On freezing while climbing a majestic red oak named Willa

'It enriches your life. You learn something about trees and yourself.'

If you enjoy this newsletter, please consider recommending it to others and becoming a paid subscriber. You’ll get dispatches about travel, adventure and #dadlife that will sometimes be heartfelt and profound, sometimes surprising and always written in such a way as to encourage you to get outside and do something you love, whatever that something is. If you support my work, I would appreciate it.

Fourth in a series on chasing big goals, crossing items off your bucket list, and doing things you thought you’d never do. Last week it was chasing adventure in Colorado—an assignment made possible by this one.

This story originally appeared in Missouri Life magazine. It’s interesting to me to re-read this now. The fear in it is very real. But this adventure proved pivotal in helping me deal with my fear of heights. I did not trust the harness in this adventure. But I did in the next one (which I detailed in last week’s newsletter), and all the ones after that.

Freezing, thawing, and giving up before it’s too late

The tree’s name is Willa. She is a majestic red oak in Ferguson, Missouri, and right now I am standing on one of her branches 30 feet in the air. I am drenched in sweat, with rivulets trickling from under my helmet. I am wearing a harness, and ropes connected to it tie me to the tree. Those ropes supported me as I climbed up here. I know, or should know, that because of them, there is no way I could fall. Yet still I hold Willa as tightly as I can.

I am on the first of multiple pitches—like the landings in a stairwell—to which my instructor, Guy Mott (his first name rhymes with tree) and I plan to ascend as part of my tree-climbing lesson, and if I’m going to go to the next one, I need to let go of Willa. I simultaneously have zero interest in letting go and 100 percent interest in climbing higher.

Something has to give.

Guy asks how I’m doing. I tell him I’m nervous, which is an understatement. My fear of heights, which was absent as I climbed, has barged in, big time. As I cling to the tree, Guy gently tries to coax me into letting go. He wants me to trust the ropes.

But he doesn’t tell me to trust them. Instead, he encourages me to lean back, which will show me that the ropes will support me. Tentatively, I comply. Fine, I think, the ropes work. I still ain’t letting go.

Guy and I talk about what I have to do to go higher. I will recount that conversation from memory, as even though my notebook and pen are in my pocket, I cannot, will not release my death-grip of Willa to reach down to get them to take notes. Here’s what I remember: Guy says something but I forget what because what was I thinking climbing this high?

---

When Guy, owner of Adventure Tree—the only adventure education company in the country with tree-climbing lessons as its core modality—was a boy, he heard the famous quote, “youth is wasted on the young,” and that has shaped his life ever since.

“I thought, that’s somebody looking back from deep into their life, saying, when I was young, I could have done more,” Guy says as he sits at a picnic table in shade created by Willa’s branches. “I just took that to heart. I thought, ‘I’m not going to waste my youth. I’m going to go out and do things.’”

When he was 17, he hitchhiked from the East Coast to the West Coast and back; it took two months. He drove a motorcycle at 140 miles per hour. He hiked the 486-mile Colorado Trail, long stretches of the Appalachian Trail, and all 48 of the 4,000-foot summits in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. He became a skydiving instructor and made 1,300 jumps.

All of that was for fun. For work, he designed software. After 30 years he decided that, gratifying though that work may have been, it had kept him inside long enough. Nine years ago, he got a master of education in adventure learning and started Adventure Tree with the slogan, “Have fun, learn, grow.”

Adventure Tree offers tree-climbing instruction to camps and schools so they can start their own courses. Guy also teaches safe climbing methods to utility workers and tree service companies. He has been hired to hang ropes for tree swings, to retrieve a bag out of the upper reaches of a tree because the flapping noise was driving the homeowners bonkers, and, yes, to get cats out of trees.

Although his tree-climbing courses focus on skills—how to climb the ropes, tie knots, get the ropes up in the tree (by using a 9-foot tall slingshot that is as awesome as it sounds)—he teaches much more than that.

“I’m teaching people to climb, yes, but also to push and challenge themselves,” he says. “There’s something that accesses deep inside of people when they climb up in trees. I’ve felt it myself. I’ve experienced it. I’ve heard people echo it back to me. It’s very subtle, but you can feel it. It enriches your life. You learn something about trees and yourself.”

One thing he has learned about is fear. He sees it swathed across the faces of his students. Some people show up full of confidence and freak out half way to the first pitch. Some people show up freaked out and somehow find the confidence to take them to the very top of Willa.

Others, like me, are a mix of the two. I climbed into the rope-harness contraption and pulled myself up to the first pitch without fear. The climbing motion involves a high step with my foot in a loop in the rope then pulling myself up with my arms. I could see the ropes working. But when I got to the first branch and stood on it, I froze. I stopped knowing the ropes were working and started wondering if they would.

I climbed by sight.

I needed to stand by faith.

I couldn’t do it.

---

I have a sketchy relationship with heights. When I was in first grade, my family drove the length of the Florida Keys. The bridges between each island terrified me. My memory says the other side of the two-lane bridge was an endless parade of nose-to-tail semitrucks going 95 miles per hour, driving with their tires on the center line and missing us by inches. I was certain my family’s van was going to get hit by one of those semis and go flying off of the bridge.

When I drive over long and high bridges now, I can barely glance sideways. And it’s not just bridges. It’s heights in general. I have somehow kept every plane I’ve ever flown in aloft by gripping the arm rest and digging my toes into the floor.

I often try to challenge that fear—I’ve gone parachuting, parasailing, bungee jumping, and mountain hiking. I apply lessons learned scaling mountains and jumping out of airplanes and climbing trees to the rest of my life. I own my own writing business, and for most of the past four years I have been the sole breadwinner for my wife and two kids. That is scarier than all those other things combined. There are no ropes to keep me aloft, no branches to hold on to. There are many days where I’d rather stay on the ground then climb to one pitch, let alone to the top of a tree as tall as Willa. But I climb every day anyway—in large part because I have no choice.

I have a choice on Willa. I could give up, and that thought crosses my mind. I look over at Guy, dangling a few feet to my left. He is smiling. I am grinding my molars to dust. The difference between my body language and his is the difference between Willa’s trunk and a cooked spaghetti noodle. I can’t talk myself into going any higher. But I can’t go down either. If I don’t climb higher, I won’t be able to justify writing a story about taking tree-climbing lessons. My two biggest fears have collided: 1. Heights. 2. Blowing an assignment.

I’ve had adventure instructors who fully understood their adventure and knew nothing about instructing. Guy has mastered both. He recognizes my distress, understands it, and doesn’t try to talk me out of it. After his instruction shows me I can trust the ropes, I manage to let go of Willa long enough to wrap a lanyard around her and connect it to myself, one carabiner on each hip of my harness. This is the proper procedure—Guy calls it one, two, one. I am always, always, always, tied in at least one way. After I connect the lanyard but before I disconnect my climbing rope, I am tied in twice. Even then, I barely let go.

I unclip my climbing rope and hand it to Guy. He moves it higher in the tree … so I can climb higher if I ever decide I want to … and hands it back to me. I reconnect the rope to my harness (so I am again connected twice), disconnect the lanyard, take a deep breath, and start climbing again.

I high-step, pull, high-step, pull, high-step, pull, up, up, up some more. I stretch my hands and feet as far as they’ll go to my left to gain purchase on the next pitch. I pull myself over and sprawl on the branch.

I stand up.

I freeze again.

This time I thaw faster.

I do the lanyard dance again so Guy can move my rope. As I do at each pitch, I perform a B.A.C.K. check—the safety routine Guy taught me in which I check the belt, anchor (the rope’s position in the tree), connectors, and knots.

Ten minutes later, I’m 10 feet higher in the tree—my third pitch—a full 55 feet up. I let go of Willa without waiting for Guy to suggest it first. “I couldn’t have done that 10 minutes ago,” I tell him.

I decide to quit here at the third pitch. I am in decent shape, but the stress of the climb, on top of the climb itself, has wiped me out. For the last 30 minutes, my heart has had more beats than an octopus doing a drum solo. My hands shake. I struggle to open the carabiners. My left leg spasms up and down. And, yes, I’m still afraid. But that fear has turned practical. Even if I could pull myself up higher, I don’t think I could contort myself onto another branch.

Guy tells me that to get down I have to swing out from where I am, Tarzan style (while still 100 percent buckled in, of course), then lower myself, using a technique he taught me earlier. It takes me a few minutes to work up the guts, but eventually I let go of Willa and pendulum back and forth.

I start to slide down. I mess up the procedure, which causes the stopper knot that I tied in my rope on the way up to create a knot jam. I’m trapped 40 feet up, just dangling there.

I was terrified half an hour ago when I was connected to the tree by the rope, lanyard and my own death-grip. Now all I have is the ropes, and I feel safe and secure. I finally wrench the knot loose and glide to the ground.

I’m exhilarated, radiating energy with “climber’s high” I recognize as a similar feeling to what I get at the end of long hikes. I want to remember everything. I walk over to the picnic table to jot down notes. The adrenaline that has been rampaging through my blood stream for the past hour is still on full go, so much so that I have no small motor skills.

I can’t read a thing I wrote