THE KING'S TREE

The Lombardi family lived in a small wood-sided bungalow with peeling paint and sagging roof line. All of it had a worrisome right-leaning tilt. The fenced yard was a stone’s throw from the main tracks that ran down the middle of town on their way to the smoky steel mills of Hamilton where Tony’s Dad worked.

Everybody in Fraserville called Tony’s neighbourhood ‘Wog Town’ because that’s where all the poor immigrants lived. It was only when he grew older that Tony realized Wog Town was definitely on the wrong side of the tracks and life there was a difficult one.

Spreading out beyond the tracks was a bush. To young Tony, it was an enormous forest, full of tall trees, scrub brush and a small, ever-flowing creek slowly working its way from one corner to the other. Tony’s mother, like all the other mothers on Station Street, warned the kids to never go into that bush to play.

“It’s a dangerous place.”

Her voice always had a weird edge whenever she talked about it.

“Before you were born, little Jasper Santos wandered in there one afternoon and was never seen again. Oh, the sniffer dog found one of his shoes. And the small red ball Jasper always had with him. But never no body.” 

Tony knew this was serious stuff. At the mention of the Santos kid, his mother always crossed herself, then whispered a quick ‘Blessed Father hold him dear to you.’

Occasionally Tony overheard his mother talking about the bush to Mrs. Ryder from next door. The mothers called it the Devil’s Bowl. But it was with hushed tones and always when they thought the boys weren’t listening.

Tony and best friends Randy, Brian and Clifford all yearned to go exploring in Devil’s Bowl. What made their desire even more intense was the giant tree. It towered way above everything else. The boys had a name for it. The King’s Tree.

The tree was a natural magnet. It drew the imagination and attention of ten-year-old boys like nothing else could possibly do. It would be an excellent tree to climb. Maybe even build a fantastic fort in its lower branches.

The boys drew up some rough plans of what their tree fort would look like. Secretly, from the many piles of discarded debris the work crews frequently left along the track, they began stealing odd sized lumber pieces, a half dozen weather-warped plywood sheets, a couple of small wooden barrels with old nails, a few rolls of rusty wire. The boys hid their stash in the tall grass of the weed-choked field behind Cliff’s house. 

It took them an entire summer to collect everything. By the next summer, the boys were almost ready to sneak into Devil’s Bowl to build their fort. And, of course, to climb as high into the King’s Tree as they dared.

But then a totally unexpected thing happened. 

One Saturday morning in early July, Tony’s mom announced that since the boys were older now, all the Station Street moms had decided that Devil’s Bowl was now a safe place to play.

Tony and his friends hollered and danced, then took off at full gallop, wildly crossing into the mysterious, once- forbidden Devil’s Bowl.

The bush was thick and dark, a glorious and scary place to explore. At the base of the King’s Tree, the boys found the remains of campfires, old shelters made of wooden packing crates, dirty chunks of grey canvas, mouldy bits of clothing including an orphan leather boot, an old pocket knife with its single blade open and a massive pile of rusty cans. But one treasured find fed the fires of their wild imaginations like no other. It was a bunch of gnawed upon bones. The boys decided these were the remains of human sacrifices surely done by the Devil himself.

But their greatest prize was an old two-handled push saw with big, sharp teeth. Randy found it wrapped in an oily grey Army blanket, hidden in a hollowed out tree. Immediately, the boys began to awkwardly practice the two-person sawing technique on smaller trees. With a few hours of concentrated practice, they had just about perfected the smooth push and pull rhythm of the long blade.

A week later Randy suggested they cut down the King’s Tree. They could saw it up into long, wide boards to build an even better fort in one of the smaller but easier to climb trees.

Tony’s real mission was to climb to the very top branches of the King’s Tree. So he wasn’t in favour of cutting it down. But he was out-voted. The felling of the King’s Tree began in earnest.

Tony believed it would never happen. He was sure it would take months of hard cutting on the tough trunk, so he continued to practice climbing the King’s Tree whenever he could. He would leap and grab the lowest branch, pull himself slowly up, then cautiously move from branch to branch using the naturally staggered limb placement like a ladder.

The higher he went, the scarier it became. Up there the tree was thinner, the branches less strong and spaced further apart. With a wind blowing, the top of the King’s Tree swayed back and forth. At that height, Tony realized it was much harder to climb and still hang on safely.

Young Tony was determined to get to the very top. His natural passion for climbing was fueled even more by a book he had recently smuggled out of the Fraserville Library. It was about the two men who were first to climb Mount Everest. Edmund Hillary and his Nepalese guide Norgay Tensing reached the mountain’s 29,000-foot summit in 1953.

To ten-year-old Tony, this was an incredibly inspiring tale. He imagined himself as Hillary each and every day he climbed one more branch upwards. Summiting the King’s Tree was his goal. And he would surely do it.

But sometimes, life has its own plans for ten-year-old boys. 

Randy, Cliff and Brian were equally determined to bring down the King’s Tree. Whenever they could, the three boys worked with focused energy at the base of the tree. They made fun of Tony’s story about the climbing of Mount Everest and teased him terribly about his silly goal of summiting the King’s Tree.

On a bright, cool late September day, the boys went into Devil’s Bowl for another day of working and climbing the tree. Tony had decided that this was going to be his Everest moment. But he didn’t tell his friends. He quickly made his way up to the remaining tiers of upper branches.

Way down below, his friends pushed and pulled with a steady and experienced rhythm. They loudly sang a lumberjack song Randy had learned from a storyteller at the library. It was about rough men who cut tall trees and dragged them to the river for floating down to the mill. The song was inspiring and helped keep a steady swishing beat for the saw.

The wind was gusty and strong that day. Tony carefully pulled himself onto the uppermost branches and hung on tightly. The treetop swayed and bent with his added weight and a more than usual force of the wind. He could see for miles. All of Wog Town and over the tracks into downtown Fraserville. In the hazy distance, Tony was sure he could see the blue Caledon Hills. To his left, over toward the lake, the faint outline of the four slender smokestacks of the steel mill in Hamilton where his father worked.

Victory at last!

Just like Hillary and Tensing, ten-year-old Tony Lombardi raised his arm in triumph. He shouted out, “I am the King of Wog Town and Fraserville! God bless the King!”

Beneath him, the King’s Tree began to shake and sway. Much farther than any time before. He faintly heard someone shout.

“Timber! Run for your life! It’s going down!”

Under Tony, the giant tree seemed to sigh deeply. A short, silent pause. Then a deafening crack echoed up to him.

Suddenly he was on his way down.

It was all over in an instant. But to young Tony, the moment seemed to go on forever.

Clinging desperately to the top branches, Tony rode his King’s Tree down into the forest canopy far below. Air rushed by. Branches slashed at his face as the King’s Tree hit the top foliage of the surrounding trees, bounced hard to the left, then bucked right as the trunk snapped cleanly off and slammed into the ground with a loud wump.

Cliff was shouting “My god, oh my god he’s dead.” Brian was running for Tony’s house crying and yelling for Mrs. Lombardi to come quick. Randy, who had the good sense to jump away from the trunk as it started to crack and fall, dropped the saw and just stood there, his mouth frozen open in a silent scream.

Tony awoke on his back among the branches of his King’s Tree. He was lying in the rocky and damp stream bed of the creek that ran kitty corner through the Devil’s Bowl. He couldn’t breathe easily. His chest felt like the time when Big Dave from school had pushed him down in the playground and flopped on his chest like a tv wrestler. His right arm, the one he had just raised so triumphantly in victory, felt odd. It didn’t move too well when he tried to pull it out from under a large branch. His crotch and underpants seemed very wet. He prayed to the Holy Mother that it was from the stream and not from pissing himself. He knew the boys would never let him forget it.

Tony just wanted to close his eyes and sleep. He did.

Dr. Roberts kept him in the hospital overnight for observation. ‘It’s just a precaution,’ he told Tony’s mother. She sat by his bed all night, wiping his head with a damp cloth, stroking his left hand. Tony’s Dad arrived at the hospital in a company truck that his foreman signed out when the mill learned of the accident. He sat in the corner of Tony’s small cubicle, staring blankly into space, sometimes leaning forward to whisper quietly with his fretting wife.

The boys never again went back into the bush.

When the railway heard of Tony’s accident, they quickly sent in a crew with saws and cleared out all the tall trees from Devil’s Bowl. The railwaymen carted away the remains of the hobo encampment using stained, rough burlap bags left over from storing coal in the old abandoned sheds that lined the tracks. And of course, a long-bladed, two-handed saw they found at the stump of the tree the Lombardi kid had ridden to earth a few days before.

As so often happens with adventures of ten-year-old boys, the story of the King’s Tree was told again and again. The entire tale took on legendary status among all the kids in Wog Town. And to the delight of the Wog Town boys, it even crossed over the tracks into the posh schools and ever-so-safe playgrounds of downtown Fraserville.

THIRTY-FOUR YEARS LATER…

When his wife had first raised the idea of a personal Bucket List project, Tony had taken it up with enthusiasm.

It helped that in the past couple of months he had been thinking about the King’s Tree from his childhood. How that unfortunate experience had ended his tree-summiting career right then and there. Tony knew it would sound silly to Terri and his friends if he confessed it openly. But now, as a forty-four-year-old man, he was determined once again to climb and summit on another tall tree.

The Bucket List offered a safe way to go public with it. The King’s Tree became Tony’s number eight: ‘Climb the tallest tree in the forest like I did when I was ten.’

Without telling Terri, he immediately began a search for the tallest, most suitable tree to climb. He checked out nearby conservation areas, old bush lots on farmers’ back acreage and of course every city park of reasonable size.

 

Two weeks ago, he discovered it.

The tree was a fifty, maybe even sixty foot Jack Pine in the heart of Emily Park on the eastern edge of town. The park was a popular area, partly because of its heavily forested grounds of mature trees of both the needle and leaf varieties.

Tony’s chosen tree towered above most of the nearby ones. It had stout branches that spiralled lazily up and around the trunk, spaced just about right for climbing. From the ground, he was sure the top-most branches would support his two hundred plus pounds. Even better, the tree was at least a hundred feet from a popular running and biking trail so he would be assured of some privacy as he climbed.

On his final recon visit, Tony tried to jump up, catch onto a lower branch and pull himself up. It took some effort because he was out of shape, but eventually, he was able to struggle up onto the branch. Satisfied, he jumped down, wondering if he should bring a short step ladder to help conserve his energy for the climb.

Tony knew he would have to climb early in the morning before any of the runners and bikers would be on the trail. Given his obvious age, it might be hard to explain to a curious passerby. So he’d have to start just before daybreak.

The adult, rational side of Tony’s brain repeatedly whispered that this was an absolutely crazy idea. But the wild, unpredictable ten-year-old kid side of his brain was a loud and persuasive cheerleader for doing the climb.

So, climb it he would.

As he began his preparations, Tony recalled Terri’s words when she saw the ‘climb the tallest tree’ item on his Bucket List.

“When you find the right tree, let me know. I’ll be there with my cell phone to take some pictures. And of course, to call 911…just in case.”

It was an unnecessary afterthought. But she didn’t regret saying it, given the circumstances.

This past weekend, over their usual morning coffee and pastry, he told Terri that he had found the ideal tree in Emily Park.

“Next Sunday. Just before dawn. That’s when I’m going to climb. You still up for it?”

Terri knew there was no point in arguing all the reasons why this was such a stupid and really dangerous stunt.

“Ok,” she said, forcing a tight smile. “Let’s do it!”

So just before dawn, she found herself standing beneath a ginormous pine tree. She had her cell and a large Thermos of black coffee they had picked up on the drive to Emily Park.

Tony had chosen his climbing gear with care. Tight fitting black T-shirt and riding shorts. So he wouldn’t get snagged on the branches. New fluorescent orange runners, bought specifically for the climb. Tony assured Terri that ‘these beauties have an odd tread pattern that is perfect for clinging and grabbing.’ He’d tried to get them in a darker, less conspicuous colour. But the store clerk at Drane’s had insisted they came only in bright orange. On his hands, Tony wore a pair of black, ventilated fabric gloves. He told Terri that all the NFL pass receivers used them for their guaranteed sticky grip. A black wool seaman’s watch cap topped it all off.

Terri asked him to pose at the trunk of the tree. Unfortunately, she left the flash on. The bright light temporarily destroyed Tony’s night vision, so he had to wait a few minutes impatiently until it returned.

Just before leaving home, Tony had decided against the step ladder. So with a deep, loud breath, he leapt up, grabbed the lowest branch and with lots of moaning and groaning, slowly pulled himself onto it. Against her better judgment, Terri even gave him a final boost upwards with cupped hands. She tried taking another picture of Tony heading up the tree. But this time she left the flash off, hoping it would turn out in the semi-darkness.

First light was peaking over the distant horizon.

The first thirty or so feet were relatively easy. In the pre-dawn mist, Tony could faintly make out the town’s white water tank and the limestone clock tower on the red slate roof of City Hall.

As expected, going upwards from branch to branch was no problem. But Tony hadn’t counted on the tree sap and pitch that started to cover his gloves, shirt and shorts. Big, gooey chunks of it were also getting tangled in the hairs on his arms and legs.

Now, the sun was just up over the water tank.

The next twenty feet or so were more difficult. The branches were spaced further apart, not in a regular spiral pattern like lower down. Tony noticed that every branch seemed to have slightly more flex to it than the previous one.

Flashbacks came unbidden about climbing the original King’s Tree in Devil’s Bowl. His concentration on climbing was starting to drift a bit. He forced himself to stay mentally focused. To lose concentration at this height would put him at too much risk.

Far below, Terri would occasionally yell up to him, asking how he was doing. Sometimes she offered words of encouragement. For some odd reason, her shouts reminded him of the cheerleaders’ chants when he was playing football at Fraserville High. It had pumped him up then and did again now.

His watch showed three minutes to seven. The early morning sunlight seemed to be bathing the upper branches with a soft, almost mystical light. He was still making progress, but it was slower than before.

A slight wind started to sway the treetop slowly back and forth. The higher he climbed, the more aware he became of the swishing rasp of his breath coming in shorter, somewhat laboured gasps. He heard a bird making a racket somewhere below. He wondered what that was all about.

Tony was almost at the top. Only a couple more branches. It was as far up as he could safely go. He dared to glance to his left, then right. He was awestruck by the spreading landscape of the waking city and the distant sounds of early morning traffic. Oddly at this moment, he thought about his usual double-double and fried egg breakfast sandwich from the drive through over on River Road.

He was at the top. Or as close to it as he could possibly get and not risk breaking a branch and crashing down into the tree canopy beneath.

Over the past couple of days, Tony had given quite a bit of thought to what he might shout to the mostly slumbering world of Fraserville spreading out below him. Now he knew first-hand what Neil Armstrong must have gone through as the astronaut tried to decide what to say as he set foot on the surface of the moon.

But in his heart, Tony knew there was really only one set of words that was worthy of this special moment.

Here at the top of the tree in Emily Park, it felt exactly like when he was ten years old, swaying wildly at the very top of the original the King’s Tree in the Devil’s Bowl.

Forty-four year old Tony Lombardi shouted at the top his lungs.

“I am the King of Wog Town and Fraserville! God bless the King!”

And just as he had imagined his childhood hero Edmund Hillary doing at the top of Everest, Tony raised and pumped his right arm in triumph.

He had done it!

For the first time in decades, he was once again at the top of the tallest tree around. It felt utterly amazing.

Way down below, he heard Terri whooping and hollering. She was probably dancing around the trunk, celebrating his accomplishment. He knew that Terri believed it was a totally crazy, wildly immature thing to do. But he hoped she’d got some good shots of him striking his Hillary pose.

Juiced on adrenalin, Tony reluctantly started down.

It was far trickier than coming up. He had to feel blindly for a secure branch below him. Sometimes his runners slipped, forcing him to hang on tightly to the branch above until he could find a new toehold.

All the goop from the tree syrup was messing up the treads causing the slipping. But there was nothing he could do about it now. He just wanted to get down and celebrate his victory with Terri. Maybe they’d each have that double-double with a breakfast sandwich he’d promised himself.

By Terri’s estimate, Tony was about halfway down, making slow progress, when it happened.

A woman’s voice pierced the crisp, early morning air. It was shrill, excited and shouting from somewhere over by the trail.

“Hey! For god’s sake, what the hell are you doing up there? Are you crazy? You’re a man for god’s sake! Shit! Get a grip. Get out of that damn tree! Now!”

A whistle started blowing very loudly. Apparently, the woman always carried one for just such an emergency. But until this very moment, she’d never used it.

Startled by the combination of excited shouts and loud, long whistle blasts, Tony immediately lost his toehold and slipped off the branch. He hung on desperately to the now sagging branch above, feeling wildly for another somewhere below him.

“Oh my god, you’re going to fall. Shit, I’m calling the cops!” It was the woman with the whistle again.

Terri was now in panic mode. High above her, Tony was desperately scrambling to find a toehold while hanging bat-like from an upper branch. She could hear him calling out with a noticeable measure of panic to the unknown woman.

“Please, don’t call the police! I’m ok. I’m on my way down! No need for the police. Everything’s under control.”

But everything was happening too quickly.

Tony now knew with certainty that the cops would soon arrive. Maybe even the film crew from the local television station who monitored the police radio communications. There’d be roof lights flashing. Maybe sirens wailing too. They would catch him in his silly stunt. He knew it would all be totally embarrassing and tough to explain in any rational way to anyone other than Terri.

His toes briefly found a semi-solid hold. But then he started sliding down, branch to branch. Sometimes, in fleeting glimpses, he thought he could see Terri beneath the tree looking frantically off toward the trail.

He had to hurry.

His rapid, erratic bouncing descent from branch to branch finally came to an awkward and painful stop about ten feet from the ground. Looking down, he realized he was just above the big branch he had used to pull himself up into the tree.

Terri was yelling at him.

“Tony! Hurry the hell up!”

There was an angry buzzing. Instantly, Tony was swarmed with what must be dozens of Yellow Jacket bees. Somehow in the dark, on his way up the tree, he had avoided waking the bees nesting inside a large crack of a twisted branch.

In his blind haste down, he had accidentally put a searching toe firmly into the entrance of the nest. The bees were now fully awake, angrily determined to punish the intruder.

Looking up, Terri realized that something was horribly wrong. Tony was hanging on with one hand, twisting wildly while swatting at some invisible thing with the other.

That was about the time flashing red, white and blue lights flooded the space over by the distant roadway. From the general direction of the path, a bunch of people were noisily crashing through the low bushes toward her.

“Oh my god,” she blurted out. “This can’t be happening!”

Terri quickly realized that not only was it the cops but also the paramedics and firefighters! All of it in response to that screaming woman’s frantic 911 call.

Above her, there was a sudden groan mixed in with a ripping, wush type sound.

Tony came crashing down, bouncing painfully off the lowest branch, miraculously landing on both feet an arm’s reach away from her, legs immediately collapsing, his limp body corkscrewing awkwardly to the ground. Terri could see that Tony was wildly but feebly swatting at what she now realized were dozens of bees darting angrily at his face and hands.

A red-faced cop and a fresh looking woman paramedic were the first to reach them. The cop demanded to know what the hell was going on while the kneeling paramedic started to immediately work on a groaning, twitching Tony.

Inexplicably, the bees ignored the paramedic, preferring to punish the creature that had damaged their nest. A stretcher was eventually produced. Tony was carted off to the hospital for assessment, and whatever treatment was necessary.

Terri spent the next hour explaining as best she could to the cop Sergeant about Tony’s Bucket List wish to climb a tall tree. But she could see that he was just not buying such a crazy-ass idea.

However, the cop eventually decided it was just another stupid, wacky stunt. Since nobody but Tony had been hurt, no harm was done to the public.

As Terri began to slide out of the rear seat of the Sergeant’s cruiser, he stopped her.

“I’ll have to talk this over with my boss downtown. But you and your husband may have to pay for the costs of three emergency services being dispatched to this ….”

The Sergeant hesitated. It was clear to Terri that he really didn’t know exactly what to call what he had just witnessed. She smiled. She didn’t either.

After a couple of hours in the ER, the hospital sent Tony home with bruised ribs, some raw looking scrapes and lots of white calamine lotion splotches smeared on many bee stings. His dirty, sap-scarred fluorescent orange runners and torn black climbing gloves were in a clear plastic bag along with what Terri figured was Tony’s badly dented ego and reputation.

After gingerly settling into the passenger seat of their car, Tony took a deep breath. And then he began to laugh.

“What you say we get some coffees and pastries at the Silver Bean? My treat!”

Flashing Terri his ten-year-old boy smile, Tony held up one slightly swollen and scraped finger.

“One down. Nine more to go.”

First Published: This story was published in two parts on November 19th and 20th, 2018 in the Canadian online magazine CommuterLit.

The Backstory: When I was a kid I enjoyed climbing tall trees - the taller, the better. The first part of this story is based on the real-life experience that ended my tree climbing passion.

As an adult, I have often thought about that experience and wondered what it would be like to once again climb the tallest tree in a forest. But mature, sane male adults just don't do that. So I created a fictional Bucket List for the main character and had him set about to repeat his childhood tree climbing passion.

Legal Rights. ‘The King's Tree' is the intellectual property of the author, Don Herald. No part of this story may be reproduced in any format without the written permission of the author.