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Epub ISBN: 9780753545904
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WH Allen, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
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Copyright © James Aldred 2017
Cover designed by Two Associates
Illustration © Alamy
James Aldred has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in the United Kingdom by WH Allen in 2017
www.penguin.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780753545874
For you, Yogita
Mera pehla, mera aakhiree, mera sachcha pyaar.
The bog sucked at my left boot, pulling me off balance. Straightaway, I could feel the earthy soup seep in through the lace holes. I spied a solid tussock of grass ahead of me and pitched myself onto it. Stretching up to grab an overhanging branch, I dragged my leg free, hauled myself forward and crawled across to solid ground. I was back in the woodland, the bone-dry leaf litter sticking to the black, muddy glue on my legs.
Treacherous bogs are a real speciality of the New Forest. Earlier that day I’d placed my foot on seemingly solid ground only to feel it wobble and bounce like the thin hull of a rubber dinghy. If you break through the mat of moss and weed on the surface of a blanket bog, you can be up to your neck in seconds. I’d already seen plenty of green-stained animal bones jutting out of these mires – a gruesome reminder to give them a wide berth. But at thirteen years old I was still learning how to read the landscape, and impatience sometimes got the better of me. I took a deep breath, and wiped off my hands. Next time, I wouldn’t resent taking an extra ten minutes to walk around a bog, that was for sure.
I pulled out my map: Stinking Edge Wood. It figured. As I sat down to clean the gunk from between my toes with a sock, distant heavy thuds and the sharp crack of branches echoed through the forest. I had been following a herd of fallow deer but these noises were too violent and big to be coming from them. Tugging my boot back on I started slowly forward through the trees. The ground was littered with huge dead branches dropped from the dense canopy above. The afternoon sun streamed into the open space between the trees and a thin veil of dust hung in the air.
The thuds were louder now and I could hear whinnying. A low drumbeat shook the ground briefly before a long stream of ponies came barrelling out of the trees towards me. A dozen mares with nostrils flared, their long manes wild and ragged with tangled bracken.
There was a crazed excitement to them, a dangerous energy in the air. They galloped round in a spiral to face inwards and beyond them I could see two white stallions reeling together in a violent storm of teeth, hooves and spittle. Eyes rolling, pink nostrils open wide, lips curled back to expose savage teeth. They bucked, kicked and reared up to land heavy blows on each other with their hooves. The mares were almost screaming with excitement, giving out long intense whinnies. The ground shook again and it suddenly struck me that despite being so close, the whole herd was still completely oblivious of me. The air was thick with their pungent smell and I was in very serious danger of getting caught up in the fray, overrun and trampled. I suddenly panicked, realising I had only moments to find somewhere to hide.
The mares were running again – circling the two stallions in wild flurries and closing fast. I couldn’t outrun them. Stepping back, I felt a tree trunk behind me. A big oak, but there were too many ponies for it to offer any real protection. Its first branch was out of reach high above, and my heart raced as my legs began to shake. Desperately running my hands along its rough bark, I felt an ancient iron peg jutting out of the trunk. It had been there so long the tree had almost engulfed it, but there was just enough still protruding to grip. Above it I found a second, then a third, fourth and fifth – and before I knew it I was lying flat on my stomach on a wide branch looking straight down onto the muscular backs of the stallions roiling five feet below. The oak and I were at the centre of a swirling mass of ponies beside themselves in a weltering frenzy.
Dust and noise filled the air and I was gripping the corrugated bark hard, my head spinning and my heart racing as adrenaline coursed through me. One of the stallions broke away and the herd rolled after him through the trees. I listened to the fading drumming of hooves on dry earth and took another deep breath in gratitude for being given such a timely escape. Silence returned to the forest and the dust began to settle.
Looking at the branches around me, I was sitting in an ancient oak pollard. The iron pegs were testimony that someone, perhaps a forest-keeper, verderer or even poacher, had used it regularly many years ago. Perhaps it had been a lookout, or a place to hide long before I had sought refuge there myself.
The wide horizontal branches stretched away from me to curl up like the giant fingers of an enormous cupped hand. I slid back into the centre of its protective palm and waited for my heart to slow. After a while the small herd of fallow deer I had been following emerged from the trees, carefully picking their way through the churned-up leaf litter to pass beneath me in the wake of the ponies. They had been there all along and I was immediately struck that not one of them appeared to have seen or smelt me as I crouched in the arms of the oak directly above.
The relief I felt, once in the branches of that tree, had been immediate. I had instantly known I was safe from the violent turmoil below, and seeing the fallow deer pass by had only reinforced my feeling of sanctuary and removal. But beyond that, I also felt an ancient connection to whoever had placed those iron pegs and sat in these same branches where I was now sitting, as if the intervening time had collapsed completely.
I’ve revisited that same oak on the edge of Stinking Edge Wood many times since. Those iron pegs are a tangible reminder that trees inhabit a different timescale to us and that the life of one tree can easily span dozens of human generations. Climbing up into its giant arms always takes me back to that exciting day in 1988 when as a thirteen-year-old boy I first discovered that trees were places of refuge and offered new vantage points from which to view our world. Even now, almost thirty years later, I still find myself puzzling over the way it just happened to be there for me. In the right place at the right time, when I had needed it most.
I had been woken by a sudden downdraft of air that left my hammock gently swaying. Lying on my side, I stared in drowsy amazement at the huge prehistoric-looking bird that had just landed next to me. The two of us were 200 feet off the ground in the top of a tree in Borneo, and I’d never seen a rhino ceros hornbill so close-up before. It hadn’t noticed me yet and was using its long beak to preen its breast feathers. A huge colourful casque curled up from the top of its head like a flamboyant Turkish slipper – fiery reds and yellows glowing brightly in the half-light of dawn. I was entranced.
A few seconds later it froze, then raised its pterodactyl head to peer at me with a ruby-red eye before launching off the branch into space. Immense black wings unfurled to catch its weight and it was gone. Swallowed in an instant by the thick morning mist.
Rolling onto my back I lay staring up into the giant branches above. It had been a long night. The sweat from yesterday’s climb had long since congealed into a clammy grime all over me. My clothes were dank, gritty and torn and my skin crawled with biting ants. I had a burning rash on my chest from who knows what, and I’d been stung twice on the face by a night wasp sometime around midnight. But it was worth it – all of it. Encountering a hornbill like that was what it was all about. I was immersed in my very own dreamworld of swirling mists and fairy-tale creatures. There was nowhere else I’d rather be.
The sun hadn’t yet risen and I was cold for the first time since arriving in Borneo, a welcome change from the usual stifling heat of the rainforest. Sunrise couldn’t be far off, but for now I was happy to lie back and watch the individual droplets of water drift past. They swirled in the visible currents of air, condensing as shiny beads on the metal of my climbing gear. I had slept in my safety harness attached to a rope, my only direct link to the other world far below.
Yesterday’s climb had been nothing short of a mission. Borneo is home to the tallest tropical rainforest on the planet and many of the hardwood trees here are well over 250 feet tall, frequently with no branches for at least the first 150 feet. Tall, straight columns of wood that support enormous parasols of branches high above. Just getting a rope up into them was often near impossible.
Experience had taught me that my catapult could propel a 200-gram throw-bag 170 feet into the air. But time and again the bag fell short of its target branch, the thin line it towed floating back down to tangle in the understorey, slack and lifeless. The branch was clearly much higher than I had realised. In exasperation, I attached the catapult to the top of a ten foot pole and used my bodyweight to pull the creaking elastic right down to the ground. My muscles shuddered as I crouched, taking aim at the branch high above me. As I let go, the catapult’s elastic cracked like a whip and tangled into a limp coil. Its job done, I dropped it to the floor. The bag powered up through the gap in the dense understorey to skim over the top of the target branch with barely inches to spare. Then down it came, the line accelerating into a high-pitched whine as the bag finally embedded itself in the leaf litter with a dull thud. All was quiet again. I squinted up through my fogged binoculars, tracing the thin line against the bright tropical sky high above. It was a good shot, at last.
I used the line to thread my climbing rope up over the top branch and back down to the forest floor, where I anchored it securely around the base of a neighbouring tree.
The start of a climb up into a monster like this is always a slow, laborious affair. Most of your energy is soaked up by the elasticity in such a long rope. There was around 400 feet of it in the system, so I bounced erratically as the nylon stretched and contracted. It was impossible not to careen into the huge buttress roots and it wasn’t until I was a good way up that I was finally able to brace both feet against the trunk and get stuck into it properly. I inch-wormed my way upwards, using two rope-clamps, or ‘jumars’, to haul myself up the thin nylon line. Rhythm is key in climbing, and it always pays to synchronise yourself with the rope’s natural bounce. But it was going to be a long haul regardless. My arms were already knackered from the struggle to get a line up in the first place, so I used my legs to push myself up in an attempt to take the strain off my biceps.
The next challenge was to get up through the forest’s tangled understorey. Vines grappled me like tentacles and leaves brushed across my sweaty face, depositing dust and algae in my eyes and ears. The sheer amount of organic debris hanging around in these lower levels beggars belief. Decades of accumulated dirt, dead branches and rotting vegetation is hanging there, snagged in a web of foliage just waiting to be dislodged. This first fifty feet was a filthy fight. Debris rained down in mini avalanches to cling to my sweat-soaked clothes and every twitch of my rope showered me with fine black compost from above. But there was no alternative route; all I had was the straight line of the rope above me. By the time I emerged into the open space above I was caked in dirt.
Although it was late afternoon I was hit by the full force of the tropical sun as soon as I poked my head above the understorey. For the next 100 feet there was nothing except open space and the monolithic tree trunk next to me. This branchless region is a strange limbo world where climbers are fully exposed to the precariousness of dangling on a nylon thread high aboveground. Concentrating on the brown, flaky bark in front of me, I slowly pressed on towards the sanctuary of the canopy.
Ten storeys aboveground I was halfway up and the tree trunk still measured five feet in diameter. These Borneo trees are on a different scale to any other hardwoods in the world. I span round to take a look at the view. I had been saving this moment until I was way above the understorey, in a place that would do it justice. But I had felt its presence lurking behind me the whole time as I climbed. An almost palpable, brooding watchfulness, as if a thousand pairs of hidden eyes were boring into me from the surrounding jungle.
As I twisted round, I was greeted by one of the most breathtaking views I’d ever seen. Dense rainforest swept away from me, cascading steeply down from the ridge to merge into an enticing landscape of giant trees far below. Many miles away on the horizon the forest rose back up to swarm over a ridge of tall, rugged hills. A vast ocean of unexplored, virgin jungle. What hidden wonders lay out there in those trees?
I was now hanging in the full glare of the sun and could feel the sweat trickling down my spine between my shoulder blades. The air was heavy with humidity and I could hear thunder in the distance. By the time I raised my arms to take the next step, my shirt was soaked through and sticking like cling film. I pushed on, up into the dappled shade of the canopy above. Soon I reached my branch 200 feet above the ground, and panting as I slung myself over it, I removed my helmet to reduce excess body heat.
The next twenty minutes were spent rigging my hammock between two horizontal branches. By the time I rolled into it, slumping in an exhausted heap, the light was fading fast. The peals of thunder, distant at first, started rumbling louder and faster. Before long, the heavens opened and sweet, heavy rain fell into my cupped hands as I washed the grime from my face. The water tasted metallic and zingy. Almost electric, it was so pure and fresh. The rain only lasted half an hour or so but by the time it stopped there were several inches of water swilling around in my hammock with me. So I rolled to one side and tipped it glistening over the edge to the forest floor far below. Even before it was dark I had slipped into an exhausted, deep sleep devoid of dreams.
Apart from the incident with the wasps at midnight I had slept well. The mist was thinning and high above I could see the first hint of blue. It was going to be a clear sunrise. I felt decadent, lying back with nothing to do but wait for the slow arrival of the new day. Cocooned in my misty world, I found myself asking why I had felt the urge to sleep a night in this tree, of all places.
It certainly wasn’t for comfort. I’d slept in my climbing harness, and eaten all my food ages ago so was now ravenous. I’d also been bitten and stung by so many insects I felt like one big lump of histamine. And yet I was at peace. Completely at peace with myself and the world around me. But why? What was it about climbing trees that was so appealing and resonated so deeply? And how on earth had I managed to make a living from doing it?
The reason I was in Borneo was to teach scientists how to climb trees, showing them the ropes – literally – and going over the drills until they could climb safely under their own supervision. They were out here to study the relationship between our planet and its atmosphere, doing incredibly valuable work mining the forest for data to fight climate change. Their research was inspiring and important.
But although I enjoyed teaching them, it wasn’t really why I was here. I hadn’t needed a reason to come and climb. My own passion for climbing trees was harder to define, born from something I had felt the first time I’d climbed into the canopy of that oak in the New Forest as a boy. There’s just something about trees that enthrals me and keeps me coming back to spend time with them.
In many ways, I feel that they embody the very essence of nature. Providing us with a living connection to our planet, somehow bridging the gap between our own fleeting lives and the world around us. I feel I’m being offered a glimpse of a half-remembered ancestral world when I climb into them, and for some reason this makes me feel good. It helps me remember my place in the scheme of things.
But above all, my enjoyment flows from a deeply rooted belief that every tree has a unique personality that speaks to the climber if they’re willing to listen. The soft shimmering glow of a beech canopy in springtime, or the vast sun-blasted canopy of a tropical giant, each tree has a unique character, and it is the privileged feeling of getting to know them a little better – of physically connecting with them, if only for a short while – that draws me back into their branches time and time again. As living ambassadors from the past, I believe they deserve our deep, abiding respect, and I’m willing to bet that most of us have experienced an emotional connection to them at some point in our lives.
My passion for tree-climbing was also born of a keen desire to discover the wonderful things held in their branches. There are entire worlds within worlds hidden in even the smallest of trees, let alone the huge forest giants like the one in Borneo I was currently lying in. The canopy is home to myriads of creatures that never touch the ground, spending their entire lives up here. Hunting, feeding, breeding, living and dying in an unseen treetop realm. Immersed in an endless cycle of secret dramas that have played out over and over again for millions of years.
A face-to-face encounter with an orangutan twenty storeys above the rainforest floor can be a humbling experience. But the branches of trees closer to home hold just as much fascination for me now as they ever did. I still vividly recall the delicate translucent green of the first bush cricket I saw in the canopy of the New Forest, marvelling at the way it leapt off a leaf to float down through the void, with its impossibly long antennae spread like the arms of a tiny skydiver.
It was a desire to share these experiences and help reveal this unknown treetop world to others that led me into natural-history filmmaking. Photography and tree-climbing went hand in hand, and by the time I was sixteen I was determined to be a wildlife cameraman.
But when I eventually left college and university it quickly became clear that a degree was no substitute for practical camera skills, and I still had a lot of learning to do. So I took whatever camera assistant jobs were offered, and worked for free in exchange for experience, doing night-shifts in factories and anything else I could find to tide me over. There can be few jobs quite as demoralising as collecting the windblown litter from fences around landfills, so I was extremely relieved to eventually be offered my first paid assistant role on a production in Morocco. A couple of years later I’d saved enough cash to make a tentative move to Bristol – home of the BBC Natural History Unit – where I began to find demand for my tree-rigging and assistant skills. My eventual transition from assistant to cameraman took a long time – about ten years – but it was an incredible journey, and I enjoyed every step of the way.
So even though I now struggle to figure out how on earth I ended up where I am, the bottom line is that I am profoundly grateful and simply can’t imagine doing anything else. And whenever I feel the inclination to grumble to myself while getting stung and bitten by insects as I film from a camera hide a hundred feet aboveground in the jungle, I consider it a duty to give myself a metaphorical slap around the face just in case I’m tempted to grow complacent and take things for granted.
As much as I love the camera work, beneath it all still lies my enduring passion for trees. Deep down I know that however I had chosen to make my living I would still be out climbing trees in an effort to get as close to them as possible.
I climbed my first big tree with ropes when I was sixteen. The intervening years have raced past in a tangle of branches and foliage and I must have climbed enough trees to fill an entire forest by now. But although many have blurred together, there are others that rise above the fog of memory. Special trees that I remember spending time in as if it were yesterday. The touch of their bark, the smell of their timber and the shape of their branches, not to mention the wonderful animals and people I’ve encountered in their canopies.
Back in the Borneo canopy, the air had warmed with the coming of the sun and in the space of a few short minutes the mist had been pushed down into the valley to pool in one vast ocean of white. To my right the sun had just risen above the hills to set the valley on fire. The mist instantly began to rise in tendrils, glowing pink, orange and gold for a brief instant before evaporating altogether.
Within fifteen minutes the sun was high in a clear tropical sky and swifts were trawling for insects over the canopy. The new day had begun and I prepared to descend back to earth, back down into the gloom of the forest floor where night still lingered.
It is a grey, damp winter’s day in the heart of the New Forest. Pillows of limp copper bracken fringe the edge of a muddy track. Two men dressed in simple forester clothing, wearing heavy hobnailed boots, stand to one side of the trail. The first leans on a tall, straight-handled shovel next to a freshly dug hole. His companion kneels down next to a bushy four-foot-tall sapling lying at his feet. Its root ball is wrapped in hessian sacking tied with string, which he removes to reveal a compact clod of dark earth containing the young tree’s soft, fragile roots. Lifting the sapling by its stem, he brushes some of the soil free to expose the root tips. The sapling is then gently lowered into the waiting hole and held straight as the first man backfills it, gently bouncing the shovel to help break the dense loam to evenly fill the gaps between earth and roots. He gently heals in the surface soil, compacting it just enough to hold the sapling steady, but leaving it spongy enough to allow air and rain to penetrate.
As the two men move off to repeat the process with a second identical sapling, which is resting on bracken on the other side of the track, a third man carrying two pails of water approaches from the direction of a stream. He kneels down next to the newly planted sapling and his rough hands sculpt a crude moat in the soil around its base, before slowly filling it with water. He waits for the soil to suck it all down and the moat to drain, before filling and refilling until the water sits on the surface of the earth, and he can see his face reflected against the sky.
By the time he returns again with replenished buckets, the others have finished planting the second sapling. He carefully waters it while his companions carry bundles of cleft chestnut palings from a nearby cart. Within a couple of hours both saplings are circled by five-foot-tall fences, protecting the soil at their feet and shielding their foliage from winter-hungry deer. The men know all too well that the first few years will be crucial for these young trees, and satisfied that they have given them the best chance they can, they collect their tools and head back to the cart. The sound of their voices and the crack and lurch of the carts gradually fade away, and the two trees are left alone in silence to guard the track.
Behind them lies an enormous plantation of young English oak trees. But unlike the anonymous, leafless rank and file stretching away into the drizzle, these two saplings are New World ambassadors fresh from California. Nurtured and raised from seeds collected in the Sierra Nevada mountains six years earlier, they hail from an exotic tribe of giant trees that will change the face of the British landscape for hundreds, if not thousands of years to come.
The drizzle soon turns to rain but as the skeleton army of young winter oaks grows dark in the wet, the verdant emerald foliage of the young evergreens begins to shine.
It was back-to-back AC/DC and Aerosmith on the stereo as we sped round the single-lane bends of the New Forest in Paddy’s beaten-up old Vauxhall. I was sixteen years old and feeling pretty rough. It was too early in the morning after the night before, and Steve Tyler’s singing wasn’t helping, nor was Paddy’s driving. Apart from the occasional pony standing in the middle of the road, the empty tarmac seemed to demand Paddy gun his long-suffering car as hard as he could. Matt was crashed out on the backseat behind me. I turned away from the road ahead, opened the window and gazed out at the trees flashing by. The closest were moving too fast to focus on but behind them, in the depths of the forest, I could see the huge, silver-smooth pillars of ancient beech.
Paddy was in his element on these roads, but just as I was about to ask him to slow down, for the sake of his car’s interior, he span the steering wheel to the right, yanked the handbrake and catapulted us across a cattle grid. The car’s back end slid out, before gripping suddenly on the tarmac of a small side road. Dropping the speed, Paddy rested his chin between his knuckles atop the steering wheel. The stereo was now off and he was gazing up at the sky through the windscreen. Matt had been woken up by the cattle grid and now had his head completely out of the window. All three of us were peering skywards with awe and excitement. We were here at last.
I leant out through my window and breathed deeply. We were kerb-crawling through a straight avenue of the tallest trees I’d ever seen. Rows of huge straight trunks lined either side of the narrow road, their dark bark deeply fissured and corrugated with the rough texture of ancient cork, and their branches holding up the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral of dappled leaves. Light was filtering through in slanted shafts of heaven, almost as solid as the tree trunks themselves. After a few minutes we pulled over onto the side of the road.
The air was heavy with the spicy citrus smell of conifer resin. It was early but the thermals on the surrounding heath were rising, sucking cooler air in from the nearby coast and filling our nostrils with the smell of the sea. High above, invisible in the deep green, I could hear a chorus of goldcrests. The living colonnade we had passed was a double row of tall – very tall – Douglas firs imported from Oregon. These were probably some of the oldest in Britain, judging from their size. A noble species of tree, true aristocrats. But not the trees we were here to visit, apparently. Paddy and Matt had other plans.
Both of them were looking across the road into the timber-dense forest, trying to see something deep inside. Peering in, I caught a glimpse of two giant hulking shadows in the green twilight. Before I could get a better look, Paddy had popped the car boot open with a clunk. I looked down into a tangled nest of old rope, metal buckles and leather straps. Both Paddy and Matt were climbers. But whereas Matt was in his element on rock, Paddy was training to be a tree surgeon and was all about the trees. Matt had his own gear, pretty Gucci-looking rock-climbing kit: a brightly coloured rope, slippery and smooth like an oiled snake, accompanied by a bunch of shiny metal bling.
But the kit Paddy had brought along for us couldn’t have been more different: two skeins of ancient hawser climbing rope, two ragged harnesses and a motley bundle of jangling karabiners – some of them clearly homemade. The ropes were stained dark green by algae, tree sap and chainsaw oil, their twisted strands rubbed smooth and shiny by the friction of countless hands. Hand-me-down kit, too old and knackered to be used for work any more.
We were still years away from government legislation designed to ensure climbing kit was maintained in good condition. So in 1991 when a tree surgeon retired a climbing rope from service it was generally for very good reasons. Chainsaws and ropes don’t mix well and as I ran the loops through my hands I felt the frayed puffs of saw-damaged fibres, an accumulation of nicks and cuts that gave the thing a moth-eaten appearance. But if the ropes were bad, the harnesses were far worse. They each consisted of two wide belts of tattered canvas and leather. One belt to go round the waist while climbing, the other to slip under the backside like a swing seat. Neither harness had leg loops and both stank of hard work and fear, a heady mixture of stale sweat, oil, petrol and tree sap.
Shouldering the gear, we crossed the road and entered the forest. I hopped over a ditch and breathed deeply, filling my lungs with the peppery spice hanging in the air. My muscles began to relax after the jarring car journey. Paddy and Matt carried on in silence, making a beeline for something further in. I followed and emerged from the shadowy colonnade into an open grassy ride. As the branches cleared, I beheld two of the most astonishingly beautiful, massive trees I’d ever seen. They were unlike any other trees nearby and stood like sentinels on either side of the open ride. Living obelisks at least 160 feet tall, they were a clear hundred feet taller than the oaks in the wood beyond them. The top third of their tapered canopies was bathed in morning sunlight but their enormous flared trunks were still shrouded in shadow. The one on the right appeared to be a little shorter, with a sharper, less weather-blunted top than its companion. But the other tree was a veritable giant. I couldn’t help imagine what the view must be like from way up there, perched high on its shoulder. I knew we had come here to climb a tree, but seeing as I’d never climbed one with ropes before I thought this was one hell of an introduction. To attempt to climb one of the biggest giant sequoia’s in Britain on my first ever foray was jumping in at the deep end, to say the least. I just hoped they had a good plan for how to do it, because I didn’t have the faintest idea.
Paddy and Matt had almost reached its base now. Their silhouettes merged with the shadows at the giant’s feet. They looked tiny – like astronauts approaching an Apollo mission launch pad. By the time I joined them, Paddy had uncoiled his rope which lay in open loops at his feet. He was trying to lob an end up and over a branch some thirty feet above his head. Again and again the small bundle of rope slapped against the tree with a hollow sound before falling back to earth at his feet.
I ran the open palm of my left hand across the bark. It was soft and yielding. A thick, fibrous coat that drummed when I tapped it. From about head height to the ground the trunk flared out wildly, disappearing into the bare compacted soil with a circumference at least twice that of the trunk twenty feet up. A few roots broke the surface of the ground in a frozen tangle, but who knew how deep the rest went.
Paddy wasn’t having much luck and it was beginning to dawn on me that our adventure might fall at the first hurdle, when Matt delved into his rucksack to produce a pair of ice axes. He waved them with a flourish. It had clearly been his plan to use them all along, but I eyed them suspiciously.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Got any better ideas?’ he said.
I hadn’t. But it seemed an insane idea that was likely to end up with him in a crumpled heap at the base of the tree. This wasn’t an ice climb; he had no top rope to hold him or any opportunity to screw in anchors as he went. Until he made it up to the first branches he would be on his own, exposed and at the mercy of the unknown strength of the tree’s bark. The machined, aggressive metal spikes seemed in stark contrast with our soft organic surroundings. It just didn’t feel right to me – not because the spikes, vicious as they were, could damage the tree in any way. The bark was way too thick and padded for that. No, for me it was more to do with respect. This tree was a living entity, an organic being, not some inanimate lump of geology to stab full of holes. An abstract deference for the tree mingled with a superstitious desire not to tempt fate, jumbled with my nervousness at not having climbed before. But of course I couldn’t articulate all these feelings properly. And even if I could, the others would have just called me a pillock and pressed on regardless.
Matt clearly had no such misgivings as he whacked both axes several inches deep into the tree before bending down to strap on a pair of crampons. He stepped up and dug his toe spikes in. He was off. ‘Thwack’, ‘whack’, step, step. ‘Thwack’, ‘whack’, step, step. The tapered trunk rising to the vertical made his situation look even more precarious as he climbed higher. He’s going to kill himself, I thought. ‘If he slips …’
But he didn’t. I had to hand it to him – he got a tricky job done swiftly and with style. It isn’t a technique I’ve ever seen used by a tree-climber since. Probably because without a flipline going round the trunk to stop you falling backwards, it is verging on suicidal. But a lot of daft things seem like a good idea when you’re sixteen years old.
Matt made it up into the branches. The lowest ones were all dead so he carried on up into the living canopy before tying in, kicking off his crampons and lobbing the axes down to the ground. One of them buried itself up to its handle in the leaf litter.
Paddy was next. He tied the end of his rope to Matt’s. Matt hauled it up, passed it over the base of a branch and threaded it back down to him, its sinuous end writhing back down along the fissures in the bark like a hunting snake. Paddy was up there in a flash. Bracing feet against trunk and hauling himself up hand over hand like a monkey. I knew there was no way I was going to measure up to these two on this, my first ever proper tree-climb. Paddy pulled my rope up in turn and threw it over a branch ten feet above him. Its end dropped back down to me and I clipped it into the two metal triangles on the front of my harness. I was now attached to a branch fifty feet above me.
‘What do I do now?’ I called.
‘Take that small loop of rope and wrap it twice around the main climbing rope then back through itself. The way I showed you,’ he shouted down from his perch. He wiggled the rope and I did as he said. I’d just made a sliding knot known as a prussic.
‘Clip the other end into you with a karabiner. No, not there; on the front: here!’ he said, hooking his thumb through his own harness rings.
This was the basic, age-old climbing system that Paddy and every other tree surgeon used every day at work. Tree-climbing techniques had not progressed an inch since the 1960s, but it was all still brand new to me. I was still too preoccupied with trying to shake off the fog of a heavy night to think through what I had to do next. Taking a firm grip on the bronze-burnished rope, I used my right hand to slide the frayed knot up a foot or so.
As I transferred my weight from the ground to the rope its elasticity pulled me onto my tiptoes. I stood teetering, trying to find my balance. It was clear that I had to commit fully. So staggering towards the base of the tree, I slid the knot further up the rope until both my feet were planted firmly against the trunk. I was now barely inches above the ground, but the rope had me. Until I reached the first branch I would be relying on this one saw-gnawed thread to support my whole weight. I swivelled my hips from side to side, trying to get comfortable in the harness. Without any leg loops to prevent the belt from sliding up under my arms, I had to lean back fully, almost horizontally, to maintain balance. I took a deep breath and arched my back. Without any other handholds, I was hanging like a clumsy spider on a thread, the rope dangling me wherever it wanted. All I had to do was climb it. Simple. In theory, at least.
After a slow start I got into a rhythm of bracing both feet against the tree trunk while sliding the knot up to capture a few inches of progress. I repeated this procedure again and again, until I was sweating freely despite the morning’s coolness. Every time I pulled down on my climbing rope it rubbed over the top of the branch high above to dislodge a fine green dust that floated down through the morning light. It filled the cool air with a soft, earthy aroma.
As I climbed higher, I felt the rope become sticky with sap. This helped me grip and added friction to my top anchor, effectively reducing my weight. I was now above the tapered base and hanging perfectly vertical against the bark. Again I marvelled at how soft and yielding it was. Hard to the touch, but then spongy as I pressed against it. I had a sudden desire to take off my shoes and socks, to feel the tree’s skin against my feet and feel its life flowing through me. I’d never live it down, though, so I leant forward to press my cheek against it instead. It was now warm in the sun and the bark felt soft and friendly, like the bristles of a huge prehistoric animal that was allowing me to clamber on to its massive back. I was entering another realm, a place of safety and retreat, and experiencing a kind of baptism – my first immersion in the canopy.
I climbed slowly – not entirely by choice. My technique was halting and lacked the confidence and rhythm that comes with experience. At thirty feet off the ground I reached the first branches, a dead thicket of light-brown, powder-dry snags. They vibrated with a hollow sound when I tapped them. Although they looked fragile, they were surprisingly tough and I found that by placing my feet at their base I could use them as a ladder. Cautiously, I started to climb the tree itself. I transferred my weight from my harness to the branches, relying on my rope to catch me should one of the branches pop.
Paddy and Matt were now only ten feet above me. Matt stood balancing like a gymnast on a branch, his chest pressed against the tree as he peered up its stem to select the best route. With his left arm hooked over a branch, he used his right to throw a bundle of rope higher and was soon off in a flurry of clinking karabiners. Paddy was sitting on a large branch to my left, finishing a crumpled roll-up. Rather than stub it out on the tree, he pinched the cherry between his nails and slid the burnt roach down into his sock. I hauled myself up next to him and looked up at the receding form of Matt scampering like a squirrel from limb to limb above us.
The tree eventually swallowed him from sight. The only sign was an occasional shower of fine dust drifting slowly down through the scattered sunshine, and the constant wriggling of his rope hanging next to me. On the other side, Paddy was in his element. He climbed every day at work, come rain, hail or shine, and usually did it with a chainsaw strapped to his belt. This really was child’s play to him. Watching him climb, I became acutely aware of how tightly I was gripping the tree and how tense my muscles were. My hands ached from my rictus grip on the rope, and my neck and shoulders were cramped. I tried to physically relax myself and lower my centre of gravity. I began to feel myself unwind a little, to sink lower down onto the branch. But it took a constant, conscious effort, and the harder I tried the more it seemed to elude me. Every now and then my whole body would spasm with a grab reflex as if I was on the edge of falling asleep. My muscles would ratchet up to clamp the tree with a violent jolt I could not suppress. Paddy broke the silence with a cough:
‘Right. Okay – happy?’ More of a statement than a question, and I replied that I’d like to hang out there on my own for a while.
‘No worries – follow us up whenever, and if not – see you in half an hour or so when we get back down.’
There was no way on earth he was going to let a rock climber beat him to the top of one of England’s biggest trees, and he was off in hot pursuit. Paddy and Matt just made it all look so easy.
I was in two minds. At sixty feet up I was currently level with the surrounding oak canopy and could sense that only a few feet above me, just beyond where the sequoia’s cone-laden branches were swaying lazily in the breeze, was a world-class view. But I was literally still trying to get to grips with my new environment and pretty nervous about venturing beyond the familiar security of the surrounding oaks. So that’s where I stayed. Perched on a branch a third of the way up, feeling the tree’s massive bulk sway around me, almost imperceptibly, in the morning breeze.
All around me the lower limbs of this huge giant stretched out and curved down in long graceful arcs. They rose back up at their tips to become almost vertical. Dense clumps of cones nestled within shaggy dark foliage twenty feet out from the trunk. Some were old, brown and cracked where they’d spilled their seed in past years. Others were smooth, shiny and light green, pregnant with promise. I set myself the challenge of trying to reach one. I shuffled out along my perch and as I began to slide down the curve of the branch, it flexed and sagged beneath my weight. The branches were big, but felt surprisingly brittle and I soon reconsidered, inching my way back up towards the trunk. Somehow I needed to keep my weight in the harness rather than on the branch. I needed to re-anchor my rope higher up so that it could support me fully as I tiptoed out away from the trunk.
I’d watched Paddy and Matt bundle their ropes up into small coils before throwing them with easy accuracy over the branch they’d wanted. But even this was a lot harder than it looked. When I finally got the rope over the branch I was aiming for, there wasn’t enough weight on its end to come back down to me. I pulled it back and it slunk down to coil around my head and shoulders.
Attaching a spare karabiner from my harness to weight it down, I pulled through a few coils of slack and tried again. This time it went over and came back down nicely, but it also slid down the branch to end up six feet out from the trunk. I put my weight on it, but the branch began to sag. I unclipped and whipped the loop of rope back into the base of the branch next to the tree stem. If I kept some weight on the rope I could hold it in place so it didn’t slide down the curved bough.
Very slowly I stood up to balance on my branch. While leaning back in my harness I brought my right foot behind my left and began to walk backwards towards the cones hanging out on the canopy edge. Keeping my feet facing the tree, I twisted my upper body far round to the left to see where I was going. With my right hand tightly gripping the sliding knot, I inched it down the rope. I held my left arm out, fingers grasping in air for the cones still five feet away.