IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND, they don’t look like much: a black bug the size of a chocolate sprinkle. Put one under a microscope and the mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae, is hairy and lethal-looking, a shovel-faced, tanklike chewing machine with legs. Since the first outbreaks began, in the early 1990s, the beetles have infested more than 81,700 square miles of North American forests, an area larger than Nebraska. Last year, in my home state of Montana alone, the plague more than doubled—from 1.2 million acres in 2008 to 2.7 million in 2009. Depending on whom you talk to, this makes Dendroctonus either the most destructive insect in the recorded history of North American forests or, as some ecologists see it, a massive influx of “ecosystem engineers” working tirelessly to improve woodland biodiversity. Call me anthropocentric, but the idea of a bug in the driver’s seat doesn’t inspire much confidence.

Take this lodgepole I’m standing next to, one of the beetle’s favorite pines. It is green-needled and vigorous-looking, but it’s actually dead as a phone pole. The bark is riddled with hundreds of bulging, popcorn-size hits. Made of sawdust, pitch, and bug scat, these spots mark where last year’s hatch of adult beetles chewed their way in to lay their eggs, which turn larval by the fall. Infused with natural antifreeze that withstands temperatures down to 30 below, Dendroctonus larvae hibernate till summer, when they pupate, abandon their brood tree, and take flight to attack fresh stands. The short of it is, this green tree’s a goner. By next spring the needles will fade; by summer, they’ll turn red. Not some feel-good autumn-in-Vermont red, either. More like the rocker-panel rust on a junkyard Dodge.

There’s something about a red evergreen that says we’re deeply screwed. Take a drive over Montana’s 6,320-foot MacDonald Pass and you’ll see these trees by the millions, spilling down the Continental Divide like leftover marinara. Some ecologists say there’s little to worry about from Dendroctonus. They’re quick to point out that these beetles are endemic—that they’ve been around as long as the forests themselves, that they cull older, weaker trees, and that these outbreaks come and go naturally over the centuries.

But this time, things have changed. Stressed by less rainfall and a warmer climate, our high-altitude lodgepole stands can’t muster enough pitch to flush out the invaders in the numbers the bug now presents. Low temperatures used to control the beetle population, killing most of them off each winter, but the last time my hometown of Helena saw sustained temperatures of 30 below was 1996. As populations continue to multiply, as they continue to thrive at higher elevations and latitudes and develop tastes for new species (the whitebark pine is now functionally extinct in some places), human intervention has so far proved maddeningly ineffective.

There’s never been a better time to be a beetle. With the forests spread before them like a cruise-ship buffet and no serious predators to worry about, the beetles are writing a whole new script, one in which they’re no longer mindless, ravening insects but a particularly exuberant tribe of eco-nihilists. Or perhaps just another few billion insatiable consumers and, in that way, not so different from us.

Nobody knows how all this will play out. But hard-hit Colorado already stands to lose virtually all of its mature lodgepoles. High-altitude trees help retain winter snowpack; if they go into decline, spring runoffs could radically change, affecting local water management. In places like Yellowstone, the whitebark’s demise could eliminate one of grizzly bears’ main food sources, the tree’s cone seeds. And what happens when all these carbon-absorbing trees decay and become carbon producers? The temperature goes up another notch.

At this point, the situation is much like what happens when a Third World country unexpectedly goes nuclear: There’s widespread alarm followed by a rush to learn about a long-ignored, now ominous threat. Who are these bugs anyway, and what do they have in mind for the Rockies?

IT’S ONLY NATURAL THAT a panorama of several million dead pines would have a disquieting effect on the psyche.

Many think that, should these red trees ignite, it will mean a cataclysmic fire of untold ferocity, one hot enough to vitrify the earth, scald the very air, and turn the verdant northern Rockies into a Mars-scape.

But some ecologists believe that red, dead trees are only moderately more flammable than live ones and that, without the green trees’ volatile resins, they might actually burn cooler. That doesn’t mean that fire danger is lower, says University of Colorado geography professor Tania Schoennagel. “Despite having recently come out of a 15-year drought,” she points out, “Colorado can soon expect another. With or without the pine beetle, the potential for catastrophic fire is always there.”

It seems like a stretch, but according to a Colorado Forest Service release, we run a greater risk of being hit by a tree while hiking than of burning up in a fiery cataclysm. “[Beetle-killed trees] begin to fall within 3-5 years,” the report states. There are 550 miles of power lines and 691 miles of trails running through infested stands—in Colorado alone.

For both these reasons—fire and public safety—there’s now an urgency to fell these hazard trees, especially in what the U.S. Forest Service likes to call “the Wildland– Urban Interface”—the place where the buildings leave off and the woods begin.

In Helena, this has created a boom of sorts for bonded contractors and the somewhat chancier element of out-of-work loggers and gypsy woodsmen. As it happens, I fall somewhere between these two tribes. I was a teacher until the economy went under, but for 30 years before that, I worked as an arborist. So, last June, I dusted off my hard hat and joined my fellow recession-strafed friend Tom Harpole—himself a former coastal timber faller turned magazine writer—to clean up the woods around the ski cabin of our pediatrician friends Mike and Tess, in the Flint Creek Range, 90 miles southwest of Helena.

On the drive over, Harp, an athletic, gently ravaged senior in a hickory shirt, tried out the results of his cataract surgery, reading me an article from the Helena Independent Record. Taken from Governor Brian Schweitzer’s spring fire briefing, the piece informed readers that if they were dumb enough to build in the woods, they were on their own. “You have a personal responsibility,” Schweit­zer said. “Don’t look to the government to bail you out.”

Harp put down the paper and grinned. “Is that tough love or what?” The idea behind a beetle “treatment,” as the Forest Service calls it, is to ambush the bugs before they hatch out, which in Montana generally happens in late July. Harp and I would fell the brood trees—the ones with active larvae—and then cover the downed wood with black plastic, frying the hatch before the beetles could fly out to attack nearby trees.

We gassed up our saws and went to work. The affected three acres had upwards of 500 trees—two-thirds of them lodgepole, half of which were infested. Since it was a family cabin and small children were usually afoot, we felled other hazard trees too: leaners (uprooted trees held up by their neighbors), widow-makers (detached tops, hanging in the canopy), snags (rotten, unstable trees), and jackpots (an idiot’s delight of leaners, snags, and widow-makers). I even climbed and topped two stricken lodgepoles that were uncomfortably close to the power lines.

It’s been years since I spent a whole day felling trees, but the work felt much like it used to, which is to say hard, dirty, and dangerous. The only thing that had changed was the way such inviolably straightforward labor was now bedeviled by vagaries: Because of the magnitude of this outbreak, did it really matter if we covered our downed wood when the neighbors left their brood trees standing? Who were we kidding with this bit of woodland housekeeping?

HARP AND I FELLED a lot of beetle kill last summer, specializing in higher-risk trees—the pines so close to buildings, propane tanks, and chicken coops that the other renegade sawyers wouldn’t touch them. In August, we bid on a job to remove three beetle-killed pines from the property of Harp’s friend Perry, five miles west of Helena. The dead trees threatened the power lines, but Perry was most concerned for the six “focal” ponderosas by his house. These had a scattering of beetle hits at the base, so he wondered if we should just take them, too.

I told Perry with utmost confidence that, no, such a light scatter of hits meant that the pines had pitched the bugs out. I went on to announce that, by this point, the beetles had certainly hatched, but to be on the safe side he could spray them with the insecticide carbaryl, arguably the most effective beetle deterrent on the market. Perry, a plumber by trade, wasted no time. The next day he rented a pressure sprayer and hosed down every viable pine he had.

When Harp and I returned five days later, we found a hatch in full progress. The insects had swarmed the house pines—the ones I’d presumed to call safe—and chewed through the carbaryl like butterscotch. In spite of the rainy summer, the big pines offered little resistance. From the base up past the 50-foot mark, thousands of entry holes peppered the trunks. There was nothing to do but remove them.

As I spiked my way up the first tree, I heard a commotion below. I planted my gaffs, hung back on my flip line, and peered down. Like a genie out of a bottle, a fresh hatch was boiling from the tree Harp had felled. The bugs crawled up his Husqvarna, flew into his face, and in a moment fairly engulfed him. Frantically, Perry scraped clumps of them off Harp’s shirt.

“Those fuckers were trying to take me down,” Harp would tell me later.

“They mistook you for a pine,” I said. “It could happen to anyone.”

“No,” he insisted. “This was personal. They infested me, Fred. I felt violated.”

It was good for a laugh, but the incident continued to haunt me. The beetles had emerged weeks past the hatch window, attacked well-hydrated trees, and made a point of attacking not just mature trees but the saplings that would take their place. And they ate through fresh carbaryl to do it. In the span of an afternoon, everything I thought I knew about this bug had been proven wrong.

At the Blackfoot River Brewing Company later last fall, I stood next to a strapping fireman named Scott Bockman who sprays carbaryl on the weekends for extra cash. I mentioned the events out on Perry’s spread: the swarming of Harp, the jailbreak hatch, the strange timing of it all. Scott laughed and bought me a beer.

“You can toss that ‘hatch window’ crap out with the term ‘unseasonably warm,'” he said. “Near as I can tell, they hatch whenever they feel like it. As far as that goes, I’ve seen bugs attack spruce and Doug fir. Things are changing so fast out there, the science can’t keep up.”

FOR NOW, OUR EFFORTS at beetle intervention have indeed seemed feeble. Carbaryl works in places, but nobody wants to talk about the collateral effects of a forestwide application on honeybees and songbirds. Controlled burns sound neat, but a fire of that scale would be hard to control, and the bugs would already have left the red trees for live ones. So we make inroads where we can and cling to small victories when we find them.

Retired Colorado entomologist David Leath­erman, who has studied these beetles for more than 30 years, offers a glimmer of hope. The past couple of years have brought anomalous weather patterns, he says, particularly to Colorado. Higher and faster summer winds have borne beetle hatches aloft, sometimes carrying them 150 miles or more—in one case as far as Nebraska. This might sound like yet another example of the climate accommodating the bug, helping them colonize, but such events can disperse the hatch, making it difficult for beetles to infest a pine with numbers large enough to kill it. Of 700 pines attacked in Fort Collins in 2008, Leatherman says, there was only a 10 percent mortality rate.

Meanwhile, scientists are finding ways to interrupt the beetles’ highly successful cycle. The focus falls squarely on their sex life, something Leatherman makes sound downright erotic. “For openers,” he says, “these guys have very short lives, and they spend 360 days of it in pitch dark. Then they pupate and suddenly they’ve got wings! They crawl out from under the bark, down a long tunnel, fly into a brilliant summer sky. Can you imagine? They float in the dazzle, rise on the breeze, soar off on the scrumptuous pheromone trails that the females thoughtfully left behind.”

The male follows this trail to the nuptial chamber that the female has prepared in the new brood tree, where he delivers a sequence of clicks, chirps, and squeaks that, according to Leatherman, constitutes the standard pitch of every male looking to score:

“What’s up? Nice place! I’ll be gentle…”

A few years back, science broke in on this love fest with a synthetic pheromone called trans-verbenol, which mimics the hormonal “no vacancy” signal that Dendroctonus sends out when a pine is full. The U.S. Forest Service has been broadcasting synthetic pheromones by the helicopter-load over Sun Valley’s ski runs to combat beetles, while Aspen is stapling trans-verbenol packets to individual trees.

And we’re learning more about the bugs’ love song itself. I recently purchased a CD of the beetles’ vocal stylings. The audio was captured by New Mexico composer David Dunn, who poked a microphone into the phloem layer of a piñon pine infested with Ips confusus, the Dendroctonus cousins that decimated southwestern forests in the early 2000s. It’s not Barry White, but there’s an edginess to it, a rising bolero of cheeps, chirps, and scratchings. The ensemble features a rhythmic crunching sound, like an 1890s stamp mill, and a periodic flushing noise, like a line of public urinals, followed by a melodious squeaking like a dry cork twisting in a bottle. It may never go platinum, but it’s got an interphylum charm that could cross over.

Last winter, Northern Arizona University researchers Richard Hofstetter and Reagan McGuire employed a similar choir in their experiments with sonic-bullet-style beetle control. They’d already hit a Dendroctonus colony with high-volume Rush Limbaugh broadcasts, to no effect. They’d tried hip-hop. Again, nothing. But when they blasted a recording of remixed Dendroctonus “voices” at the colony, the beetles went insane. “There’d be a male and a female, they would mate… and two hours later, he’d chew her to pieces,” said McGuire. “That’s not natural.”

Dunn, who consulted on the project, had mixed feelings about the results. “I fell in love with [these beetles],” he said. “But then, we’re watching them cannibalize each other. I always think, ‘How bad is this karma?'”

My own beetle karma caught up with me last Thanksgiving, when I ran into Tess for the first time since summer. I asked how her pines had fared and she gave me a rueful smile. “The beetles destroyed most everything,” she said. “We need you to come back, I guess.”

With millions of acres going red, I don’t know why it was so hard to swallow. Of course, our efforts had come to nothing. Her woods were simply part of the rapidly changing larger landscape, and it was time I appreciated its scale. Once again, the bug had the final word.

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I get the rhythm of climbing this monster about the same time my fingers start to blister. I tip my head back and sight along the great column of wood rearing skyward in front of me. Halfway up this tree, the trunk does not yet begin to taper.

I flex my fingers and grab the two metal ascenders clamped to my climbing rope. The upper ascender is clipped to my harness, the lower to foot stirrups. They look like staple guns, work like locking ratchets. It’s a two-step deal: Sit in the harness and raise the stirrups; then stand in the stirrups and raise the harness. It’s about 18 inches a throw, and more than anything, it resembles the methodical crawl of an inchworm. Given that this tulip poplar is 165 feet tall, with a trunk that is 20 feet around, it seems about as fast.

As I climb higher, a woodland panorama opens up below me. Except for a few looming hemlocks, the forest is mostly hardwoods, and the light streams through the thinning tops of the taller oaks and basswoods. They are sizable trees, most of them, but even the 90-footers are dwarfed by the giant I’m dangling from. This tree is the tallest in the Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, a 3,800-acre tract of old growth in western North Carolina’s Appalachian Mountains. The tulip poplars here—the oldest date back to the 1600s—are among the largest living organisms east of the Mississippi. Decades ago, they escaped the logging crews that leveled these woods, and today they’re being scaled by a gung-ho tribe in harnesses and helmets, packing enough rope for a direct ascent of Yosemite’s Half Dome.

I arrive at the first branches breathing hard. How long did that take? Ten, 15 minutes? I’ve been a tree surgeon for years, but I’ve never been up a tree much taller than a hundred feet, and I’ve never climbed 90 feet without passing a single lateral branch. The limbs of this first crotch are more than two feet in diameter, too big to get my arms around. I lean over in my climbing harness and peer down. Genevieve Summers, my big-tree guide, stands far below, gives me the thumbs up. I mean, it could be the thumbs up—I’m so high I can’t really tell one digit from another.

Genevieve is a former chimney sweep who still favors black. She is a clear-eyed, athletic woman in her forties and one of the few certified tree-climbing teachers in the country. She’s a member of, and paid instructor for, Atlanta’s founding grove (or chapter) of , a club and school dedicated to promoting the sport of “technical tree climbing.” Established in 1983 by an Atlanta tree surgeon and rock climber named Peter Jenkins, TCI has five groves in the United States, as well as groves in Europe, Japan, and Botswana, where the lone member climbs baobab trees. As arcane sports go, tree climbing is right up there, though each year it creeps closer to the mainstream. By the end of 1999, TCI had some 600 members, nearly double its membership of just two years earlier. Its website—41 pages of advice, anecdotes, and boosterism—gets some 350 visitors daily. And , the country’s only manufacturer of recreational tree-climbing harnesses and saddles, arboreal hammocks, and other tree gear, doubled the size of its shop last year, hiring its first two employees. Tree climbers are taking all this equipment up California redwood, Okefenokee cypress, and Oregon Douglas fir.

Optimistically, perhaps, Jenkins calls tree climbing “America’s fastest-growing vertical sport,” attributing its popularity spurt to a kind of millennial techno-malaise. “TCI represents a grassroots movement away from high-priced machinery to a more simple form of exploration that adults remember from childhood,” he writes on the Web site. “Our fast-paced technological society seems to keep pushing us away from the natural world. Yet there still remains that hunger for more simple forms of adventure that can bring us back to nature.”

This weekend, about 30 of us are putting the moves on nature in the Kilmer Memorial Forest. The forest was established in 1935 in honor of New Jersey poet Joyce Kilmer, who was killed in World War I at the age of 32, but whose sentimental 1913 poem “Trees” (“I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree”) doggedly lives on. Each year, TCI members and instructors from around the country meet here to commune with the big trees and with one another. It’s not a buff and pumped-up group. Rather, it’s familial: four father-daughter pairs, a father and son, a mother and son, and two married couples. Ages range from ten-year-old Patrick Livergood to 72-year-old tree-climbing marvel Wild Bill Riordan. But from my roost 90 feet up this poplar, they all look tiny, indistinguishable as marbles.

Genevieve’s 19-year-old son, Silvan, is high above me in this great canopy of Rousseauesque leaves. He pulls himself onto a branch, checks his prussik knot, and lets himself down on his rope, hanging upside down like a lemur. He swings back and forth, grinning at me, and I think of what his mother said earlier: “Everything’s different when you meet people in a tree.”

At the base of the tree, I can just make out Genevieve, getting ready to come up. Very early this morning, she set our ascent rope with a hundred-foot shot over a high branch from her crossbow, and now she fixes her ascenders to the anchored line and snaps them to her harness with a locking carabiner. Most of the techniques and gear we use have been employed by cavers and rock climbers for years, but the tree climbers’ argot is mostly their own: A “flying traverse” is a Tarzan-like pendulum swing from treetop to treetop. “Bark bite” describes a tree-inflicted abrasion. “Tree surfing” is euphoria-induced skylarking on a windy day.

Unlike most other sports, tree climbing takes place in a living organism (or “being,” depending on whom you’re talking to). Maybe that’s why there’s a kind of built-in pantheism to it. Trees have long provided places for us humans to hang any anthropomorphic whimsy that crosses our fuzzy little minds. To children, trees are sprites and fairy-tale monsters. To adults they are shade, board feet, gods or goddesses. To tree surgeons they are fickle, uncooperative, occasionally violent clients. For related reasons, the naming of trees seems an important part of tree climbing; this tulip poplar I’m in has been christened Ariel. A pair of TCI training oaks are named Nimrod and Diana. Julia “Butterfly” Hill, the tree-sitting activist, called the 200-foot redwood she lived in Luna. And in Missoula, Montana, where I live, there’s a 60-foot Siberian elm I’ve come to know as Butch.

TCI founder Jenkins reveals his flower-power lineage when he speaks of wanting “to transform mankind’s relationship with trees.” And member Robert Fulghum, author of the spiritual primer All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, offers this koan-like assessment: “Tree climbing is a place to be rather than a thing to do.”

“The intimate experience you get from climbing a tree opens the mind and heart to what a tree really is,” says Sophia Sparks, co-owner of New Tribe. Of course, Sparks sells gear without which, for many, this degree of intimacy would be impossible; her company’s Ness climbing saddle costs $70, and its Treeboat Hammock (for arboreal spooning or leisure) goes for $112. There are also Treeboat Blankets, Treeboat Pillows, and an insulating Treeboat Cozy hammock liner. This is all good-looking equipment, and quite reasonably priced. But it’s hard not to think, Is this another deal where, to get back to nature, you gotta have the gear?

Unlike my own ascent of Ariel, Genevieve’s is not inchworm-like at all. Her movements are fluid and economical; she reaches Ariel’s first branches in half the time it took me. Watching a person come straight toward you up a rope produces a weird binocular effect, like she’s tunneling at you through thin air. Genevieve arrives unwinded and ties in above me.

“Hey,” she says, regarding us on our perches. “Lookit all these handsome dudes.”

It’s been a calm day so far, but now the wind kicks up. It roars through the branches like a great wave, loosening showers of seeds. There are shouts and whoops from all over the tree, and the climbers above me take pendulum swings, kicking out from the tree and rotating on their lines as the big tree sways.

“Wow!” someone exclaims. “Beautiful!” The earnest TCIers call this “deep fun.”

On the other hand, it’s impossible to be in a tall tree in a high wind and not feel, at first, a little bubble of panic. Then, like an infant, you give yourself up to forces stronger and larger than you—the rush of the wind, the creaking, the rocking. The movement becomes comforting and familiar. Even looking down becomes comforting and familiar. In a big tree, it all feels right.

It occurs to me that Ariel was a sapling about the time the Pilgrims arrived. In 400 years, the lower plates of bark have simply sloughed off, much like rock from an old vertical face. This is a “wild” tree, and up until ten years ago it was a pretty safe bet that no human had ever set foot in its branches.

Genevieve switches on her two-way radio and, like an air-traffic controller, tells ground control who to send up, who’s coming down. She needs the radio because at 120 feet it’s difficult to understand anyone hollering up from below, especially in this racket the wind is creating. The truth is, there’s a lot of hollering anyway. And a whole lot of ropes. There are now seven climbers above, below, and parallel to me. I try, but I can’t shake the feeling that somehow we’re infesting this tree. To the small crowd of day hikers standing below us, we must look like a pod of caterpillars, dangling by our silks.

In oracular mode Peter Jenkins predicts that, inside of ten years, recreational tree climbing will eclipse both rock climbing and caving in mass participation. He believes this is good news for trees because it will instill what he calls “a heightened tree awareness,” which will ultimately lead to more old-growth preservation. Included in the TCI mission statement is a pledge that its members will never harm the trees they climb. Spurs such as those worn by telephone linemen are forbidden, as are various other bark-damaging climbing aids like spikes or hook-ended lag screws. Climbers rely on ropes at all times. And TCI is scrupulous about the use of “cambium savers,” nylon tubes, and webbing slings, all designed to protect tender upper bark from rope damage. TCI also encourages climbers to fertilize the trees they climb and to spread gravel at the base of those that receive a lot of foot traffic to protect the root systems and avoid compacting the soil.

In 1970, when I first started rock climbing, I thought it was a sport for renegades and eccentrics, maybe like tree climbing is today. None of us ever dreamed that there would soon be so many people on the rocks that we’d need to switch from high-impact to low-impact gear. Or that, in spite of replacing steel pitons with cams and stoppers, we would eventually degrade many of the best routes simply by overclimbing them. I hope Jenkins is right about the “heightened tree awareness.” But I don’t believe anyone really knows what effect increased traffic will have on the trees, even if it’s traffic from enlightened climbers like the members of TCI. As the sport becomes more popular, of course, some climbers won’t bother with the kind of ethical protocol TCI observes and will climb the big ones without much interest in whether it’s injurious to the tree or even legal. (Here at Kilmer, we’re climbing with the approval of the Forest Service, although Kilmer’s rangers may soon impose more stringent regulations. Many public-land administrators, particularly in the West, will not allow their old-growth stands to be climbed at all.)

Then there are do-it-yourselfers like the Midwest man who took a bevy of students up a big maple and left them there, too panicked to get down. Or the kid who rolled out of his hammock high in a Kilmer treetop because he didn’t tie himself in securely enough, and sustained a mildly cracked backbone. (The boy was not with TCI; its safety record over 16 years is superb: zero fatalities, zero serious injuries.)

Still, “sometimes you can love a tree to death,” worries author Don Blair, a second-generation tree surgeon and the author of the book Arborist Equipment. Blair is skeptical about TCI’s ability to both promote the new sport and prevent damage, but mostly he’s scornful of that all-too-human tendency for climbers to keep score, a habit that mountaineers disparagingly refer to as “peak-bagging.”

Jenkins says that he sees no sign that tree climbers are slipping into a macho “summit or bust” mindset. But records are nonetheless kept of the heights of trees climbed. (Jenkins himself has been up a 357-foot coastal redwood, reportedly the fourth-tallest tree in the country.) And everyone knows that climbing buddies will compete for the fastest ascent, much like motorcycle riders drag racing for beers. When I told a TCIer that I had been up Ariel the day before, she smiled and said, “Yes, but did you go way to the tippy-top?” I was too mortified to admit I had not.

After three hours in Ariel’s canopy, I rappel to the ground and doff my harness. An older woman strolling along the path stops dead in her tracks. “Oh, my stars,” she says. “Is that a girl way up there?”I assure her that it is.

A couple walks by. “I’m gonna sign you up for that, honey,” the woman says.

“Uh-uh,” he cracks. “My tail ain’t long enough.”

At the foot of Ariel, a couple from New York are sporting the first designer climbing saddles I’ve seen, both custom-made by New Tribe. Hers has a faux-jaguar seat, his is faux zebra. Her climbing rope is a striking coral color. Unable to restrain myself, I blurt out, “What a beautiful rope!”

She fixes me with a look that might be ironic, might not. “Well,” she says, “isn’t that what it’s all about—your gear?”

A hundred yards up the path, several climbers prepare to ascend a double-trunked poplar tentatively dubbed The Twins. Nearby, a lone climber heads up a 120-foot cucumber magnolia as yet unnamed. He’s wearing camouflage, so when he hits the foliage, he becomes more or less invisible. A TCIer and his 19-year-old daughter are making their way up Ariel with the New York couple. Ten-year-old Patrick Livergood and his father are hanging from a small maple, practicing a technique called the “body thrust.” The body thrust is one of the more curious-looking methods of ascent: The feet are planted against the trunk, and the climber, horizontal to the ground, thrusts his pelvis skyward while he reefs on his rope. Talk about intimacy with nature! All this while 72-year-old Wild Bill is dozing in the sunlight halfway up a 40-foot maple.

There’s a side of me that enjoys watching these tree climbers having their deep fun. But I have problems because trees are my workplace, where the daily tasks of high pruning and dead-maple removals are deemed so hazardous that most insurance companies refuse to write policies. It may be my calcifying soul, but it’s hard for me to see trees as a playground. Imagine a gang of funsters piling into your office for a spin on the old swivel chair. Imagine them lying on your desk, saying things like, “Wow, that ceiling!” or “Hey! Bitchin’ windows!” Imagine them wearing faux-zebra power suits.

I wander down the trail to the fenced-in plot that is the official Joyce Kilmer memorial. Every day, a steady stream of visitors hikes the one mile from the parking lot to the site; they read the boulder-mounted plaque, pausing to note the pitiably short span of Kilmer’s life. They snap ritual photographs. Then, like light-seeking flowers, they crane their necks to the big trees, hoping to see whatever it is that people are always looking for up there. Which is what? A sense of scale?

“A tree that looks at God all day / And lifts her leafy arms to pray,” Kilmer’s poem continues, though not many get past the first line or two. You have to wonder what Kilmer would make of the scene here today: this towering forest bearing his name, the trees full of people, all this strenuous yearning for transcendence. The last lines of “Trees” (“Poems are made by fools like me / But only God can make a tree”) will tell you Kilmer was all too aware of his limitations. All he ever wanted was to make something beautiful, and you can’t blame a guy for that.

“Trees” is a forgettable poem, written by a young man with more heart than talent, yet it has not been forgotten. Probably because it’s a poem that rather simply and nakedly longs for transcendence—not unlike the people climbing these trees. And not unlike me, now that I think of it.

Tree surgeon Fred Haefele is the author of the motor-cycle memoir .

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