Apparently, the urge to climb could not be knocked out of me

Behind my Ohio elementary school in the 1960s, there was a green expanse, wide and at least a few hundred yards deep, spacious enough to contain three baseball fields with open ground to spare. Viewed from the schoolyard, this expanse was bounded on the left by a walking path atop a small ridge, on the right by the chain-link fences that kept the dogs in their suburban backyards. Opposite the school, in the distance, was woodland. One tree towered over all. It was magnificent, probably a pin oak, full and symmetrical, its lowest branches within reach of a nimble 10-year-old, and the next higher branch always no more than three or four feet up. It must have been 70 or 80 feet tall.

And one day I climbed to its top.

After accomplishing the hard part, which was grabbing the first branch, I had to keep going. I couldn’t stop. The climb was like solving a puzzle—attain a branch, pause, consider my options, reach for the next handhold and pull myself up, gripping the trunk with my sneakers until I could stand on the higher branch and plot my next move. Up and up and up, utterly absorbed and utterly fearless. What was there to fear? I scaled that tree with the assurance of a gibbon. The bark was sometimes smooth, sometimes rough, always cool under my hands. My feet rocked on ever narrower limbs, curled inside my flexed sneakers. The upper reaches swayed and gave voice to the breeze. I suspect I was concentrating too hard to be thrilled until I made it to the crown and gazed at a glorious view. Hard dirt baseball diamonds and my drab single-story grade school don’t sound inspiring, but to a 10-year-old that high in the air under his own power? Glorious.

Perhaps the best part, at least in my memory, was spotting two other boys on the ground looking up at me, and hearing one say, “Jesus, look how high that kid is!” I was small for my age, skinny and tough but not strong, spirited but not good at any sport. A brainy kid who could read a book in a day but couldn’t sink a jump shot or do a pull-up. I could climb, though. I could really climb.

The term of art for a kid like me in the 1950s was “he climbs like a monkey.” And I did. I would climb anything I could. This nearly killed me. When I was 4 years old, we lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in the city. Behind our building were three intersecting retaining walls that I was not allowed to climb. I climbed them anyway. One day, I was on the top wall, the summit, when my father, returning home from work, spotted me. I knew I was in trouble and in my rush to clamber down I slipped and fell, smashing my head on (I think) the lowest wall. My panicked father scooped me up and ran across the street to a hospital—bit of luck there, yeah?—where they found I’d fractured my skull. I’d also suffered a serious concussion and an inner-ear blood clot that later had to be painfully dug out. I recovered, but friends have been known to surmise that this early knock on the head explains a lot.

My fall did not dim my enthusiasm for climbing. When I was 6, my parents bought a small crackerbox house in the suburbs. It had a backyard that to a city kid looked as big as New Jersey. There was a peach tree, an apple tree, and a cranberry tree, none climbable. Just behind the house, though, at the edge of the patio, was a Japanese elm, fast growing and already tall, and I went up it as soon as I could. At the point where I had to stop because the branches became too thin to support me, I could see over the house to our cul-de-sac. That was thrilling to my little boy’s mind: I am higher than the house!

I climbed trees because I was good at it and because it was fun. But I also think I climbed them because in the crown of a tree I could be truly alone. I’d climb the elm in my backyard just to sit in its upper branches for an hour. My parents were lovely about allowing me to shut myself in my room, and I had no siblings. But there was a greater solitude 30 feet above the ground that drew a boy like me. I didn’t think about why I climbed the elm, I just did it whenever I had the chance, especially if I was upset by something. My mother was a canny woman, and I recall occasions when she would gently ask, “I saw you were up in the tree. Something on your mind?”

In my teenage years, I grew too big, finally, to climb trees. But I was the right age to fancy climbing where I wasn’t supposed to climb. To be accurate, this behavior first appeared on my grade-school playground. If a kid launched a kickball onto the roof, I figured out how to climb on a stair rail, and from there to some narrow cement windowsills just wide enough to let me slide across about 50 feet to where I could hoist myself up and retrieve the ball. Somehow I never got caught.

I also liked to scramble up onto the roof of my house. This wasn’t exactly forbidden because I’m sure it never occurred to my father that he had to. What sort of nutty kid would do that? Me. I’d shimmy up a carport post, hoist myself onto the carport roof, then scamper up and over the peak of the main roof to lie down on the back slope where the neighbors couldn’t see me. I loved it up there. Who knows why. Maybe I missed climbing the elm.

A buddy in high school had figured out that we could break into a local church where he volunteered by sticking a scrawny arm through the mail slot and pressing the inside push bar to unlatch the door. He supplied the strategy and I supplied the scrawny arm. We weren’t interested in mischief, just a couple of good kids who wanted to climb out onto the roof, which included walking a 20-foot ledge, three-stories up, that was about 18 inches wide. We did so without a second thought. Without a first thought besides watching for cops.

My last unauthorized ascent was in Singapore. I was there as a travel writer in the late 1980s. One morning I thought, I know, I’m gonna go up on the roof to take pictures. That is, the roof of a 50-story hotel tower, without permission, in a place that imposed stiff fines for spitting on the sidewalk or jaywalking. I took an elevator as far up as I could go, found a stairway, and kept going up until I came to a final door. Then I stepped onto the roof, hoping I hadn’t set off an alarm or locked myself out. The pictures weren’t much, but the stunt was fun. And I didn’t get arrested.

In the 1990s, my wife and I started climbing mountains. Not like we were alpinists, not even close. We did what climbers call, sometimes dismissively, “walk-ups.” A walk-up is more of a strenuous hike in which the climber hikes to the top of a mountain, often through steep and difficult terrain. A walk-up is not “technical”: it does not require ropes or crampons or ice axes, nor does it require that you know what you’re doing. If your legs and your lungs and your courage hold out, you can reach the top of some impressive peaks. We were proud to do some “fourteeners” in the US Mountain West—that is, hike to the top of a few mountains that were more than 14,000 feet high. It was not hazardous like rock climbing, but it was not without danger. You could fall, obviously, especially on the descent. You could put a foot wrong and find yourself trapped, your boot irredeemably wedged between rocks. In Colorado, you had to get up and down all in a morning to evade the thunderstorms that rolled in on many an afternoon.

We did achieve one technical climb, reaching the top of Mt. Hood in Oregon. (That’s us in the opening photo.) Whenever we come across pictures of the mountain now, we are still proud of that climb, though the summer we did it, the record for successful ascents was held by a crazy dog that belonged to a camp worker. In the wee hours of a morning, he would attach himself to a climbing party and just lope along all the way to the summit. Day after day. Gives one perspective, though to be fair, that must have been one strong dog.

I did a little reading on why some of us feel such an urge to climb things. Psychologists have written papers on the psychology of climbing—of course they have. I found this:

Many climbers are motivated by a need for cathartic release, a desire for personal transformation, or an urge to achieve a heightened sense of purpose and self-transcendence.

Too grand for my taste. There was also this:

Many are task-oriented, goal-driven, and find deep satisfaction in the pursuit of mastery and personal achievement.

Nope, doesn’t describe me, either. I do find meaning in mastery, but not while wearing hiking boots. Whenever I got to the summit of a fourteener, I didn’t revel in all that I’d mastered. I enjoyed the view, snapped some pictures, then thought, Boy, this is gonna be a bitch to get down.

Related to tree climbing, I found this:

The act recalls evolutionary instincts—navigating arboreal spaces is integral to primate ancestry—which can evoke feelings of competence, primal connection, and belonging. Both adults and children report feelings of clarity, empowerment, and happiness during and after climbing trees.

That feels a bit closer. Remember: “He climbs like a monkey.” Reaching for another branch while 40 feet above ground does focus the mind, even the previously concussed mind of a goofy 10-year-old. Clarity? Yep. Empowerment? Maybe. Happiness? Definitely.

My climbing days are past. I still love being in the mountains, but now I don’t look for walk-ups, I look for drive-ups. That odd little loner who preferred the top of an elm still lives inside me, and I feed him now and then. I love overlooks and observation decks. In a Manhattan hotel, I prefer the highest possible room, and a rooftop bar is a grand thing. There’s no mastery or catharsis involved; I just like being up there.

On his estate near Bordeaux, Michel de Montaigne invented the essay in the 1570s while writing in a tower. I could be happy writing essays in a tower. Sounds perfect.