“Treetises” is a column where I discuss the best trees to climb around Harvard’s campus. I wrote three Treetises—“The Best Tree in Harvard Yard,” “The Tree Trials,” and “Perchin”—during my junior fall, six years ago, in 2018. I left school after that year because I wanted to hitchhike and write.
I didn’t plan on taking five gap years, but I fell in love with living in my converted school bus. With a bus, you can live off-grid anywhere on public land, especially out west—in the desert, on the coast, up the mountains. Best of all, you can live with the trees.
Now, I’m back at Harvard for my senior year, and I need the trees more than ever. After years of barefoot freedom in our National Forests, I am perhaps more well-adapted to the environment of Harvard’s trees than Harvard’s halls. Growing up in Southern Massachusetts, I climbed similar trees with a child’s courage. I took trees for granted before; now, having lived so long in the desert, I appreciate them in a continental context. Massachusetts from above looks like a tufted ocean of trees. This old, wrinkled, temperate coast is a deciduous paradise. The ones with changing leaves are its drama and joy.
The eastern seaboard was once the Enchanted Forest—unknown, mature, full of living and large, twisting branches, rich soil, just the right mix of death and life. And though ecological grief sits heavily on our generation, I believe that the full spirit of the former and future forest lives in the heart of every individual tree—seeds of enchantment, even here at Harvard.
William James gave a commencement speech in 1903 called “The True Harvard,” in which he said that the true Harvard “is the invisible Harvard in the souls of her more truth-seeking and independent and often very solitary” sons and daughters. I would add that the true Harvard is also Harvard the place, the environment. Harvard the institution is but another flowering growth of Harvard the land, which has known many names. This land now carries peculiar human hives which are wonderfully well-adapted to producing the honey of the mind—honeycombs stored with words, honeybees dancing as a form of debate to develop new understandings of the world beyond the hive. “Thoughts are the precious seeds of which our universities should be the botanical gardens,” James said. We are farmers, hunters, and gatherers of veritas. We are the gardeners of our very selves, cultivating a diversity of imaginative blossoms.
It’s been a spectacular, beautiful, bittersweet fall. The specter of climate change hides over the horizon, while I enjoy week after week of days in the sunny seventies surrounded by surreal leaves in several severely searing colors. Every week since September, I’ve gone on long walks for what I assume is the “last warm day.” Every week I am mistaken. The leaves linger longer than I’ve ever seen. Orange leaves cover the bottom steps of Standish Hall in Winthrop’s Courtyard—a crunchy threshold between our old primate houses and our new buildings, these abstractions of trees.
All Souls’ Day was one of these warm autumn days. I had a wonderful office hours chat with a brilliant professor, and a lovely long lunch with a brilliant classmate. Is there anything better than that, here on this wildlife safari by the Charles River? Afterwards, I was sitting on the west railing at the crest of the Weeks Bridge, looking over the river that shaped this environment long before us, when I got a call from my mom. My uncle died; they just found his body. A single leaf in the light wind tore off my limb, flew, floated, and after a long linger landed lightly upon the surface of the water, spreading its last, slight, concentric ripples.
So I walked. I walked to Harvard Yard, which is full of trees. I walked by trees I’ve loved—old reliable perches, or trees that were challenges, whose first branch was just out of range, until after dozens of failures I learned to run faster, jump higher, reach just far enough. Tourists grazed the still-green yard. I walked until I reached my favorite tree at Harvard—the Emerson Tree. It’s the easiest tree to get into, and it lets you climb high with its straightforward, horizontal, pine-sappy branches. I pulled myself in, entering a flow state of feet and hands, dancing higher and higher skyward until I was over the inscription on Emerson Hall that says “WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM.” There’s a symbolism here, in climbing the tree over this building named for our greatest philosopher of man-in-nature, Waldo Emerson himself. The question thins to an answer in the open air. “WHAT IS… THAT THOU ART…”
A squirrel scampered from one thin branch in the heights of a neighboring tree right onto a branch of mine, as if across the dendrites of a neural network; we were in the canopy, at eye level with the broccoli of the Yard’s other trees. Perhaps all the branches of all the trees of all our stories are touching in some kind of canopy, some dialogue of ourselves from a wider point of view.
Along the way down I played a little, shifting my weight between four limbs on branches, a sort of organic tree yoga, stretching muscles that evolved first for the shapes of trees. I dangled by my hands high, high above the ground; I’ve never fallen out of a tree. I swung from branch to branch as if across monkey bars. Swinging carefully from a final branch I dropped to the ground, bipedal again, and began walking, my hands swinging freely. The Latin root of the word “man” is “hand.” So much of what it is to be human is what it is to have hands. To be freed from gravity by friends. To be capable of reaching out to the world ahead. To be this endless grasping.
Finally, as the sun was setting, I crossed the Science Center Plaza through warm wind to the massive oak between Littauer and the Science Center, where students walk between the Yard and the Law School. This narrow confluence is a major vein of Harvard’s body. I took off my shoes and socks to stretch gratuitously in the grass, limbering up.
See, for real tree-climbers, this tree’s what you might call a black diamond; it’s wicked hard to get onto that first thick branch high off the ground. You’ve gotta run, jump, kick-double-jump off the trunk, reach high, and grasp this very difficult-to-grasp branch, tilted upwards and thicker than my hips. You basically end up bear-hugging it upside-down, dangling from quite high. It’s a scary moment. But if you’re strong, you can wiggle yourself around the branch using the trunk-wedge as twisty leverage, dragging yourself inch by inch around the thick limb until you’re straddling it belly-down. This will scratch you up if you don’t wear long pants and sleeves. It’s significantly harder barefoot, but trees feel way better raw. Once you’re balanced on the first branch, you’re more than safe—you’re in the tree. It’s easy from here, and quite rewarding.
The Littauer Tree is interesting because it has so many different levels, perches, and paths to move through. Branching complexity increases degrees of freedom in a way that’s more multiplicative than additive. The sun had oranged towards the first buildings peeking out from the Cambridge canopy to the west. A slice of shadow struck me, so I climbed higher. Full and orange again I broke out into the sun, as tall as the top floors of Littauer, perched on a main trunk-branch far above the tunnel of cars below the Plaza. They, too, I suppose, are part of nature; not different in origin, but rather in their degree of harmony with the ecosystem.
I wedged my poor red feet into yet another v-shaped pocket, pulling myself higher, going out on a literal limb. I’ll admit, this one felt a little risky, but the limb was strong. I rose the height of a tall child. I was in the entire sun. Sometimes, the wind blew powerfully, and I held on tight. To know wind upon branches this high is an exhilarating exercise of faith—faith in the movements of my body, faith in the strength of the tree. To participate in the life of the land, to be shaped in dialogue with a place—this is how we become native.
I descended with the sun, but to still-considerable heights, like Melville’s Catskill eagle. I lingered alone in the canopy. There were no eyes I had to meet with words. I love climbing trees because it feels like a chance to escape the social environment into clearer air—to breathe singularly, to think in solitary contact with the sky upon my forehead. To be with nature. But of course, our hive of words is nature too, a beautiful new kind of ecosystem. There is nothing we can do that is not a branch or leaf of nature. Humans are a part—just not all. There is so much more than ourselves to learn from. So we reach out…
I descended further. Below, in the vein of the tribe, a law student from my “Rights of Nature” class walked by, heading from the Law School towards the heart of Harvard. The class imagines how our legal and cultural environments would change if trees and other living things had legal rights, a voice, and respect for their personhood. After all, corporations can have the rights of people… Are trees not just as real, just as possessing of needs and desires?
As it darkened, I descended to the most comfortable perching branch, wedging myself between it and the trunk. I wrapped my legs tightly around the branch, balancing myself to free my hands, so that I could take out my notebook and write. Poems come easily to hands in such environments.
My little sister, now a senior too, called me. Through the technology of the phone (a sort of tight crystallization of nature), I learned she’s in the Science Center Library, a stone’s throw away as the neutrino flies. So she hung up and ran outside, overjoyed to see me in such an impossible-looking tree. We had a lovely vertical conversation. We talked about our uncle; we talked about our dad. He is very lucky to have us. Prodigal oak leaves fell around us in every color—they make good soil. It is true to say that trees are our ancestors. It wouldn’t be heaven without trees.
Every year, this tree grows a little, and drops a few more leaves than before. New branches, new offshoots, new fruits of our labor as time grows on. Sprouts of ourselves we can nurture. I have grown these last six years; my uncle’s niece has grown, not just in size, but in beauty and wisdom. I dropped to the ground and stood, held up against gravity by the millions of deaths that make the dirt so alive. We walked home together, through Harvard Yard, me and the branch of humanity closest to mine. I imagine our ancestors smiled to see it. I know I did. Old branches, new leaves.
Aidan Fitzsimons ’25 (aidan_fitzsimons@college.harvard.edu) is staunchly against leaf-blowers.
