The trees have been here so long and me, I’m just a punk drop-in. I do not expect them to accept me all at once. I know better than that. Still, I feel they are beginning to at least get used to me. And that’s comforting, because I’m thinking I could be here a while.
Just some other day ago I rode my bike to the Ravenna Park bridge. A narrow steel arch built eons ago, the roadway has long been closed to vehicular traffic and in genteel old age provides pedestrians and cyclists a quiet place to stop, take a breath, and gaze down on the wooded ravine of the park. Some might find it dizzying, but not me. I love standing there contemplating the thick wall of trees rising in a grand arboreal palisade, a green bosom. Or I did, anyway.
It was a soft summer evening. I leaned my bike on the cast iron railing and enjoyed the trees and the fluting of the robins. After several moments, a figure appeared at the south end of the bridge and walked toward me. A woman. Her stride was purposeful, as if she was on her way to meet someone she knew. Even at a distance, I could feel her eyes boring into me. Did I know her? She came closer and I saw that she wore a gauzy sort of black dress over jeans and a veiled hat that obscured her face.
“Enjoying the view?” Her voice floated up to me, soft and tinged with formality.
“Yes,” I replied, glancing briefly toward her. I did not want to be impolite and stare. I was not looking for company.
She chuckled quietly and sidled away. I turned back to the view—and something grabbed my legs. She was embracing me! Shit, I thought, are you that desperate? Then I was jerked upward, and before I could grab the railing I was falling. A tune ran through my mind and I thought of my wife. I jittered to a stop in a spiky embrace. I was lying in a tree. Pine needles jabbed my face, I hugged the branches desperately. The wobbling stopped and I looked up at the bridge. The woman was staring down at me. I screamed up at her: “What the FUCK! Are you CRAZY!” She disappeared.
I yelled “Help!” hysterically. I didn’t have my phone but I knew that people frequented the bridge and the footpaths down below. Maybe somebody saw what happened, but surely somebody would hear me and call 911. I moved to get more comfortable, making the branches droop. I tightened my grip and kept yelling.
Another head appeared at the railing and a man’s voice shouted, “Hey! Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I think so.” My voice shook. “Yeah,” I repeated, lowering the pitch of my voice and trying to sound more in control. “I’m okay. Can you call the cops?”
“I’m dialing 911 right now.” A minute later he shouted, “Okay, the police are on their way. How the hell…?”
“That crazy woman pushed me. Did you see her?”
“Yeah, I think so. I saw a woman running.”
The needles poked my face but hey, I wasn’t complaining. I didn’t seem to be hurt. Thank you, tree. Okay, the police were on their way and they’d get the fire department and they’d get me down. Far below, through the branches, I could see a short section of the park trail. A jogger flashed through and vanished. Shit, no way could a big fire truck negotiate the narrow dirt path. They’d probably have to run a ladder from the bridge—but Christ, how would that work? Fucking crazy damn bitch. Why would somebody push a total stranger off a bridge? I guess because it’s that kind of world, a world of bombings and beheadings and ethnic cleansings and endangered species exterminations, and now, apparently, bridge-pushings.
A siren shrilled in the distance and came nearer. Two officers appeared at the railing. “Okay, sir,” one yelled, “are you stable, there?”
“Yeah,” I answered, “I think so.”
“What happened?”
“A woman pushed me, grabbed me by the ankles and pushed me. She’s wearing a black dress and a black hat and tennis shoes.”
“Okay.” The cops conferred and I could hear them radioing a description of the woman and a request for the fire department. Now we were rolling! I hoped they weren’t laughing at me for getting pushed off the bridge by a woman. Cops do that. But these guys were quick and efficient. “Okay,” one shouted, “fire department’ll be here ASAP.”
“Great!” I yelled. “Thanks. Hey, you gotta find that woman who pushed me. She’s psycho!” I remembered my wife. “Hey! Can you call my wife and tell her what’s happened?” I gave them her number and they said “okay” again and disappeared.
I lay stewing in anger. How in hell did she do it? She didn’t look especially big, but then I didn’t get a good look at her. That old waist-high railing, easy enough to lever someone over, I guess. Still, you had to have some strength. Maybe she was an athlete of some sort. Or just possessed. Well, fuck me. But why?Was it some sort of twisted fantasy, or revenge for an old injury? No, she was just a crazy woman. I’m always amazed that there aren’t more insane people around. Hell, maybe there are, I don’t know, anymore. Well, fuck her. My body ached to leap up onto the bridge and run after her and grab her and punish her.
Suddenly my branch drooped and in a terrifying blur I fell ten more feet. I lay stunned, flat on my back in the cradle of two massive boughs that barely moved under my impact. Thank God for boughs—no, thank the boughs. As for God—“the Deity,” Mark Twain called him—I guess I’ll thank him when he or she or it restores me to solid ground. I love Mark Twain; he would have found my predicament amusing and could have written something amusing about it. Me, I’m no Twain; I don’t write and I’m not glib or witty, and at that moment God was a big old fir tree with big old mother’s arms hugging me.
Another siren sounded. The intervening limbs now screened my view of the bridge, but I heard the rumble of a large vehicle. Salvation! A masculine voice bellowed, “Sir, are you down there?”
“Yeah!”
“Okay, we can’t reach you where you’re at, so we gotta work out something else, okay? We’ll be gettin’ back to ya ASAP.”
Not what I was hoping to hear. “Okay.” The fire truck rumbled away. I listened for it to reappear below, but it didn’t. All righty, then. I’ll just wait right here, shall I?
A few minutes later I heard another voice, thin and distant. “Honey?” My wife.
“I’m down here.”
“Oh, my God! How did you get down there?”
Didn’t the cops tell her? “Somebody pushed me.”
“You’re kidding?”
She always says that. I hate it. “No, I’m not kidding. I’m waiting on the fire department. They said they’ll be back soon.”
“Oh, God!” She sounded almost worried. It felt good to hear worry in her voice. She asked how I was doing and what the cops said and when the fire truck would be there, and I said, “fine” and “not much” and “I don’t know.”
Recently she had gone cool on me. Maybe this was why: my vagueness, my shifting opinions, my failure to possess solid answers. I was never big on answers, I was always more a question guy, and women don’t much go for that. In America, nobody much goes for that. We like answers and the people who have them, or pretend to. And right then, I wanted answers and I wanted action. I yelled up to my wife, “Would you call work and tell them what’s going on?”
“Okay, honey. Anything else I can do?”
Yeah, go back to the old you. “I don’t think so. Oh, my bike.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s there by the railing. Can you take it home?”
“Oh.” She sounded put-out. “It’ll fit, won’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“And, would you keep after the damn fire department and make sure they don’t forget about me?”
“Okay, honey. Well, I guess I’ll see you later.”
I guess I’ll see you later? I felt empty. Maybe it was menopause, or simply general disillusionment. I can understand that; I’m a pretty dull old stick these days, a slouching, sighing parody of my younger self, with wispy graying hair and a propensity for long, leaden silences between coughing jags. We used to joke about it.
I asked her what was wrong. She shook her head violently, as if wishing me out of the room. “I don’t know. I’m struggling through this. I feel like a different person.”
“Okay,” I said, “well, change is normal. Can’t we change and become different together?”
She only burrowed deeper into herself, and in bed faced away from me.
I looked around and evaluated my chances of climbing down. I couldn’t see through the thick branches, I thought it was probably too far down to the next branch, and when I shifted my weight toward the brink the branch wobbled sickeningly. I’d fallen twice and had been lucky both times. But a third? Maybe I’d try later. Maybe a rush of adrenaline would take charge and force me down.
“Sir!” I saw a flash of orange on the trail far below. A fireman.
“Hey!” I yelled.
“Okay, we can’t get our ladder truck in here, so we’re gonna have to work something else out.”
“Okay,” I called, trying to sound disappointed but not pissed. So, what else, exactly—and when?
“We’ll be back with you ASAP.”
All righty, then. Well, no lack of ASAPs floating around. No sir! It was kind of funny, really; good old America, all ASAP and promise and platitude. Action, not so much. I told myself to be patient; they’d be back soon, sure they would—they said ASAP, didn’t they? What more did I want? I was a citizen, a taxpayer, an American, and in America, job done is job one. Our mission is excellence. Just look at our schools.
But they weren’t back. Dusk became evening and my anger smoldered as I realized that, yes, they really were going to leave me here all night in a fucking tree. Maybe I hadn’t paid enough taxes. Thankfully, exhaustion took hold and I nodded off. I only had on a T-shirt and shorts, so I got chilled and woke frequently. I lay there listening to the wind, the creaking tree limbs, the bats whirring, all the tiny night sounds from earth to sky. Eventually they sang me into deep sleep where I dreamed of blobby, shrouded figures.
Sun and birdsong and hunger woke me. There was nothing here but pinecones. I plucked a lobe and gave it a tentative nibble. Not bad, not great, but available, right here, right now. Can’t argue with that; most life forms eat what’s available, and who was I to think I was any different? Pretending it was an old-fashioned donut, I pulled off another lobe and chewed it slowly, letting the juices sink in. No, not bad at all. Hunger receded. I chewed a few more lobes, speculating on how my digestive tract would take it, then ate the rest. I felt better.
Juncos hopped among the branches going pit-pit and trying to figure out this strange misshapen monster squatting in their tree. One of them perched nearby and cocked its head at me. I like juncos; with their white bills and dark heads, they are handsome, plucky creatures: jaunty, like I used to be as a youth, bell-bottomed and suede jacketed and curly haired. Something girls cocked their heads at. I pit-pitted with the little head-cocker—hey, you take it where you find it—and we had us a nice little talk. Some cultures consider birds to be harbingers of death. “Hey, little junco,” I said, “are you a harbinger of death?” It pitted once and flew away. I took that as a no. Birds are basically unknowable; they eat constantly, they weigh almost nothing, they move in four dimensions. They are unafraid of falling.
The sun rose higher and I stared into the green bosom. The semi-circular hedge of trees was in the full, glorious green of summer, and the color, light, shadow, and the great loamy earth at the center of everything took me out of one time and into all time and lay me down in a green pasture of primal being, faith, and hope. The sun felt good, my mind floated free, and it occurred to me that I was now a member of a very exclusive club. I grunted sardonically and thought of my mother, who had always wanted to belong in what passed for Society in Seattle. I say this not in derision, for as a kid I had social aspirations of my own, specifically the Oongah Club. Led by tall, handsome Scott Miyake, this was an informal organization that required initiates to perform certain feats on demand, i.e. whatever struck Scott Miyake’s fancy at the moment: catch a squirrel, shoot a robin with a B-B gun, ride your bike standing on the seat. Not that I ever saw him doing any of these things, but there it is: Kid-dom is a realm of small, scratchbuilt cruelty.
My turn came one afternoon when a bunch of us were hanging with Scott at Harrison Elementary playground. Scott suggested that I might like to join the Oongah Club by way of climbing up on the roof of the school. Climb—me? I watched television, I rode my bike, I played with trains. I didn’t climb things. But there it was, and there I was, poised quivering in mid-air, Scott ordering me up, me trying to will strength into my wimpy little arms and legs. The roof had a wide overhang and it could not be surmounted, not by me and probably not by Scott Miyake, either. Blinking back tears, I shook my head. Scott shook his head, got on his bike, and rode away in disgust. I never made the Oongah Club and I never learned to climb things.
Remembering all this made me laugh, scaring off a junco, pit-pit. All our self-imposed strivings: Mom aspired to them, Dad despaired of them. Why? They were good parents but they never really knew me at all. Never knew about my desire to impress Scott Miyake, or my furtive peering into neighbors’ houses, or my hiding out under the deck entertaining obscure desires. Well, destiny is a funny thing. Can you see me now, Folks? Right here in this tree! The fire department can’t get me down, isn’t that funny! How’s this for destiny?
I nibbled another pinecone and thought about the office and how it was when I was a sick kid kept home from school, and how left out I felt as the other kids and teachers carried on without me. I didn’t feel left out now, though; I got tired of the office a long time ago, but have been unable to come up with anything better. I’m pretty sure my wife explained my situation, but my boss is a jackass who probably doesn’t get it. He likes to talk in sports-jargon, saying things like “game plan” and “full-court press” and “team players.” I’m pretty sure that, if I don’t show up tomorrow like nothing happened, I’ll be on probation. If I fail to appear the next day: off the team.
I was impressed at how nourishing the pinecone felt and how it seemed to settle me down. Or maybe I was just too weak to worry about anything. Regardless, it felt good to lay there in my green hammock during business hours, listening to the birds, the distant traffic, the faint voices down below, the wind. The air was full of sound, but no beep-beep-beep of heavy equipment, no heavy male voices calling up to me promising me salvation ASAP, no wifely voice saying, falsely, “honey?” I was at peace.
Good thing, too, for by noon it was apparent that I had slipped off the fire department’s radar. Maybe there had been some bureaucratic “snafu” or mechanical “glitch,” or maybe the yesterday guys went off duty and neglected to tell the next shift. Poof, you are now a non-person. That seemed unlikely; surely the computers would show me still dangling here, probably in blinking red caps. Computers don’t lie, right? Sure. Remember the Space Shuttles? Al those layers of computers and fail-safes and redundancies and red-lettered warnings and team-playing, can-do excellence, and still—poof!
I wondered when my wife would come again. This would have been a logical time to make a break; I could hear it in her voice, the voice of incipient breakup. What did we have in common, after all? Not all that much, really, not anymore. Well, fine; if she wanted me, she knew where to find me. And if she did show up, I would make her call the press and tell them about me stranded in the tree and forgotten by the Seattle Fucking Fire Department. But all morning, she didn’t come, she didn’t come, she didn’t come, and I lay there thinking various awful thoughts about her, and after a while I started thinking a song, an old-time sort of roundelay or whatever they call it—Come to me, come to me, come to me, my darlin’! Who knows why these weird bits of music come popping up odd moments, say like when you’re free-falling off a bridge? Hey, never mind that, here’s the theme from “Bewitched”!
As if in response to my inner song, my wife showed up that afternoon. What had she been doing all morning? Sitting in a lawyer’s office, perhaps.
“Honey?” she called, “Are you still there?”
Where the hell else would I be? “Yeah!” At least she still called me “honey.”
“Okay,” she yelled, “if you can hear me, they’re working at getting you out, okay?”
Glad to hear it. Were they doing it digitally? “Great. Tell them there’s no hurry. Did you talk to the office?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
“Anything new at home?”
“No, not really…”
Not “really”?
“So,” she said, “how are you doing? You must be getting hungry.”
“I’m eating pinecones.”
“Pinecones? You’re kidding!”
Yeah, I’m kidding. I’m really eating my own feces. “Nope. They’re not bad, either.”
“Oh, well, as long as you’re okay.”
I didn’t say that.
There was a pause. Then she said, “Okay, honey, I have to go.”
“You just got here.”
“I have things to do. I have to call the fire department.”
You could do that on your cell phone right here, couldn’t you?
I guess not. She was gone. The dissolution papers would be waiting for me on the dining room table.
What could I do? The sun was warm, the birds were singing, I had pinecones. I chewed some more lobes and fell asleep. Was there something in them that induced sleep? If so, I could be on to something, except probably the Indians already knew all about it. Fuck me, anyway.
Night number two—or was it three?—fell. The forest closed in, the day birds bedded down. I could hear them in the branches above me. Bats came out. Little flying warm-blooded mammals: could this be man in a thousand years—man with wings and a little humility? I liked hearing their tiny whirrings and mysterious sonar pingings. I had never thought much about bats, and I fell asleep happy to have their company. Funny thing, too: I didn’t feel chilled at all. Maybe it was all the warm-blooded energy around me, and maybe it was the pine boughs recirculating my own heat. And something else was funny: the branches seemed to be holding me a little tighter, a little closer. Probably I was just getting accustomed to my situation and feeling more secure. At any rate, I slept soundly.
Now it’s today, and today there has been no activity. At least, not where I’m concerned. My wife has not shown, my rescuers are absent, MIA, AWOL. Well, okay, how many people—say, in automobiles skidding toward each other, or on falling airplanes, or drowning—believe right up to the last instant that they’ll be saved? I mean, come on: how long should a person really live? It’s getting late, maybe for me, maybe for all of us.
I feel things starting to slip away, and other things creeping in. For one thing, I was worried that these pinecones might wreak havoc with my innards. But so far, I haven’t felt any adverse effects; in fact, I feel good. People think so much about their damn stomachs: eat, eat, eat, all those carbs and decaying meat fibers. These pinecones are clean food and they fill me right up, so much so that now I have a fresh worry: I feel a nice big dump coming on. I’ve already peed, no problem. Shitting will be a bit of a hassle, but, well, here goes. Ahhh.
There it went, and it went well. I had no trouble getting the shorts down and sitting upright and getting it all out. It felt amazingly good, too, a way solid primal evacuation. It probably landed in the next bough down (I hope it didn’t hit any birds), in which case it’ll probably stink up the place for a while. And of course, I have no way of cleaning myself, but you know, I don’t really give a shit. (Ha-ha!)
What day is it? I’m not sure. I know it’s not yesterday, I think it’s at least a day later, because I seem to remember another night falling. But that’s stopped being a major concern—not relevant now. Right now, I’m lying here flat on my back during working hours enjoying the peace, the green all around, and the gentle rocking of the branches holding me while I sleep and look around and think and apply my mental energy to new and unimagined things, things like actually becoming a bat-man much sooner than ten thousand years from now, and what I’m going to do when the pinecones run out. Also, now I’m getting pretty fucking thirsty. I sense this will be my biggest immediate problem, or “situation,” as the AWOL ASAP first-responder boys would say. Fuck them.
Well, I can’t worry about that, worry has no relevance here in my sky palace. I think about these trees all around me, and particularly this one holding me. It’s big—too big to get my hands around and try to shimmy down. What kind is it? A blue spruce, I think, but I’m not sure. I really should get to know my trees better. I do know that trees have taken a lot of shit from people, they suffer and die for us, great bloody wooden Jesuses. Oh, I’m sorry, is that blasphemous? Well, fuck me: not relevant now.
I think about my bike and how much I enjoyed riding it and how it made me feel like a kid again. Thank you, bike, but sorry: not relevant now.
I think about the things on my desk: projects, ideas for projects, ideas for better processes to manage projects, and other stuff: not relevant now.
I think about my boss, Mister Game Plan, and how he can go fuck himself: totally not relevant now.
I think about my wife and how she used to love me, and about the pleading look of desire she used to get, and I know even now that to be the focus of such a look—even if it doesn’t last—makes it all worthwhile: possibly still relevant now, even as I lie in the green bosom. In fact, I almost kind of wish I could get her down here with me and put some sense into her. Hold that thought.
I think about the bats that came last night and how this time they spoke to me, very clearly, in tones halfway between bat and man. They said, How are you doing, tree-guy? Would you like something to eat? I don’t remember what I said, but they dropped things on me: moths and other insects, which were surprisingly tasty and also loaded with moisture, thank God. (No, thank bats!) The stars were out, then they weren’t, and deep in the night something else came to me. It was dark and indistinct and its face was covered in a kind of gauze, but it was human-sized and warm, and it slid in close and kissed me. It kissed me for a long time and stayed with me afterwards and held me in its arms as we slept, and my dreams were of places once remote and now near. I wasn’t afraid at all.
I woke alone. My visitor was gone. It’s cloudy but that’s hardly noticeable, so nice and cozy and green and soft and surprisingly warm it is in here. The pine boughs smell heavenly. I think again about trying to climb down from here, but I don’t feel like it. I feel instead that I’m occupying just the right position between land and sky and seeing only what I need to see and feeling what I need to feel. The trees and birds don’t know anything about my life, my bills, my faltering marriage, my crummy job; they only know I’m here with them. Maybe I’m starting to lose it just a little, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels more like I’m starting to get it.
I know that they’ve forgotten me and that there will be no rescue. Possibly, the computers are down or the system has crashed or the bureaucracy has failed, but I don’t believe so. No, my real suspicion is that my wife has told them that I’ve made it down on my own and don’t need their help anymore. Would she really do this? Yes, I believe so. Isn’t that funny? Ha-ha! I laugh loudly, but the sound collapses in on itself. I don’t see or hear people down below, now, and I think they probably would not hear me even if I screamed loudly. Laugh, scream, it’s all not relevant now.
I feel the branches growing tighter around me, hear them rustling in the night as they close in. I can’t even think of being anywhere else, and why should I? The juncos dropped by for a pit-pit, the robins are warming up to me, and this morning a crow brought me a dead squirrel. I set aside my revulsion and sank my teeth into its belly. It was weird, chewing through the fur and warm flesh, but the blood hit me with a rush. Blood for blood, life for life. The crow watched me and nodded its head and made that rattling sound crows make when they approve of something. And you know, even raw, the squirrel, poor thing, wasn’t bad. Wasn’t bad at all.