For want of a tree to climb

After a round of golf the other day, I was having a beer and burger with some of my playing companions, Baby Boomer types who started talking about the “good old days.”

Their talk centered around the disorganized play of our youth in the 1950s:

How there was no such thing as a “play date,” how we’d leave the house, bike to the ballfield or vacant lot with bat, ball and mitt to see who was around for a pick-up baseball game.

And it got me to thinking: Does anyone climb trees anymore?

I’m not talking about climbing trees as a way of life to trim and top and cut them.

I’m talking about climbing trees because they’re there, because I remember it as being such an adventure.

When I was a boy at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado, where my Dad was an English professor, we had Big Tree.

We lived at 4509-I (38.985967,-104.863118 on Google Maps).

Just behind the house, in the woods, was a path that we used to walk to the Community Center, where the movie theater, base exchange, bowling alley, etc. were located. It’s all still there.

Just after the first fire break/flash flood ditch you’d veer off and venture in a couple of hundred feet to get to Big Tree.

It was our Empire State Building of trees. Nothing around it was as tall. Or as scary. Or as inviting.

Like everything else we did, it wasn’t announced that we were going to go out and climb the biggest tree in the world. It was just done. A broken arm. A broken leg. If they happened, they happened.

Climbing Big Tree was the Everest of tree climbs.

Your muscles ached from pulling yourself up from limb to limb, testing some to make sure they hadn’t become to brittle that they’d bust under the weight.

You tried not to look down but that was part of the scary fun.

The climate was different up there. At the top, above everything else, the wind blew where it didn’t seem to blow on the ground, and you could feel Big Tree sway -- a lot of it was particularly windy.

There’s a very real possibility that Big Tree wasn’t all that big. But everything then was big and vast.

And we’d just head out and explore. Nothing was rarely organized. Our play date was with anything we could conjure up to do at any given moment with whomever or whatever was available to us.

Does any kid have a Big Tree anymore?

Probably not, at least not without adult supervision, a helmet and government approved climbing harnesses.