by Leath Tonino
I tried to write my sister, but stumbled and fell, viewing the white landscape.
I closed my eyes.
It was the welded joy-sadness, that’s all. It was never making it home. It was the dangerous, enlivening, many-mouthed land, the notion that we are winged seeds drifting over hungry scratches of earth. It was inarticulate, an image, the branch releasing its snow, the light coming through, the grains silvering for an instant before falling to the warm black road, melting away, keeping no space.
Dropping. Darkening. Central Valley again. I didn’t know what time it was or what towns we’d passed through. I didn’t even know I’d been asleep. No music played. Nobody spoke. There were egrets out there, white birds like flags of peace. I couldn’t see them. Or perhaps I could, just barely, only if I didn’t really look, didn’t really try.
Letter to the Megalopolis
Tonight I will be your eyes and through me you will watch the moonrise and together we will be slowed and stilled and humbled. I will walk your puddled streets through traffic-roar and siren-wail, will climb the hill that is your shoulder, will climb and climb until the buildings release their boxy grip and the sidewalk becomes a trail. Up there, in a small park, balanced on a rock above your sprawling, glowing body, I will pull back my hood and look to the east.
We won’t blink.
We’ll hardly breathe.
Have you seen the color orange? Tonight you will. You will see it bleeding from the orange of yourself, your grid of lamps and windows and neon signs. You will see a giant circle of orange inching up from behind the far ridge, a circle of orange larger and greater than me or you, than the ridge or anything. At first it will be scary, this heavy, rising presence. We won’t like it, the way it makes us flutter, our attention beating against craters and dry seabeds, our eyes like moths. We won’t like it, but neither will we shy away.
I’m telling you, Megalopolis, this is going to be some night. The orange moon will arc into the sky, carrying us with it, me right up out of my shoes, you right up out of your concrete, broken glass, poverty, cigarette smoke, excess, idiotic wealth. By degrees the orange moon will shrink and fade, fade and shrink, and then at last the lamps and windows and neon signs will glow bright again.
We will return to earth.
We will return to this earth, changed.
I’ve been with you for a long time now, five winters and five springs, and it’s always good, always bad, always all kinds of things, all kinds of everything. But you know. You’re you. The helicopters chop. The rapist goes about his business. The newspapers arrive each dawn. The money is made and counted and counted again. The clock ticks over our heads and on our wrists and in our temples, as if the ticking were our pulse. You know these facts. You are the ticking.
And you also know that there are children with innocent faces, children playing games, children laughing. And that there are hawks nesting in pines bordering the playgrounds. And that there are gophers eating tiny flowers, nibbling silky petals. You know it’s all kinds of things, all kinds of everything, and that the moon does visit regularly, though of course the moon never stays.
Megalopolis, enough. We both understand that I can’t be your eyes, and you have no ears, so I can’t even read you this letter. Really, it’s not you who needs humbling anyway. This letter is for me. This letter is for me and the people I haven’t met, the people I will never meet, the people I wish the best for nonetheless. We’ve forgotten the moon. We are screen-dazed and sad. We are lost in a room, the walls closing ever inward, the computer’s blue light ghosting across our features. There is a faint electric hum. There is a wailing siren at the door.
But the door opens onto nothing.
And the door is locked.
Here I am at the heart of you, surrounded by you, alone. Here I am ascending the shoulder, balancing atop the rock, pulling back my hood. The moon is rising fat, fiery, an orange beast to crush the distant hills. Impossible, it would seem, to ever in a million years forget such a moon, such a presence. Impossible, but somehow we do.
Okay. Time to finish this letter. Time to say fondly, sincerely, best, take care. Time to be quiet, to forget time, to taste orange and watch and keep watching and swallow hard.
And swallow hard.
And swallow harder than before.
A Room of Boughs in a City of Lights
I loaded my backpack with supplies for a three-night trip: hammock, sleeping bag, hundred-foot rope, rock-climbing harness, carabiners and webbing, raingear, headlamp, six peanut butter sandwiches, a twenty-dollar bill, a knife in case I got tangled in my rigging and had to cut myself free. It was already afternoon when I left my apartment on Dolores Street and pushed west, uphill, toward Twin Peaks. Mockingbirds talked across the sky. Babies babbled from their strollers. And the trees, as anticipated, were bountiful, beautiful, and diverse. Mike Sullivan, an obsessed amateur botanist and author of the field guide The Trees of San Francisco, has identified 274 species growing in the city. There are Washington thorns and cockspur coral trees; jacarandas, cajeputs, and Chinese photinias; sweetshades and golden rain trees; spotted and lemon-scented gums; pin, cork, and holly oaks. Mostly, I didn’t know the names of what I saw—but it wasn’t names that I intended to climb.
My plan was really more of a prompt, a nudge in the direction of urban-arboreal adventure. I’d wander San Francisco, neighborhood to neighborhood, park to park, paying attention to trees. I’d pay attention to ants and squirrels and clouds and my own shifting thoughts as well—but primarily I’d focus on the trees. When I found one I liked, probably a big one, I’d climb it, string the hammock as high as possible, and lose myself in the dazed sway and drifty weave of green smells, green sounds, green moods. This would be a new city, a lofted metropolis of branch and twig. I’d rock to bed, wake with dawn’s birds, rappel to earth, and go get a cup of coffee. Maybe I’d be downtown, at Union Square or Embarcadero. Maybe I’d be in the Presidio or bordering the zoo.
Strolling, I noticed the particularities of the trees I passed. Magnolias I’d walked by a hundred times demanded consideration. A ginkgo with yellowing leaves stopped me in my tracks. By creating a situation in which I needed a tree to camp in, a situation in which the lack of a tree rendered me just your average tramp, I’d tricked my mind into a new type of attunement. Crown structure, location relative to buildings and power lines, degree of rot in dead and dying limbs—all of this was now important. I stared, scrutinized, kept moving. The perfect one was out there, somewhere.
I made a mental map of trees I could come back to should nothing better turn up. A California pepper tree in the Castro had a sweet umbrella shape to it but leaned against a second-story window that I worried was someone’s bathroom. A ring of eucalyptus on Tank Hill promised amazing views of the Financial District, but the trees themselves were unappealing, their hammock sites few and daunting. I liked one Monterey cypress, but when I traced the trunk downward it disappeared behind a fence, into a backyard. This got me thinking. The cypress’s roots extended beneath the street—I imagined them pulsing with water and nutrients below the blacktop—and visually the bulk of the tree inhabited an airy public space. So whose tree was it? I got a bit miffed: To hog a tree like that! To lock it away and deny it a hammocker’s companionship! At the same time, I was conscious of the dubious legality of my whole enterprise. Best to leave it alone, I figured, find privacy amid denser vegetation.
Norfolk Island pine (too flexy). Cliff date palm (too frondy). Tree by tree I worked my way to the top of the Mount Sutro Open Space Reserve, a largely undeveloped area of sixty acres at the city’s center. The afternoon was ebbing, my anxiety about establishing a place to sleep rising. I followed a shuttle bus into an apartment complex where the trees, mostly eucalyptus, were out of my league, ascension-wise. I’d learned technical tree-climbing techniques while working for the US Forest Service on a study of northern goshawks, but that’s not to say I’m confident around either heights or knots; climbing is intense work and
generally not to be messed with after dark.
I needed to discover my perfect tree. And soon.
The coast redwood is a Northern California icon; it’s the sparkle in John Muir’s eye, the poet Jane Hirshfield’s “great calm being.” As a human’s body provides an immense terrain for mites and other roaming microcritters, a redwood’s body provides habitat for warblers and salamanders and epiphytes. Redwoods can grow to over three hundred feet and live more than a thousand years. They’re skyscrapers, fogscrapers, animate towers with corridors and chambers and balconies and elevator shafts and fire escapes. It probably comes as no surprise that seeking a hammock-hotel there atop Mount Sutro, I found myself checking in at the trunk of Sequoia sempervirens.
Mine was one hundred feet tall, by no means a monster, but then again, an absolute monster. It made a lamppost look like a puny sapling and rose considerably higher than the four-story apartment buildings across the street. A friendly monster, it spoke to me, called me up into the complicated heights. The language was presence, massive and inviting, not heard but felt. I know it’s unscientific and weird, but this is the truth: Hey there, little fella, the tree said, why don’t you grab that branch of mine and see where it leads?
The redwood isn’t only a major Bay Area player; it’s also the quintessential adventure tree, a botanical Everest. In college, about the time I started hanging hammocks higher than three feet off the ground (I was into rock climbing and forest ecology), I read an article in the New Yorker that documented the search for the world’s tallest trees. Written by Richard Preston, the article profiled Humboldt State University biologist Stephen Sillett, a guy who spends days and nights in the canopy living out of a harness and a hammock. Preston’s book on the subject, The Wild Trees, argues that the upper tiers of a redwood forest are as little understood as the depths of the ocean. Hyperion, the tallest tree on earth at 379 feet, stands in an undisclosed locale in the backcountry of Redwood National and State Parks. Epic storms, Tyrolean traverses, automobile-sized chunks of debris crumbling above helmeted scientists—I burned through The Wild Trees in a weekend.
Organizing my gear and nerves in the duff beside the sidewalk, I kept reminding myself that I’m no Steve Sillett, no expert, and that I needed to be methodical and slow. Overhead, innumerable branches radiated out from the redwood’s straight bole in a maze of ladders, the lowest ones almost within reach. With all those holds I wouldn’t need the rope, just the harness system and my own monkey style. By anchoring loops of webbing to limbs as I climbed, I could inch upward without ever risking a major fall. I might slip, knock my noggin, and dangle stunned for a spell, but plummeting to my death was out of the question. Once I left the ground, the harness would never loosen, not for sleeping, not for peeing, not for anything. In a sense, the tree would protect me from its own dangers.
I double-knotted my shoelaces, tucked my shirt in, jumped for a branch, missed it, jumped again, pulled, contorted, and got it underfoot. A young lady in a purple jacket walked by and I held my breath; though I was plainly visible, ten feet away and no more than eight feet high, she didn’t see me. A man with a briefcase passed, then a grandma with a toddler and shopping bags, then another shuttle bus. Nobody glanced up. So quickly, I’d crossed over to the secret city.
You scrape legs and hands, get needles in your hair, hook branches with elbows, armpits, ankles, and knees. You impress yourself on the tree and the tree impresses itself on you. It’s like Robert Frost’s apple-picking poem, the one where an “instep arch not only keeps the ache, / It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.” Your body learns the tree though this touching, this ache and pressure. There’s mysterious reciprocity here, deep rapport between beings.
Recall that image of a mite orienteering the landscape of a human body. Climbing higher, I went small and the tree went large. The other world—Below or The Ground or The City I Previously Knew—dropped off like so many fluttering bark chips. Sure, sounds filtered through the walls of foliage (sirens, kids yelling), but they were vague, less than real, coming to me the way an alarm clock’s beeping enters a dream. The real was at hand, was the wood in my hand: this hold and the next hold and the next.
After approximately eighty feet (the tree’s collarbone?) I stopped, my attention drawn from the climbing for the first time in a half-hour or longer. Something pink caught my eye through a window in the boughs—the bay reflecting the sunset sky, a huge view of toy-sized cargo ships and the Oakland Hills. I looked around and another window opened to the north—the Golden Gate Bridge, Mount Tamalpais spilling ridges to the Pacific, folds of land fading into the distance. I’d been in the meditative do-not-fall trance, the trance of effort and exhaustion, and was at last awakening. A red-breasted nuthatch landed nearby, gleaned an insect, and dissolved back to green. Again the tree spoke: This is your spot, little fella. Make yourself at home.
It took another half-hour of tiptoeing to rig the hammock, stressing the whole time about bobbling a key piece of gear and watching it plummet. When the chores were finished, my supplies hung on lines I’d strung up, like a kitchen in Tuscany with herbs and salamis and saucepans dangling from the ceiling. I removed sneakers and socks to let my sweaty feet dry against the tree’s cool, rough skin. Swinging in my harness, testing various seats, scheming a way to recline across three branches, a part of me wondered if the hammock was necessary.
Two scrub jays stopped by for a chat. I ate a peanut butter sandwich and watched the city’s lights lift from the gloaming in reds, oranges, and electric blues. It got darker. A neon glow leaked through the gaps and cracks in the foliage walls. I ate a second sandwich and flipped on my headlamp. The top was a mere twenty feet away.
The trip went on for another three days, with overnights in a wind-tortured, rain-lashed cypress by the ocean, and a redwood in Golden Gate Park that let me gain fifty feet before scaring me down to a cramped hammock site. I mingled with the homeless, walked dozens of miles, bought a slice of pizza, studied trees from afar, from below, from inside and out. Each was different, a unique vehicle providing access to itself and to some new perspective on the city. A series of engagements! A sequence of invitations! Oh, but nothing beat that initial Mount Sutro redwood, the adventure’s literal and figurative high point. I can close my eyes and go there, even now.
The trunk tapered to the diameter of my wrist and I perched on a branch the diameter of my thumb, then touched the utmost tiptop for good measure. I tied in twice to be safe, and in fact I was safe—no threat of creeps or thieves, no fear of getting hit by a van in the crosswalk. The night embraced me like a fat firm hug.
A dog barked. A parked car idled. I watched an elderly couple preparing dinner in one of the apartments across the street, watched the city lights, watched my brain’s activity slide into rest. Hirshfield’s line about a “great calm being” came back to me, and for a while that’s how I felt—like a redwood, both great and calm. It was mellowness by association, I guess.
Soft. Still.
Nobody on earth—no human, at least—knew my whereabouts.
Again, it’s weird and unscientific, but paused there in that soupy darkness a hundred feet off the ground, the thought came to me: I never asked this tree for permission. In my excitement—over the ascent, then over the camp chores—I’d forgotten my manners.
So I started to say something, some thanks and praise, some gratitude for offering me this experience. Hearing the words aloud though, I shut up. Or maybe the tree shut me up? I felt silly, not because I was talking to a plant, but because I was only now realizing that I’d been talking to a plant all along; I’d heard the redwood’s voice, why wouldn’t it have heard mine? Anything that needed saying had already been said, and, moreover, said with a clarity human words rarely achieve. It was the clarity of climbing, of touching. It was the language of bodies, of presence. My host knew everything I was thinking. I knew it knew this—don’t ask me how.
The dog barked. The elderly couple stirred their soup. The city glittered.
I descended to my cozy hanging bed, my lullaby of a hammock.
Secret Springs
I met Joel Pomerantz at a bustling intersection in Cole Valley, the geographic heart of San Francisco. All around us the usual morning crowds were up to their usual morning business: fiddling with smartphones, waiting in line for brunch, hopping on and off buses, fiddling with smartphones. If anybody besides Pomerantz was thinking about water—where it comes from, where to find it, how it can draw us into an intimate relationship with the local cityscape—it wasn’t apparent.
“We’ve got options,” Pomerantz said. “Head into Sutro Forest and look at a true gushing spring, a really nice spot, or, if you want something more urban, climb over the ridge at the end of this street to a site where water wells up from beneath the pavement.” I voted for the latter, picturing a microparadise of ferns and flowers bursting through cracks in the sidewalk. “Good call,” he said. “The ones in plain sight are often the most interesting.”
Pomerantz—a thirty-four-year resident of the city and the founder of Thinkwalks (“Nerdy Tours for San Franciscans”)—is, in his own words, “a hands-on freelance educator of the public with a special interest in fresh water and water politics.” He is also that wonderful and necessary subspecies: a nonconformist, a guy in a bright yellow T-shirt and red knit cap pausing now and then to put his ear to a sewer access cover and listen for gurgles. “I’ve always resisted having a career,” he told me, explaining that underemployment affords a person lots of opportunities to wander. “You can’t depend on experts. You have to become a part of the environment yourself.”
