Our theme for the month of February is “plants.”
We came from the trees.
All of us, every Homo sapiens alive today, is a descendant of a limb swinging, fruit munching, tree climbing expert. The lives of our ancestors depended on their ability to grasp branches, differentiate vines from snakes, and be at home in the canopy of tropical forests. Granted, that was four million years ago, but the selective pressures that sculpted the genes of our ancestors left deep imprints.
Maybe that’s why I, like Natasha and others on this blog, have been drawn to climb the arboreal jungle gyms in our backyard and beyond. For as long as I can remember I’ve been climbing trees. When I was a kid, climbing trees gave me a perch to look out over the cornfields and watch the deer. Tree climbing gave me a glimpse into the lives of the raccoons nestled in the big cavity in the sugar maple behind our house. In high school, I’d climb trees and set up a hammock where I would read and sometimes spend the night, just for the novelty of it. When I worked in Costa Rica, my coworkers and I would scramble up the strangler figs that towered over our bungalows, watching cows graze below and birds soar around us at eye level.
Today, in what feels like a wonderfully natural progression of things, I get to climb trees for a living. I officially started climbing a few weeks ago, and the knots, carabiners, prusik friction hitches, pulley devices, etc., are just starting to make sense. The more I understand how it all works, the more relaxed I’ve been feeling ascending, descending, and navigating canopies—turns out it’s good to know what your gear does and exactly how to use it when you’re forty feet up in the air. On the ground, tree work consists of stacking brush, chipping limbs, and operating machinery. There’s a lot of stooping, raking, and leaf-blowing, and it gets old pretty fast. With tree climbing, though, there’s a rush of dopamine when I start ascending, which mixes with exhilaration and a twinge of healthy fear the higher I get. Then, there’s the puzzle of figuring out which path to take through the branches to reach my destinations and make precise cuts. Coming down, I feel accomplished to have finished the job and grateful to have been held up by the tree itself.
Before I started climbing, the world of tree canopies seemed out of reach for exploration, like the underwater world before scuba or space before rockets. Now, I notice trees in a whole new way, focusing on branch unions I could thread a rope through and strong, outstretched limbs I could walk across. Tree climbing is a doorway into a three-dimensional world where complexity and biodiversity vastly increase. Consider this: the further south you go, the more epiphytes you’ll find—an epiphyte being a plant that is anchored to a rock, tree, or other surface above the ground. The more epiphytes present, the more insects feed on the plants and the more frogs live within the epiphytes, thus providing food for snakes and arboreal mammals that hunt the frogs, which provide food for birds of prey, and the cycle goes on ad infinitum. In the tropics, it’s estimated that up to ninety percent of living things exist primarily in trees, and much of it is understudied.
We came from the trees. It feels good to be going back up.
Jon Gorter (‘17) graduated from Calvin with degrees in English and environmental studies and holds an MS in natural resources from the University of Michigan. He enjoys fly fishing, mushroom foraging, and waterfall scrambling near his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
Thanks for this vicarious exploration! Sometime around middle school the fearlessness left—and now I find I have much more than just a twinge of healthy fear… maybe that gear would be a help.