The lowest branch was eight feet up, and to reach it you had to climb a blue plastic rope with knots in it, a piece of flotsam my Mom had found washed up at the beach. If you could not haul yourself up those 8′ of rough prickly plastic and knots, inchworming your body knot by knot, you were doomed before you even began, the realm above was closed to you.

But if your hands could pay that entry fee, heave yourself upward to the sky, you could reach that first branch.

From there, the giant fir was like a ladder with many rungs. I’d clamber fast over pitch-resin fragrant branches until I was thirty, forty, fifty feet up above the tar-and-gravel roof of the house below.

How many times did I climb that high?

Eventually, flimsier and closer together, the branches made crawling upwards between them difficult, and perhaps I had the sense to know as they were becoming soft and supple and unfit for my weight.

Even in the smallest breeze that high up off the ground the crown of a tree moves very far, from side to side, it’s surprising. The world below is calm, still, but you’re moving back and forth across it, above it, up high.