Falling From Grace (2 page)

We scrambled across a dry creekbed on to a narrow trail overgrown with underbrush, then pushed through a patch of willow to find our way obstructed by swiftly flowing water. Above us to the left, a waterfall cascaded in a turbulent froth into a deep pool, to our right the main stem of the river and before us a boulder-strewn rapid.

I checked the map. “We have to cross the river,” I yelled over the din of the waterfall.

“Through the rapids?” Paul's eyebrows lifted.

“Your initiation,” I joked.

He dropped his pack in the sand at the water's edge and undid his belt. “If I had known I'd be fording wild rivers, I'd have worn my best gonchies.”

I studied the bubbling froth ahead, the water deep and fast. “I'm sending you over with a rope.”

He saluted me playfully, then stripped to his underwear. He tied one end of the rope to a sturdy sapling, slung the remaining coil over his shoulder, and waded into the current, paying out the line. “It's ice,” he hooted. The water rose to his knees, then to the middle of his thighs. He picked his way over and around rocks slippery with algae to the opposite bank and scrambled out, hairy legs pink with cold. He hobbled barefoot up the slope, wet body glistening, and wound the end of the rope around the trunk of a young Douglas-fir. He gave me the thumbs-up and flashed a smile, then waded back into the current, pulling himself along the taut line. I couldn't help but notice his muscular shoulders and the trim of his waist, the dark hair plastered to his chest by the river water, the V disappearing into the waistband of his shorts. I realized I was staring and looked up, but he was concentrating on his footing. I let out a mischievous wolf whistle—another skill learned from my brothers.

“Sexual harassment,” he protested with a grin.

“You should have seen what I did to my last assistant.” I laughed, glad of his sense of humour.

Paul stepped out and shouldered a pack. I waded cautiously into the river, my grip tight on the suspended rope. The frigid water soon rose above my waist and I gasped at the cold, the current stronger than I had anticipated, the rocks underfoot treacherous. I tightened my grasp and fought my way to the far bank, thankful for the security of the rope; I lost my hat to the current in the process. Paul ferried the gear across and made another trip back to the car. I set up camp and changed into dry clothes. An hour later tea water boiled on the camp stove, tents up, wet clothes drying in the sun.

“Great spot,” Paul commented, filling my mug with steaming dark liquid.

“I imagine you've seen lots of great spots,” I said. “The amount of travelling and wilderness work you've done.”

“Sure, but not many as hard to get to as this place,” he replied. “We hiked three days into a site in Borneo.”

After lunch we bushwhacked our way from river to ridge. Giant ancient trees appeared one by one: Sitka spruce in the sediments of the flood plain, trunks dripping with lichen and moss; thick-barked Douglas-fir rooted into the well-drained slope, and on the ridge a dozen western redcedar reached skyward, as big around as cars. Hemlock everywhere. Paul and I paced opposite directions around the perimeter of a mammoth cedar. We met halfway and beamed at each other. We had found our study site.

We assembled our equipment at the base of a massive hemlock. I threaded fishing line through the end of a rubber-tipped bolt and notched it into a custom-made high-powered crossbow mounted with a casting reel. I took aim from a patch of sword fern where I had a clear view of a large limb a third of the way up the tree. I braced myself against the recoil and squeezed the trigger. The bolt hissed through the air; the fishing line snaked behind, the reel singing as it spun.

The arrow cleared the limb and dropped down the far side. “Yes!” I raised my fist in triumph. I slung the crossbow over my shoulder and ran across the rough ground to the base of the tree where I searched the lower foliage for the dangling bolt.

Paul jumped from a fallen log and waded through a patch of salal. “First shot. You're a pro. I don't know what you need me for?”

“My safety net,” I said.

“Here it is.” He pointed out the bolt hanging a metre above his head. I paid out the line from the crossbow reel and the bolt descended to the ground. Paul retrieved it from the grasp of a devil's club and untied the fishing line.

I watched him knot the line to a coil of light parachute cord, pleased with his apparent skill and comfort with the equipment. He pulled the parachute cord over the branch and repeated the procedure with a climbing rope strong enough to lift a Volkswagen Beetle. I secured one end around the base of a nearby fir while Paul geared up to begin the tedious process of rigging a tree. Ascend to the limb, shoot another line higher up, climb, shoot, until he reached the top where he'd install a permanent pulley and anchor webbing to support the rope.

It took three hours to rig the hemlock. Our lives depended on the care with which we placed the rope higher and higher in the tree.

When done, Paul rappelled to the ground and we took a break against an arm-thick root that emerged from the trunk above us, looped over our heads, and wormed under a mass of moss, shoulder-high salal, and Alaskan blueberry. We reviewed our safety procedures over a bag lunch of sandwiches and fruit.

“Have you ever had problems?” I flicked a carabiner clip closed with a click to test its spring.

“No,” he said. “I don't take chances. But I've scraped a couple canopy cowboys off the ground. I watched one guy crater. Half equipment failure, half brain failure.” He glanced up from the nylon webbing he was knotting into a loop. “I think he clipped his descender onto the wrong side of his rope.”

“Did he live?”

“Yes, but it wasn't pretty. How about you? Any problems?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Knock on wood.” I tapped the gnarl of root behind me. A few months previous a reporter had interviewed me for a story about canopy research. The woman had crossed her legs and scrutinized me in silence, hesitant, I knew, to ask the burning questions.
How do you climb giant trees with your stunted limbs? How do you wipe your bum?
“Let's say I manage,” I would have assured her.
How do you lecture a class, carry a pack, drive a car, tie your shoes? Make love?

The tape recorder hummed on the table between us. She finally spoke. “Tell me, Dr. Pearson. How many canopy scientists are injured or killed every year while climbing trees?” I wanted to scream at her, at the stereotype, at her fixation on the sensational.

“It's the falling, not the climbing that gets 'em,” I had answered wickedly in my most professional voice. The reporter's face turned blank in confusion. “With proper training and equipment, tree climbing is safer than driving your car to work. And we never climb alone. Would you like to see my climbing gear? In fact, why don't we gear you up?”

We never got around to talking about bugs, the reporter and I. Few people understood my passion for segmented bodies and multiple appendages, armourlike exoskeletons so unlike the soft fleshy exterior of the
Homo sapien
, the ability to moult.

Paul loved to talk about bugs. He seemed to know an enormous amount about them. He had informed me that morning on the drive into the site that a flea can jump one hundred and thirty times its own height. That a house fly hums in the key of F and mosquitoes are attracted to carbon dioxide. That one species of moth exists entirely on cow tears.

I tried my damnedest to steer him away from the trivia toward my own passion. Arthropods.

“What do you think we'll find up there today?” he asked, double-checking my equipment.

“Mites.” I snapped the chin strap on my helmet closed. “Lots of mites.”

In climbing gear, I resembled one of my specimens blown up to gargantuan proportions, a creature from space. Helmet, safety glasses, hiking boots. A harness heavy with carabiners that dangled with ascending equipment called Jumars, foot straps, and a descender. I stuffed the pockets of one side of my dork vest with a soil corer, plastic sample bags, field notebook, and a pencil; the other side with a compass, handheld tape recorder, walkie-talkie, digital camera, knife, and a bag of chocolate chips and soy nuts. I took a pee behind a snag before I headed up; I expected to work in the canopy for several hours.

Paul and I bounced from the end of the rope like toddlers in a Jolly Jumper, to test the ability of the rigging to hold the weight of two people.

“All set.” Paul knelt and held the bottom of the rope taut to give me purchase. I clipped my Jumars onto the rope and climbed: slide the top ascender as high as I can reach, sit in the harness, lift the bottom ascender along with my feet, stand in the foot loops. Top ascender again. Repeat. Hump, stretch, hump, stretch, I jugged up the rope the way a worm inches along a tendril of honeysuckle vine. Early on in my career, tree climbing presented a challenge for me. My elbows did not straighten, each stride up the rope with my short arms and legs inadequate. An entire tall tree exhausted me. I worked out, swam to increase my endurance, practised yoga asanas to loosen my shoulder joints and hips and watched my weight. It wasn't until I understood climbing was more technique than strength that I was able to swarm up most trees in ten or fifteen minutes. Paul nicknamed me
the human arachnid
, although he beat me hands down, one-legged, a single stride to four of mine, up a tree in sixty seconds flat.

The going today was easy; the tree devoid of lower branches, the redundant appendages shed over time, no longer useful, the bottom third of the trunk straight and uninterrupted. I followed my progress against the red-brown scales of the bark a half metre away. I stopped, hung in my harness, and ran my hand across the rough surface, my fingers coming away sticky with clear, amber-tinged resin, the scent a mixture of herbal tea and paint thinner. I recalled the reporter's view of canopy work as sexy and chuckled to myself. Sap stained my clothes from years of mounting trees, my arms and legs bruised, hair decorated with plant life shed from branches. I laid back and looked up. The rope wound from the ground, between my thighs and through the ascenders, to disappear into the lacy foliage of the canopy high overhead.

I resumed my ascent and entered a maze of plant life. The light brightened and filled with birdsong: the
suweet
of a towhee, the spiralling whistle of a thrush, a raven's
kraah
, and the soprano
tsee
of a creeper. Each limb wore a cloak of vegetation as varied in colour and texture as a weaving. Forty metres up and out of sight, in the sunlight above the dense canopy, I knew the top of the tree drooped like all hemlocks, the way the tallest person in the room hangs his head in a vain attempt to appear shorter.

My radio crackled and Paul's voice floated out, frightening all the birds into silence.

“How's it going, boss?”

“Great,” I replied. “Why don't you rig the cedar while you wait? And don't hit me with a wild shot, eh?”

“I'll do my best.”

I continued up, stopping at five-metre intervals to take core samples. My perceptions were sharpened, the sounds louder, the smells more intense, the bark under my fingers an extension of my skin. I lost myself on a climb. Lost my limitations. Lost my name, my past. I opened up to the world in a way I never did on the ground. It was as if I became part of the tree. I twisted the corer, a section of open-ended pipe, into the thick mats of moss and soil, growing more and more excited at the prospect of what I would find once back in the lab with my microscope. New unnamed species of arthropods? Unique to the canopy? To this tree? Little was known about the high dwellers of the temperate rainforest.

It wasn't until I reached the pulley and tied myself in that I noticed the world beyond the intimate space of my hemlock. I radioed to Paul with one hand and fished the bag of nuts from my pocket with the other. “I'm at the top. I'll take a snack break before I head down.”

“What's it like up there?”

“Spectacular.” Through the crown branches, a sea of green stretched out to the horizon. “Trees as far as the eye can see.” I swivelled my head around to the east. “Shit.” My voice dropped an octave at what I saw.

“What's wrong?”

“Bloody goddam clear-cut.” From my vantage point I could see the destruction across the river, the ridge at the top of the slope bare of trees, and if I concentrated I could hear the distant roar of chainsaws and yarders.

• • •

After dinner,
we stood on the pancake boulders in the wide, lazy mainstem of the river near our campsite, the current sluicing around us.

“How far away is the logging?” Paul said. His eyes followed the trajectory of a bat feeding on mosquitoes high above our heads.

“Can't be more than a kilometre.” I flipped a pebble into the water. “Thank God for the park.” I sat cross-legged on the rock, its surface like human skin, warm and smooth against my hands. I took in the beauty of the valley, the hushed light of day's end on the water, the cool green of the forest. A Garden of Eden. Every surface, every nook and cranny, above and below ground, brimmed with life. Last winter on a whim, while writing a talk on canopy research for an outdoor group at a church, I downloaded the King James Version of the Old Testament from a website and searched for references to trees.
SEARCH
, the striking of a single button on a keyboard. The computer counted three hundred and twenty-eight. I found and read them all.
FIND
. The process took me a week, the initial reference—the prime reference
—
was to the
Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil
.

Was it old? Did its limbs drip with lichen and moss? Did spiders spin their webs between its branches; did mites go about their business of decomposing organic matter in the accumulated soils, the tiny chelicerae hard at work? Did beetles wriggle under the bark and armies of ants build galleries in between its roots? Did Adam and Eve climb into its canopy when they ate the fateful fruit?