Treed

I grew up in the era of free range children. I also grew up in a house that was next to the woods. So there was ample opportunity for tree-climbing.

While I did my share of roaming around as a kid, I was never an extreme physical daredevil. Oh, I clambered over rocks. I loved going like lightning on an icy flying saucer run. I was as raucous as all the other kids running around in packs. I snuck into Mr. Downey's creepy, falling-down garage and pawed through the junk stored there. But I always had a fear of heights, so I wasn't much of a tree-climber.

By the time I was ten feet up, I was pretty much done for. And I didn't get that high, that often. I was okay reaching a treehouse if the kids who built it nailed climbing boards to the trunk. Free form climbing, not so much.

I much preferred playing on a tree that had fallen down.

One in particular was a colossal old tree that had fallen down in a nearby field - a field that shortly thereafter was developed into a nursing home. (Now that I think of it, the tree might have been knocked down to make way for said nursing home.)

Anyway, it was there for months, and the raucous neighborhood pack took it over. Who needed slides, swings, and jungle gyms when we had this old tree. We dubbed it Dinny the Dinosaur, and it made a spectacular climbing and play structure. You could rock on Dinny's branches. Ride his back and pretend he was a bucking bronco. Dinny could be a train, a boat, a plane, a fort, a castle - whatever we needed at the time. Alas, I sprained my knee - pretty badly - falling off of Dinny. But up until then...

Thanks to Dinny, most of my tree-climbing was horizontal, not vertical.

But real tree-climbers are of the vertical persuasion. And some of them are even professional.

Pros like Andrew Joslin.

Joslin has been climbing high into trees since 2005, inspired by an article about researchers who had pioneered a way to get 200 feet up into redwood trees to study the unknown world in their canopies. Long a serious birder, Joslin began cobbling together an education in “recreational tree climbing” and spent his early years figuring it all out on tall trees in tucked-away spots. Soon, he was putting others up on ropes, and today he estimates he’s put hundreds of people into canopies. (Source: Boston Globe)

Two-hundred feet you say? That would be about 190 feet above and beyond my high-arbor mark.

Joslin is 66 now, and this amateur tree-climbing passion that arrived in his late 40s has long since become professional. He makes his living from a combination of teaching through his Tall Pines Tree School and freelance work for commercial tree companies, climbing to places many can’t reach. Then there is his side work rescuing cats from trees — even indoor cats have four-wheel drive to get up a tree, he says, but unless they learned when they were young, they don’t know how to claw down the same way. He also does a lot of work with wildlife officials returning birds to nests they’ve fallen out of.

In his Linkedin profile, Joslin calls himself a "professional arboreal aeronaut." I'm not quite sure what it means, but we should all be fortunate enough to be able to come up with a job title like that. And an actual job to come with it.

Joslin's also an artist, who worked for many years for IBM as a visual designer.

But that was then, and this is now. And now Joslin's all in on arboreal aeronaut-ness and his Tall Pines Tree School, which:

...is dedicated to teaching the art of tree climbing using rope and harness. The school was founded by recreational tree climber and arborist Andrew “Moss” Joslin. Our purpose is to teach and promote tree climbing as an enjoyable and safe outdoor activity.

I have no desire to get up into the canopy. I'd find those heights way too wuthering. But if Tall Pines Tree School finds a fallen tall pine that I could do an old lady, Dinny the Dinosaur clamber over, I might give that a whirl...