Читать книгу The Tree Climber’s Guide онлайн

8 страница из 11

Many are the poets who have stood in the shade of a great tree and proclaimed its beauty, but what they behold is a mere fraction of the whole. By climbing, we engage all our senses. The textures of different barks and the suppleness of branches that bend under our weight are a stark contrast to the synthetic nature of the world we inhabit at ground level. Pausing in a tree top we can tune in to an alternative soundscape, a world of subtle variation unnoticed in the cacophony of the street; the heavy sigh of a branch buffeted by a lorry’s slipstream or a full head of leaves catching the wind off the river.

Only once, in all the trees I’ve climbed across the city, have I found someone sitting in the top of one. The man I encountered was small, grey and smiling. He was at least sixty, dressed in suit trousers with his shirt untucked and a jacket and tie hanging on the branch below him. Once we had gotten over our mutual surprise – and I’d taken a subordinate perch – we began talking. This man was no great libertarian, no anarchist or antichrist. He was simply a lawyer on a lunch break having his sandwich in an ash tree. This choice, to eat at altitude above the packed square of the park, was not a radical one. To me this man was following the most natural inclination in the world – a desire for breathing space and a different point of view.