Tree Seat

Joey Arnold
Paul Montone
Writing 115
10/16/2009

Tree Seat

We should travel back to my trailer park in Forest Grove, Oregon. We should ski right back, past the smoggy wind, the wet ewwy rain, and the delightfully lowered temperature!

Once upon a time, for most of the 90’s, there would lie or stagger this medium size maple or oak tree, right in our front yard of this so called ghetto neighborhood. Five years after being born in February 11, 1985, I was haunted by this tree. Ok, it was probably not that bad, but I really wanted to be able to climb it like my friends and older siblings. The tree was beautiful in the spring and summer time. During the thundering winter time, it was totally discolored and totally neutered from all leafs. We had swings on that baby, from time to time. One swing was on one branch for so long that the tree literally just ate it up. The branch grew around it and over it. Near the end of that decade, I would go up there and see the ropes all going right into the tree. I use to ponder about it. I use to wonder how that was even possible. It reminds me of an even bigger tree down the block, one that even bumped over a near-bye sidewalk over with its roots. How is that even possible? The tree was so big. The tree cracked that sidewalk up by five inches. Don’t plant your trees too close to the curb, to the street or sidewalks. Lesson learned. My tree didn’t ruin any sidewalks, but it sure did almost digest my ropes (our ropes, excuse me).
The floor, I mean, the ground, underneath our tree was usually dirt. In 1996, I was planting grass there. But we usually played there so much. I was always concerned with the yard’s health but there was only so much that an eleven year old could do.
I always look at this maple tree. We have even carved names and such into it. My older brother even attached a rope line or wire to it. The other side of the line was attached to this fence that keeps us from running into some factory’s field. But we would try hang gliding (or what do you call it with a coat hanger?). I never really tried it. But we also had this pulley. You could pull people up from the tree. We had several different swings or ropes or tires. One time, we even attached a balancing bean (board, minus the legs) to several ropes for a swing/teeter totter toy ride thing. We have build tree forts on and around it. I have dug holes all around it all through my life. We have played Power Rangers up in that tree, and the Bonus Game, and House, hide and seek, the Land of the Universe, the Tree Game, etc. One time, I snuck onto our roof from the tree. That was pretty tricky. This tree was much bigger than our apple tree in our backyard. Our third and only other tree (that we ever did have, really) was a pear tree that was eventually killed (or it may have died, just last decade). But this maple tree, however, was seeable from blocks away. I could recognize this tree from so far away. Better yet, you can go up there, where the wind is blooming, and see the neighborhood from way up there. One time, I stuck over thirty of my mice up there during early spring, maybe 1999, in pots, and blankets, but to make a long story short, they all froze to death up there.

But when you are up there, sometimes even with your cat (and never mind the mice, so sorry about that), you will find it easiest to rest on this tree branch.

I know I have thought up in that tree seat. I would describe that place as my office. If you want to get away, just jungle up this tree and sit on this tree-made seat. I am not sure how a tree can build itself a seat from the intersection of several more branches but I was always a fan of the place, even in the last several years. The tree may be dying. But this seat will never be forgotten. I am not even sure how such a simple product could do such monumental things. While playing Power rangers, that tree became this spaceship control center or pilot chamber for guiding my astrological space monsters through the spaces and times of my own imagination! My theories for innovation, or for nonsense, were often formed from my tree throne!

You would just have to be there to understand it. Why was it so important to me? Because it was my room. I always had to share my room with my older brother until 2000 when he ran off to college in Oklahoma. That is why I held that part of the tree with high esteem. I would not see it any other way.


It was symbolically the seat to my very brain!