Higher Places
At five, I was climbing trees far beyond my level of skill. I would like to say that my parents watched with mixed quantities of pride and heartache, but that would be a lie. They were more often at work. I wasn’t distressed by this. It just meant that I could sit up high in the sturdy gum in the front yard unharassed by the voice of reason.
The appeal of ‘the high place’ wasn’t overwhelmingly obvious back then. Now, I look at it and, perhaps with a hint of nostalgia, remember looking down on the lichen-covered roof of our single storey house with a sense of power that I am currently unable to muster. If I can get this high without tools, then nothing will ever be able to stop me.
Unfortunately, the tallest peaks of our yard remained insurmountable. Along the back fence, six gigantic pines stood side-by-side and reached taller than any others in our neighbourhood. The foliage was so thick that the trees blended into one another. Paired with their uniform height, the illusion was that you were not looking at six single trees but one solid wall of tree with six trunks. Though I tried repeatedly throughout the years, I could never make the least headway up their thick trunks. It was easy enough to make it one or even, when my resolve was at its strongest, two metres up the trunks, but the path to the point I craved, the highest limb that could bear my weight, was cut off by an impenetrable blockade of thin twigs and branches. Occasionally, I fantasised about climbing the trees with a chainsaw in hand, hacking my way to the top. My parents, though, either in ignorance or fear of what I might accomplish, repeatedly neglected to buy such high powered equipment.
The love of holes came as an epiphany. At thirteen, I made the spontaneous decision to dig myself a bunker. When I got home from school one afternoon, I set my mind to digging the deepest hole I could. I made sure to dig it down behind the pine trees against the back fence so that I could hide it from my parents by covering it with planks of wood—a commodity that I was, because of the various renovations and extensions in the house over the years, never deprived of—and dead pine needles from beneath the trees. As I dug, I was careful to sure up the sides of my bunker. I put some of the planks around the walls. I’m not sure if they served any real purpose but the walls weren’t collapsing as fast with them as they were without.
Eventually, I hit clay but discovered that if I poured a bucket of water into the hole and attacked it with the pitchfork I clumsily wielded, it broke up into clumps that were easily removed. The same worked for roots, they were easily dispensed with minimal discomfort. By seven pm—the hour that was artlessly and inexorably known as Bath Time in my young world—I had dug a hole deep enough to submerge myself completely. Satisfied with my day’s work, I went inside to clean up for dinner.
I hadn’t decided exactly how deep I wanted the hole to be, but I figured that it should at least be big enough to house myself and a few friends. I planned extensions in all directions and imagined future adventures in the hole. This was going to be the greatest achievement of my life to date.
The next morning, I awoke to the startling realisation that there was
a second hole. This one, though, was in the wall of pines. Three
trees stood
tall,
then a space, then the last two. The fence had been obliterated entirely,
and along
with it, the back half of our neighbour’s house. Needless to say, I stuck
to climbing.