved trunk, but I hugged it while I climbed, explored, spied, read, lived—while I was free, at eight, to be myself: angry after an argument, dreaming despite a limitation, effusively existing in the trees embrace.

No one else climbed the tree, and although it was because my sister was six years older and the neighborhood boys were more interested in the water balloon wars of that summer than in tree hugging, I interpreted my relationship to the tree as unique, chosen—a strange friendship that existed day in and day out, something unconditional and solid, despite its knobby branches.

---

When I was in college, I read a poem by Robert Frost, Birches, that seemed to walk off the page and hide in my head. In it, Frost writes about an imagined childhood in trees, detailing the thrill of climbing and bending a birch branch by swinging down.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

…

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

The poem is maybe a reflection on childhood and the inevitability of growing up, it’s maybe about the wonder housed inside of all of us that calls to the natural world, and it’s also maybe about death about how everything is cyclical, connected, even in it’s inevitable end.

And maybe it’s just about trees.

It’s definitely about my tree, anyway. The way it held an embrace and set me down after climbing. The way it hid third-grade-dreamer me away from the world for a few years. But if Frost is right about anything, it’s the perpetual existence of memory and dreams. Once a swinger of birches, always a swinger of birches, even when the tree is gone.

By fourth grade, the tree creaked when I climbed it, heavy sighs in each branch. This was not a Shel Silverstein tree: my tree was not giving, it was surviving. As an adult, I can see the danger there—a dead limb or two, the leaves from one side grown curled like hands waiting to be filled with water. And one day when I came home from school, my tree was gone.

I ran through my house to find my dad in his bedroom upstairs reading a book or putting on socks or making the bed. I demanded an answer, a reason, an ability to time travel. It was sick, he told me. And I’m not sure he understood why I cried, what sort of loss the tree was for me. That gone with it was some small part of eight-year-old me, a part that maybe had to go, but not yet. Not yet.

The tree was gone, but I dug my nails in on memory and clawed that self back into my chest. Childhood would not be so easily claimed from me—safety and inevitability be damned.

---

As a kid, I refused to learn the lesson of this is just how it is and, if you know me well, you know that refusal has followed me into adulthood.

After my tree was gone, I spent the summer of fourth grade entrenched in the neighborhood battles between the kids on my block—the type of near Lord of the Flies situation you find yourself in if you are the only fifth grade girl in your neighborhood of boys. That coupled with a slightly unhinged imagination and a penchant for reading young adult novels about survival made the option to spend my afternoons lost in the trees in neighbor’s backyards nearly inevitable.

Hatchet, Tomorrow When the War Began, and Homecoming all sat dogeared on my bedside table, and so I approached my role as spy leader with a seriousness I’d learned between their pages—setting traps with honeysuckle vines, making a survival stew out of acorns and maple leaves, and running surveillance by peeking through the holes in the old wooden fences around our neighborhood.

Hunting through the ferns of the vacant lot across the street, I was staking out territory in the bizarre game that as kids in the neighborhood, only we knew we were playing. I returned home only when the streetlights came on, caked in mud, my knees bruised, crowing about victory like a rooster to my confused parents.

---

Summer ended and middle school began with a ferocity that distracted me from tree climbing and the games of neighborhood, nature, and books. But what I had been able to create inside myself was my own—in those moments in maze of our neighborhood backyards, something had happened to me at a very young age: I had found myself.

None of it was safe, surveilled, planned. My world was my own, like my tree. And I developed away from prying eyes, questions, supports, or demands.

It’s nearly unheard of today, a seven, eight, nine year old wandering a neighborhood alone. And I understand why. Things get worse, strange, scary. And all of us can agree: we want to keep the kids safe.

But what a loss, I think when I look at the Totoro tree. Sure, it might fall down soon. And we need to protect our homes. But what an awful, abject loss nonetheless.