The Eucalyptus Sucker

This is a story about an odd boy…, and my dad.

After ten years of financial purgatory, my folks grabbed at a lower rung to once again own a home. Sometime in the early to mid-50’s, around the time I was born, my dad’s fencing business failed and my folks lost their home. We ended up in a ‘single-wide’, in a trailer park in Concord. My first memories were from the years we lived in that trailer. Raised as an only child, our two-bedroom trailer seemed cozy. I suspect my folks, both over 6 feet tall, felt it was cramped.

When my parents had scraped together just enough, they bought a modest, two bedroom/one bath rancher in Walnut Creek. The house was built during the flood of post WWII home construction and typical of the time, it wasn’t well built, and it hadn’t been well maintained. But it was ours. A big positive was that the house was on a half-acre of land which included a small orchard, quite a change from the trailer park we had been living in. My dad was raised in San Francisco, but for some reason, he was driven towards a country life. He dreamed of becoming a farmer. Our orchard included almonds, plums, peaches, cherries, apricots and pears. My dad got a taste of farming by tending these trees.

During this period in the early 1960’s, my dad worked as a union carpenter, building houses in the area. He planned to improve the house over time. But one of the first things he did was to build a playhouse for me. My playhouse was square with a real door, cut down to be more kid-sized, and a flat roof, covered in tar paper that was made with coarse sand covering the exposed side, as roofing material. Next to my playhouse was a medium sized shade tree and under the tree, alongside one wall of the playhouse, my dad had piled a bunch of sand for me to play in.

The shade tree was ideal for climbing and that’s when I gained my first climbing skills. Before too long, I was able to climb higher than the roof of the playhouse. One day, I made the scary stretch to swing over from a high branch to the playhouse roof. As a kid, that first time being on the roof was exhilarating. I felt like I was on top of the world and could see great distances. 8 feet off the ground felt immense to my 8-year-old self!

The playhouse roof became my favorite place. I showed my friends how to climb up and we spent many days in imaginative settings and daring adventures up there. Eventually, as we got older, we brought sleeping bags up onto the roof for sleepouts under the stars. Shades of James Taylor…

Looking back through the eyes of a parent and now grandparent, I suspect we may not have encouraged our kids in the same way. The playhouse roof had no railings. However, no one fell off either. My folks were clearly on the permissive end of the scale, but those were different times too.

At the very back of our property, two large eucalyptus trees straddled the property line, standing closely together. Looking back through my mind's eye, I think the taller tree was easily 60 feet tall. The trees in our orchard were at least 15 feet tall and the eucalyptus towered over them, about 4 times their height. The second eucalyptus was shorter, maybe 40 feet tall and not as full as the big tree. When I looked towards our back property, I saw three rows of trees in our orchard, and towering majestically behind them was the eucalyptus. Our orchard trees were very attractive. My dad pruned them and tended them well. However, my eyes were pulled to the big eucalyptus. I wondered what the world would look like from high up in its’ branches.

During the first winter at our house, my dad discovered that the former owner had cheated us. Our house seemed cold, regardless of how high we set the thermostat of the furnace. Finally, my dad investigated and was shocked to find that the house had no heat ducts to connect the furnace to any of the rooms. The ducts must have been removed by the former owner, perhaps because they were in very bad shape, and the house was sold to us with nothing said about it. This was back in the day before real estate disclosure laws and professional inspections. This certainly explained why our house never felt warm. Without heating ducts, the furnace simply blew hot air into the subfloor area. Only a little of the heated air made it up through the floor vents, into the rooms of the house. This was a problem, but one that could be fixed by spending the money to install new ducts. The much larger issue was that this house didn’t have great drainage, typical for many of the quickly built homes of its’ era, and the soil under the house varied from damp to soaking wet throughout a typical winter. When the furnace blew hot air under the house, it mixed with the moisture in the soil under the house and created a warm, humid environment, perfect to grow things like fungus. When my dad investigated the heating issue, he found that a majority of the wooden substructure of the floor was heavily damaged by dry-rot and would need to be replaced.

My dad, a journeyman carpenter, had the skills to make the repairs but my folks didn’t have the money to afford him to take time off his paid work or to keep working and hire someone else to make the repairs to the house. So, he worked as a carpenter during the day and at night and on the weekends, he worked to fix our house. I was very tall and strong for my age and this became my first lesson in carpentry, as my dad’s helper.

Limited to a couple of hours after dinner most nights and full days on most weekends, the repair work took many weeks. We had to remove the floor from the entire living room, replace most of the structural beams, and then rebuild the floor. As a kid, I saw it as an adventure, and there was a silver lining. When we removed the floor of the living room, the hot air produced by the furnace naturally flowed into the house, keeping the house much warmer than before, even though the living room was open to the dirt below!

As I got older, I kept growing rapidly. I was always one of the tallest guys my age. Being tall and with a long reach was quite an advantage in tree climbing. Trees with lots of horizontal branches became easy. I kept eying the eucalyptus. It presented quite a challenge. The branches of a eucalyptus tend to rise vertically from the main truck, and branches are fairly far apart. When I inspected the eucalyptus up close, I realized that its’ lowest branches were probably 10 or 12 feet off the ground. I needed a way to get started. I hoped that if I got to that first branch, I would somehow figure out how to keep going. After all, I had learned that with most trees, the higher you climb, there are more frequent branches coming out of the trunk. I was twelve at this point and felt ready to try bigger challenges.

My dad always had several ladders. Standard equipment in construction. But a carpenter generally only needs an 8-foot ladder. Luckily, because we were now small-scale farmers, we needed a taller ladder to harvest the orchard trees. My dad got a tall, farm ladder, the kind that has steps on one side and a single propping leg on the other side, because three feet are better to level than four on uneven surfaces. The farm ladder was huge. My guess is that it was around fourteen feet long. Now I had what I needed to start climbing the eucalyptus.

I struggled to carry/drag the wooden farm ladder all the way to the back of our property. Rather than using the propping leg, I kept the ladder folded together and leaned the ladder against the huge trunk of the eucalyptus. Besides the unique feature of having only one propping leg, farm ladders are different from regular ladders in that they are not uniform in width. Our farm ladder was about three feet wide at the lowest rung. The two sides of the ladder curved together towards the top rung, which may have only been one foot wide. I had never used the top rungs of the farm ladder before and as I climbed higher, the narrowing rungs made me feel much more exposed. From the top rungs, I could reach and get a good climbing hold on the lowest limb of the eucalyptus. However, I had done enough tree climbing by this point to think ahead about how I would have to work myself down from this branch and get footing on the narrow, top rungs of the farm ladder. But I didn’t have enough climbing experience to worry too much. After all, I was beyond anything I had done previously… So, I gulped and pulled myself up onto the branch.

I didn’t worry about the strength of the branch to hold me. The lower branches of a really big tree like this one are massive. Rather, it was the lack of smaller branches, the huge diameter of the trunk and the nature of eucalyptus that its bark is loose, constantly shedding, and that its underlying bark is very smooth, that taken together, convinced me that I had taken on something bigger than I could handle. It was daunting.

However, I wasn’t done yet. There was another branch about eight feet higher. I was far from six feet tall at this age, so I couldn’t reach it. However, I felt driven to try. The only way I came up with was to knock off the loose bark with my hands and then ‘bear-hug’ maybe half of the trunk of the tree, climbing up like an inch-worm, figuring that my sweating hands might be able to hold onto the smooth under-bark, and my Converse tennis shoes might gain enough traction to propel me higher. So, that is what I did…

Scary as hell, but I made progress up the trunk very slowly. When I got close enough to the branch to reach it, I had the dawning realization that I had a fundamental problem. If I let go of my bear-hug on the trunk with one hand to reach for the branch, the bear-hug would be broken and I would begin falling. I figured that if I climbed high enough to have one shoulder right under the branch, when I let go of the trunk with that arm, and if I moved quickly, I could grab the limb with my arm as I started to fall away from the trunk. Thinking this through, I concluded that I could probably do this. However, I also became convinced that if I did, when it was time to climb down, there was no way possible to successfully reverse this maneuver. I was defeated by the eucalyptus.

I inch-wormed slowly back down to the lowest branch. Even crawling back down from this meaty limb while reaching for the top rungs of the farm ladder, feeling with my foot for something stable to shift my weight to, was scary enough.

Back on the ground, I gazed up at the towering eucalyptus for some time. The tree gained in stature for me. I admired it. It was, as great things should be, the unconquerable, the unattainable.

Our orchard had three rows, with three trees in each row. From the back of our house looking towards the back of the property, the row on the right side had a plum tree followed by two almond trees. The row on the left had two cherry trees and a pear tree at the rear. The middle row had two peach trees and then an apricot tree. In a way, the middle row had a fourth tree, the eucalyptus.

My favorite tree was the plum tree because I loved the fruit the best. The ripe plums were so juicy and sweet and I loved the flavor. Second behind the plum, for me, were the cherries, and I ate a ton of them when they came in. My dad on the other hand loved the peaches, probably his favorite fruit. But overall, he loved the apricot tree the best. The apricots were great, and I think he thought apricots were special, with less juice but a very distinct flavor. However, I believe he loved that tree the most because it was beautiful. All of the trees in our orchard were healthy and shaped well because of my dad’s pruning. But the apricot tree was perfect. It was robust. Its’ leaves were a rich, dark green and had the largest canopy of any of the trees in our orchard. The apricot tree caught your eye within our orchard. It stood out as special.

One day, not long after I had tried to climb the eucalyptus, my dad and I were in the orchard and he told me that he wanted to show me something. We walked over to the base of the eucalyptus and he pointed to the smaller, second tree growing very close to the big one. He asked if I knew what this was. I didn’t know this was a trick question. I told him it was a eucalyptus tree. He corrected me by saying that this wasn’t a separate tree. This was a sucker. I must have looked at him questioningly. I had only heard that word two ways. All kids knew suckers as hard candy on a stick. But I had also heard my dad occasionally use the word when he was angry to describe a person who made him mad. I couldn’t figure out why he was calling this tree a sucker. However, the way he said the word had a tone that reminded me of when he was angry. My dad explained that what I thought was a separate tree was just a shoot growing out of the roots of the big eucalyptus. I looked up at how tall this other tree thing was. It was more than half as tall as the big eucalyptus. My dad must have read my mind. He shared that it may look like a tree, but this thing is a parasite, feeding off the roots of the big tree, which will hurt the big tree. When he said the word parasite, it was like he was almost spitting.

As I think back, it may have been that my dad wasn’t as progressive as I had thought. He was a lifelong Democrat, but that was when unions were strong and he was a union carpenter. But I remember him not being a fan of social safety net programs like welfare. Could it be that the added emotion in my dad’s voice when he talked about the sucker was because he thought it was taking a free ride at the big tree’s expense?

My dad said that we should cut the sucker down, to protect the big eucalyptus. I was all for it. First, anything that protected the big eucalyptus was great. Secondly, cutting down the equivalent of a tree, even if it was a sucker, was pretty exciting. After all, this thing was perhaps 40 feet tall by itself. I had never been involved with cutting down a big tree. I had heard of lumberjacks and everyone had heard of Paul Bunyon! Plus, my dad had a ton of tools and he had a chainsaw. This would be awesome!

My dad got out his chainsaw and his special file to sharpen the saw teeth. I had never heard it running and when he started the engine, I was thrilled. The chainsaw was very loud and a little blueish smoke came out of the exhaust. The chain moved so fast around the bar that it became a blur. What an amazing tool!

Back at the eucalyptus tree, my dad explained what he was going to do. He was going to cut a pie-shaped wedge from one side of the base of the sucker. Then, he would begin to cut on the opposite side of the trunk and he told me that at some point the trunk of the tree would break and in the direction of the pie-shaped wedge, almost like the hinge of a door.

However, he cautioned that it was very important that the falling sucker land between the orchard trees, otherwise our other trees would be damaged. So, the cutting had to be down just right. Even so, my dad pointed out that the closest tree to the eucalyptus was the prized apricot tree, maybe only 20 feet away, and he wanted to take extra precautions.

My dad told me that he wanted to tie a safety rope to the sucker, as high up as we could secure it, so that when the sucker started to fall, we could both pull on the rope to make sure it landed safely, where we wanted it to land. Wanting to be helpful, I told him that I had climbed up the big eucalyptus, without telling him that I didn’t get very far. My dad smiled a bit when I told him this. No doubt he already knew all about it! I claimed that I could climb up the sucker with the rope tied to my belt and then I could tie the rope to the trunk of the sucker and climb back down. I think he got a kick out of my enthusiasm and agreed with the plan.

After tying the rope to my belt, I climbed on top of our back fence to get a start in climbing the sucker. It turned out that the sucker was easier to climb than the big eucalyptus. There were more branches and they weren’t as far apart. Before too long, I was over halfway up the sucker and my dad felt that was a fine spot to tie off the rope, which I did, and then climbed down. We laid the extra rope on the ground, where we wanted the sucker to land.

We stood at the base of the sucker and my dad talked through our plan. He would use the chainsaw to make the cuts to the trunk, which was over 18 inches in diameter. He wanted me to be standing back, away from the cutting, holding the rope. When he felt that the trunk was starting to break, he would shut off the chainsaw and run over behind me, grabbing the rope too so that we could both pull the sucker as it fell, guiding it to land safely.

When we were both in place, my dad fired up the chainsaw and started cutting. The chainsaw was even more impressive in use. It roared louder, smoke jetted out of the exhaust and a stream of light-colored wood chips flew back at my dad's feet. He finished the pie-shaped cut on one side and started to cut the other side. He told me to start pulling on the rope to put some tension on the sucker. I was pulling and watching everything happening. I saw the top of the sucker start to shudder. My dad suddenly turned off the chainsaw and started running towards me, grinning, and yelling ‘Pull!’

My dad ran behind me and grabbed the rope. He was really strong and when he pulled, the rope was like a straight cable, angling up into the sucker. I did what I could, but I suspect I didn’t add a lot. The sucker started to fall. But it wasn’t falling towards our planned landing area. It was headed towards the middle of the orchard! Now my dad was yelling with urgency ‘Pull, pull!’. But pull as we might, the sucker seemed to have a mind of its own. As it fell, it gained speed, and down it came with a crash.

It couldn’t have been a more direct hit if we had tried. The sucker-tree landed exactly on top of the prized apricot tree! The sucker didn’t merely break off some branches. The heavy sucker-tree split the apricot down the middle, completely destroying the most prized tree of the orchard!

Initially, we both just stared at the damage. My dad got angry, but it seemed to be a quiet anger. More likely frustration. He didn’t say anything. We untied the rope and took the chainsaw back to his shop. We were done for the day. I suspect he made himself a stiff drink.

The next time I went into the orchard, on another day, I found that the carnage had been mostly cleaned up. My dad must have cut up the remains of the apricot tree. He had also stripped the sucker tree of all of its branches and leaves, leaving the naked trunk, remarkably straight and perhaps 25 feet long, laying where it landed.

The trunk looked strong and an idea came to me. I could use it to build an observation platform! I asked my dad if I could use it and he was very casual about agreeing to let me do whatever I wanted with the sucker trunk.

Looking back on this time it makes me think about parenting styles. My dad was not a talker. He taught by doing. I think he thought that by watching him work, I would learn the essential skills. Following his lead, as a boy, I wasn’t a talker either. I learned to be an observer, to study what he was doing and to memorize as much as I could. I think my dad also thought that a tremendous amount could be learned by experimentation, by struggling, by figuring it out on your own. As I matured into manhood and became a manager in business, I tried to encourage my staff to solve their own problems, to experiment. However, by middle age, I had become quite a talker, perhaps too much so!

Looking towards the rear of our property, to the right of the three rows of orchard trees, there was an open space. Perhaps the original owners plan was to have four rows of trees, but the fourth row never got planted. That open space struck me as a perfect place for my observation platform. I dragged the heavy trunk from its’ resting place through the outside row of the orchard, into the open space.

I planned to dig a hole, as deep as I could, and wide enough for the thick, butt-end of the trunk. The soil of our property was heavy clay, and I figured that I would stand the trunk of the sucker in the hole and pack around it with our heavy soil. I hoped that the trunk would be supported well enough in this way to support a platform that I envisioned building on the top, 15 to 20 feet in the air!

My dad had plenty of tools, including a clam-shell post-hole digger. I took the digger out to where I wanted to position my structure and started digging. The heavy clay of our soils may have been an advantage for what I was trying to support, but I quickly found out how tough it was to manually dig a two-foot-wide hole through it. I needed the hole to be two-feet-wide, because the butt-end of the trunk was about 18 inches wide and I needed some extra room to stand the trunk into the hole.

About four feet down, I hit concrete, which surprised me a lot, because this spot was out in the middle of our agricultural property, with no structures nearby. I asked my dad if he had any ideas. He came out and took a look down my hole at the concrete and he concluded that this looked like the outside of a large diameter concrete pipe. My dad said there was no knowing how big this was without digging all around it to expose more of it. I was too excited to build my observation platform to spend the time on what this was, so my dad recommended that I simply try digging in a different spot. He didn’t ask about what I was doing. He simply answered my question about the concrete and then when about his work.

I filled in the hole and moved over a few feet and started digging a new hole. This new hole was no easier to dig, but at least I didn’t hit concrete again, which was a relief. I had worried that there might be a huge storm drain pipe that we hadn’t known of, running under our property. This time it was just dirt all the way down. A clam-shell digger can only go down about five feet at most, and that is how far down I dug.

When I had finished preparing the hole by smoothing the sides all the way down, I started thinking about how I might be able to stand the heavy trunk up. It became clear that I couldn’t do it all by myself and I didn’t want to bother my dad for help. So, I invited a couple of friends over to make it a team effort. We rolled and pulled the trunk into position, with the thick, butt-end right at the edge of the hole. I guessed that if we picked up the skinny, top end, the bottom end would start sliding into the hole. My friends and I tried this and sure enough, the bottom end started going in the hole. However, we were nowhere tall enough to stand up the trunk. Seemed like we needed something to prop it after we had lifted it partially, so that we could reposition ourselves and push it further towards standing upright. In my mind I could see that a strong ladder might be a good prop. I went back into my dad’s shop and found his heavy-duty contractor's ladder. It was a big one, over eight feet long, probably 10 feet.

I positioned the opened ladder so that its steps were near the top end of the trunk. I had the weaker of my friends handle the ladder as the other boy and I lifted the top end of the trunk. When we lifted the top end, maybe four feet off the ground, I told the boy with the ladder to move the ladder forward so that the top end of the trunk was between two of the steps. When we let the trunk down, it was propped up by the ladder and remained four feet high. The other boy and I repositioned ourselves to lift again. When we did, the boy with the ladder moved the ladder so that the top end of the trunk rested on a higher step. The third lift ended with the top of the trunk resting on the top step of the ladder. This strategy of using the ladder worked so well, we kept going. We were now pushing to stand the trunk up instead of lifting, and as we pushed, the ladder was moved up against the trunk, which was now leaning against the ladder. As the trunk became increasingly vertical, it seemed that it took less effort than when we were purely lifting. All three of us decided to push together and when the trunk was nearly straight up, it slid neatly into the hole. The trunk of the sucker was now a slightly leaning, tall pole that tapered from the ground up to the top, and perhaps 20 feet tall!

To set the pole firmly, I went back into my dad's shop and found his digging bars. I selected one that had a heavy metal disc on one end, designed for tamping. When back at the pole, we filled the hole around the pole with loose dirt while I held the pole as straight up as I could. I used the tamping bar to firmly pack the soil all the way around the pole and went this was complete, I tried to shake the pole to see it would wiggle. The pole was surprisingly firm. I couldn’t get it to wiggle at all. It was time to build the observation platform.

Working by myself on other days, I looked through my dad’s scrap pile for stuff I could use. My Dad was constantly doing projects around our house and he kept everything that he didn’t use for the future… I found short sections of 2-by-4’s, and I found a piece of external grade plywood that was about three feet square. In my mind, I envisioned fixing a piece of plywood right on top of the pole. But I thought that it might be stronger if I cut a hole in the middle of the plywood, big enough so that the narrow top-end of the pole would fit through it, and then I could brace it underneath with 2-by-4’s.

I had picked up a fair amount of basic framing knowledge when I was helping my dad repair the flooring of the house and subsequent projects. However, I had never done it all by myself. When my dad was doing construction work, he used powerful electric tools like circular saws, drills and reciprocating saws. I don’t remember him ever saying directly that I couldn’t use these tools, but the little he did say about them made me fear them. He made a couple of almost casual comments while using these powerful tools, that many of his fellow carpenters were missing fingers. I wasn’t tempted to use his electric tools at all. I went straight to his old-school manual tools.

I cut a hole in the center of the plywood board, using a brace and bit drill. I enlarged the hole with a keyhole saw, based on how wide the top-end of the pole was. With a hand saw, I cut the ends of the 2-by-4’s, trying to create 45-degree angles like I had seen my dad do when he created bracing. I ended up with maybe a dozen pieces of 2-by-4 of various lengths, and with each end angled. I found a small, canvas carpenters' apron that fitted me ok, and one of my dad’s finishing hammers, that I could handle because it wasn’t too heavy. I filled the apron with 8 penny nails I found in one of his buckets and carried all of this over to my construction site.

The construction ladder that we had used to erect the pole was not tall enough for me to reach the top, so I replaced it with the tall farm ladder. The top of the pole was several feet higher than the top step of the farm ladder, so I needed to stand on one of its top steps to work on the platform. It was clear that standing at the very top of a ladder is unstable, so I needed to hang on to the pole next to the ladder with a hand, or with the crook of my elbow while I worked, to keep my balance and not come crashing down.

The first thing I did was carry the plywood board to the top. I had to one-hand it up and over the top of the pole, while hanging on with the other hand, trying to thread the top of the pole through the hole I had cut in the center of the plywood. Then I started bracing the board with 2-by-4’s. I wanted the platform to be strong. It had to hold my weight. So, I figured I better use plenty of braces. I decided to create two rows of braces. The first row would use shorter 2-by-4’s and would support the center of the board. Getting the first braces nailed in were the most challenging. The plywood board was loose and wobbling. And I needed to hang on while I tried to hold the blocks and nail them in, without falling. While not pretty, eventually I got a couple braces in, which made the job of adding braces much easier because the board wasn’t moving around. After I nailed several shorter braces around the pole, up to the middle of the plywood board, then I started adding longer braces that went from the pole up to the edges of the board. I kept adding braces until I ran out of open spaces to put another brace. I tested the strength of the platform, and it seemed plenty strong. However, the bracing underneath looked like a mess compared to the neat, precise job I had watched my dad do.

I was very excited to try out my observation platform for the first time. I took off the carpenter's apron and climbed back up the farm ladder. As I was climbing, I started thinking about how I might get on top of the platform. The realization hit me that I probably should have thought of this before. The structure was a little like a tall mushroom, the pole being the stem and the plywood board, now the floor of the observation platform, was like the cap of a mushroom. It dawned on me that it would be very hard to be directly under the platform, where the farm ladder was standing, and have to climb out and then up over the edge of the three -foot-wide plywood board to get on top of the platform.

With this insight, I climbed down and shifted the farm ladder over, so that the top of the ladder was directly below the edge of the platform and the steps of the ladder were facing the pole. The top step of the ladder was more than three feet lower than the platform. I climbed the ladder again and as I got to the top few steps; the ladder became wobblier. I was able to just reach the platform at this point and that allowed me to steady the ladder by holding on to the platform. Gripping the platform, I climbed the last couple of steps and was now standing on the top of the farm ladder. I remembered one of the sparse pieces of advice my dad gave me, that it was dangerous to stand on top of a ladder, and true enough, it felt pretty wobbly. But I had a firm grip on the platform and my head was now above the plywood board. I could see the top of the pole extending up through the plywood, sticking up two feet from the platform. I paused in this position for a few moments, planning my movements from here. I felt it was time to go, so I raised my arms and got them on top of the plywood. I pushed off the top step of the ladder gingerly, trying not to knock the ladder over in the process, and got my elbows under me on top of the platform. My legs dangled in the air. I reached over with one hand quickly and grabbed the top of the pole and pulled myself up and onto the platform for the first time!

I remember crouching there frozen for a few minutes. Adrenalin was pumping and I was on alert. I had no idea whether the platform was strong enough to support me. From this height, the platform was at or above the height of the orchard trees, the whole structure seemed vulnerable to falling over. My mind was racing as I second guessed how deeply I had dug the hole and how firmly I had packed dirt around the base of the pole. I listened for the telltale sounds of wood cracking if my braces were failing.

The only sounds were made by a breeze that day and some birds. I began to test the platform by shifting my weight. The floor didn’t sag at all. The wooden structure didn’t make a sound as I moved. As I became more confident, I tried bouncing up and down, a little at first, and then more vigorously to test the platform. It seemed very strong. Then I experimented with causing the pole to sway. I didn’t go crazy in doing this, but I felt I had to give it a decent test. The pole swayed as I shifted my weight from side to side. The pole flexed like a giant fishing pole. The pole seemed very strong, it didn’t make a sound as it moved, and more importantly, the pole seemed firmly planted in the ground.

As I relaxed sitting on top of my observation platform, I began to feel elated. I built this! It is strong, it holds me, it works! The feeling up on my observation platform, my observation tower was multiple times the feeling I had when I first climbed onto my playhouse roof. This perch was at least twice as high as the playhouse roof. It also felt much more open, much more in-the-air. The playhouse was much bigger than I was, and from its’ flat roof, my primary perspective, the view that seemed the most open, was when I looked up. From my platform, which was only three feet square, it was more like I was suspended in the air. My perspective and feelings of expansiveness were in every direction I looked. This place, my platform, felt very unique, very special and I was beaming.

I sat observing the world around me, marveling at this new view, for quite a while. I thought about what I would like to do while on my platform. It was getting close to dinner time, so I started thinking about climbing down for the first time. Climbing down can often be much harder than climbing up. My basic plan was to simply do what I did to climb up, but in reverse. Holding on to the top of the pole, I got onto my stomach and slid my legs over the edge of the platform. I couldn’t feel where the ladder was because it was still a few feet lower than where my feet were dangling. I had to let go of the pole-top, prop myself on my elbows and kind of walk my elbows back towards the edge to lower my legs further. Still no ladder. I couldn’t think of any better way from here than shifting one elbow off the platform at a time while gripping the plywood in my hands. Now I was in a ‘pull-up’ position. I searched around with my legs but still no ladder. Finally, deciding that I had to go for it, I extended my arms and hung in the air from the edge of the platform. Searching with my legs, I finally connected with the ladder. I got one foot on a step. I let go with one hand and reached under the platform to hold onto one of the braces, so that I could let go with the other hand and get my other foot securely onto the ladder. I made it, and climbed down to the ground.

The way down was scary and was only possible because I was tall and strong. I needed to come up with something to help me climb up onto the platform, and especially, to help me climb down. Rope. Rope with knots in it every foot or so. My dad had lots of rope for hauling lumber in his pickup. I cut an eight-foot length and tied knots along it. My plan was to tie this knotted rope to the pole-top, letting the rope hang over the edge of the platform, down to the farm ladder below.

My second climb was easier. I knew what I needed to do and how it felt. This time, I had the knotted rope hanging over one shoulder like I had seen mountain climbers do in movies. When I was gripping the edge of the platform and standing on the top step of the ladder, I knew I had to make a medium jump up, to get my arms onto the platform and catch myself on my elbows. It went well. I was also learning that, while the ladder wobbled when I stood at or very near its top, the ladder was still surprisingly stable. The wobbling was just the wood of the ladder flexing, just like the pole of my tower flexed. When I got back onto the platform, I tied the rope to the pole-top and let the rope hang down. I was excited to try the rope so I didn’t stay on the platform to enjoy the view. I was still in a mode of fine-tuning my structure.

With the knotted rope tied securely to the pole, the climb down was much easier and felt much less risky. As I was climbing down, it occurred to me that another rope, a longer rope with a bucket tied to the end, would be a great way to bring stuff up to the platform, rather than trying to carry things I might need or want while making the still challenging climb.

I ‘borrowed’ some more of my dad's rope and a bucket. I was now thinking about what would be fun to do while on my platform. I had an impressive comic book collection, so that became my first activity on the tower. When I went to the tower again, I brought a few comic books, the long rope and the bucket. I tied one end of the rope to the bucket, put the comic books into the bucket and tied the other end of the rope to my waist. Climbing up was becoming routine. I felt increasingly comfortable with the moves I needed to make, and having the knotted rope helped a lot. When I was back on top on the platform, I tied the end of the ‘bucket rope’ to the pole-top. I pulled the long rope up, bringing the bucket up to the platform with my reading material. I spent the next hour or so sitting Indian style, on a small wooden platform, near the top of a 20-foot pole, reading a few comic books, while being aware of the sheer audacity of what I was doing. I am sure I was grinning!

On another day, I borrowed my dad’s binoculars and hauled them up to the platform in the bucket. I spent a couple of hours observing houses, trees, birds; everything around me. It kind of felt like I was an astronaut, looking down at the earth from very high up. I keenly felt being separated from the world, a very strange and not very comfortable feeling, but new and different. Watching birds from up in the air was an interesting perspective. It felt like I was now where they lived as compared to always looking up at them. I thought about life as a bird, about flying.

Perhaps my reflections on birds gave me the idea to bring a kite up to the platform. I picked a breezy day on purpose. I wasn’t surprised that from the height of my platform, it was easy to get the kite to fly. On the ground, it typically took running to get a kite up into the wind. Up here, the wind was steadier and the kite wanted to fly. I let the kite take as much string as it wanted and soon the kite was soaring very high. This was not a large kite so it couldn’t lift too much string. When it was clear that this kite was as high as it could go, I tied the string off on the pole-top and just watched the kite for a while, my thoughts flying too.

Eventually, the breeze tapered off. The kite started losing altitude and because I couldn’t run with it, as I normally would on the ground, all I could do was to start pulling in the string, rewinding it around the ball. However, the breeze faded quickly and to save the kite, which was descending over a neighbor's property, I needed to stop neatly rewinding the string and as fast as I could, hand over hand, reeling in the string, pulling the falling kite towards the tower. A pile of loose string gathered on the platform and spilled over, down to the ground. I managed to keep the kite aloft long enough to pull it over the fence so that it would land on our property. I determined that flying a kite from my platform was interesting, but not worth it.

On another day, it seemed like a good day for a picnic in the sky. I put a soda and a snack in the bucket and pulled it up to the platform. It was a nice day and eating up there was great. Munching away while looking out at the world and letting my mind wander was very peaceful.

For the next several weeks, I spent time on my platform, sometimes doing something, other times just observing and letting my mind go. However, increasingly, I became aware of the alone time I was having while still enjoying my platform.

I was raised as an only child by older parents. I always had a lot of guy friends and I was very close with the three kids who lived next door, two of whom were close to my age. Even so, there was quite a bit of alone time in my life. I was introverted as a boy, so I didn’t have a problem being alone, but I enjoyed playing with kids more. Gradually, my view about my platform shifted, it no longer seemed to fit as well into my life.

I climbed up to my platform less often. Looking towards the rear of our property, I would see my tower standing alone. I needed to process what my platform had meant to me, and what it means now. I decided I would do something I had not done before. I climbed back up on top of the platform. Instead of staying seated, I stood up. I was standing on a three-foot-wide platform, on top of a slightly swaying pole, with no hand-holds. I felt like a giant with 20-foot-long legs! This was also a final salute. I made up my mind that my observation tower chapter was over.

Summer drifted into fall and then the rainy season. Standing starkly alone, my tower seemed now more like a monument. Towards the end of summer, as harvest in our orchard demanded, my dad had moved the farm ladder into use, picking fruit as it was intended. So, my platform was cut-off. It no longer had its’ access. It was unplugged.

After the rains began, I started feeling that I needed to take it down. I hadn’t finished the chapter. The clay of our soil, which was baked hard through the summer, providing an effective foundation for my tower, was now soft and I guessed that it wouldn’t support the platform as it had. I went back to my tower carrying the farm ladder for the last time. I climbed up to the platform. I still had plenty of muscle memory of how to do it, but it had been months and I was reminded how strenuous it was to get on top. Now back on top of the platform, I sat for a bit, remembering how peaceful it was and how I enjoyed the special view.

I had previously decided to test the strength of my tower, to see how much it could take to bring it down. I hoped that it wouldn’t suddenly collapse, but I wasn’t sure. I was both nervous and excited. I started shifting my weight back and forth, making the tower sway. I chose a path for it to sway that I hoped wouldn’t have it fall on the farm ladder, crushing it. I had done this before, but within limits, just to make sure the tower was reasonably safe. Now I was pushing it on purpose. The tower swayed quite a bit, but each cycle it recovered firmly. I was surprised and wondered if I had enough strength. It became a contest and I got up onto my knees to be able to push against the pole-top that much harder. The tower swayed wildly. More subtlety than I had anticipated, the apex of each swaying cycle became a little further out. Then, at the end of a cycle, something seemed to give way and in almost slow motion, my tower began to lean over. I stopped pushing and braced myself. Turned out that I didn’t need to worry. It was almost as if my tower was gently lowering me to the ground. When the edge of the platform softly landed, I simply stepped off, amazed.

With the tower down, I proceeded to dismantle it. From my dad’s shop, I brought his big framing hammer and a crowbar. I went to work tearing apart the platform. There’s a special energy about destroying something. Very physical. Very loud. On the edge of violence. Maybe it’s just testosterone!

After the platform was gone, only the pole remained, inclined slightly because it was still supported a little by the earth and wasn’t lying flat on the ground. I brought my dad’s limbing saw that he used for pruning trees and trying cutting the pole, which was now the dry trunk of the eucalyptus sucker. I learned a lesson then about how hard some wood can become when dry, and eucalyptus is one of those woods. This wasn’t going to work, so I put away the tools to think about a different solution. Truth be known, I had no idea!

A few days later, glancing into the back of our property, something looked different. I realized that the sucker trunk was gone. I went and took a look and saw the telltale shavings of my dad’s chainsaw. He must have come afterwards and cut it up for firewood while I was at school. I remember feeling grateful, because I hadn’t thought of any way to deal with it myself. With that, my experiment with building an observation tower was officially over.

Looking back, I’m not sure I understand what drove me to build the tower. I remember very strong feelings about the whole experience. The tower was the first project that I built myself. I’ve built many things since, both physical and organizational, and I wonder how much of what I gained through that childhood experience shaped my future efforts. I also recognize that throughout my life, I have enjoyed climbing things; trees, buildings and mountains. Something resonates deeply inside me when I look at the world from a great height. I’ve always tried to look over the horizon. I recognized at the time that what I built and what I was doing was not typical. Mostly I was pleased that I was doing something unique that felt special. I do remember beginning to feel a bit self-conscious towards the end of my ‘observation tower’ period. I started worrying that what I was doing was not normal, that perhaps there was something wrong…with me?

As I’ve thought about this odd episode, I was surprised by something that hadn’t occurred to me before. Throughout this whole adventure, not once did either of my parents even acknowledge what I was doing. There was never any discussion about what I was thinking about, what I was trying to build or how I felt about being up there on my platform for hours at a time. Furthermore, there were no concerns expressed about this very unique drive of mine, nor were there any concerns expressed about safety. Again, as a parent and now grandparent, I am having a hard time reconciling how I might have approached a similar situation if a child or grandchild was similarly driven.

The parenting style that my wife and I attempted was to allow our kids an amount of freedom to operate on their own, but to set limits which would keep the kids safe. We crafted our approach through trial and error rather than through books or classes. When we were raising our children, it didn’t seem like there were many resources to guide young parents. Perhaps we were just too busy working and trying to keep it all together to do more research and find whatever advice that may have been available at the time. We set limits based on what felt right, relative to our individual sense of risks, and our personal experience with risk. Like any couple, my wife and I brought different perspectives about risk into our parenting decisions, which often meant she and I negotiating about where to set risk boundaries for our children. Probably no surprise, in light of the wide latitude that I experienced as a child regarding risk, and the fact that I survived without too much injury in the process, I was always more relaxed in setting limits for our kids. I readily admit that my very liberal youth made it harder for my wife, whose more normal sense of risk, caused her to be constantly the parent circumscribing the boundaries for our children. A hard role for my wife and no doubt confusing and frustrating for our three kids.

I believe, with not much to go on, that my parents probably engaged in parental negotiations too. Maybe typical of parents of their age, my father was born in 1913, there were no conversations in our home when I was growing up, about anything other than current events. I suspect that my dad was likely more risk tolerant than my mother. He was more of an adventurer. However, my mother was very progressive. I have to assume that my folks discreetly watched as I went through the process of building the tower. How did they feel about their only child engaged in this very unusual pastime? Were they concerned about me, or perhaps proud of me? Did they negotiate about risk limits? Did they argue about me? I’ll never know. Both of my parents have been gone a long time. Along with many other discussions that I wished I’d had with them, this is one…