just follow the cat

Notes From the Overground

A Practical & Dispassionate Guide to Disappearing

If you're planning to be the man or the woman in the tree, the first thing you need to think about is the tree itself. That probably sounds obvious. And I guess it really is obvious, but that doesn't make choosing the specific tree any easier on you. After all, there are literally trillions of trees on Earth and tens of thousands of different types of trees. Among all of them, you want just one that you can climb and live out your life.

Since your ultimate goal is to disappear, picking a location for your tree might seem like a simple question. So simple that you might immediately leap to the conclusion that your tree should be in the most remote location possible. I think that's a mistake. Any activity in a remote location is memorable and you want to be as unmemorable as possible. Therefore (it seems) that the location you choose should be ignored more than it's isolated.

People should walk by or near your tree from time to time but have no reason to stop, wait, or explore. Your tree can actually be near a town or a city or even in the center of a city as long as the general area is fairly rundown. There should no homes, stores, rail lines, or trails nearby. Being close to an abandoned building can be good but nearby creeks and streams are not. Abandoned buildings will draw all sorts of unwanted visitors. So, make sure your tree is a long stone's throw away from the blight of the world. Likewise, people are attracted to water, so stay far away from that as well.

Keep looking until you find a tree that gives you the impression that no one has ever looked at it before. Not just a passing glance, but truly looked at it. Looked at the size, shape, health, and type of tree. If you walk away from a tree with an overwhelming sense of the ordinary, then you're probably close to where you need to be.

Once you've found a good location, you will need to choose a specific type of tree to climb. Given the thousands of species of trees, this may seem like an insurmountable problem, but it's not - because nature can be your guide. Ask yourself, who spends their time in trees? Obviously, birds fly from tree to tree all the time. Unfortunately, we don't have wings that could make those types of visits possible. But many animals also live in trees or they climb them. Some people (mostly children) do that as well. Think back to when you were young and you might recall times when you climbed every accessible tree. For most of us, however, adventurousness doesn't extend into adulthood. So don't be that person. Climb a tree from time to time and you will look as if you belong. That fact alone will render your excursions near the tree as being unremarkable. You can't ask for more than that.

When I first started to plan all this, I sat at the edge of a small forest and watched the trees. Lots of children came to climb them, but they didn't climb every tree. They looked for ones with lower branches that were sturdy. To my surprise, squirrels chose many of the same trees when they built their nests for winter. They just did it for different reasons. While kids looked for low branches so they could get off the ground, squirrels chose those same trees because they had thick branches almost all the way to the top. Building nests near the tops of trees kept the squirrels safer. Building them in trees with wide, heavy branches also gave them more room for food in their nests and more space for all the squirrels who huddled together for warmth during the coldest months.

Of all the trees in my personal forest, the beech tree (fagus grandifolia) seemed to have the best attributes for anyone planning to become the man or the woman in the tree. Low, thick, sturdy branches that can get you started on your travels off the ground. Heavy branches farther up the trunk that will give you all the privacy you might ever want.

Mature beech trees also have a dense network of internal branches. In the summer, when they are fully leafed-out, it's nearly impossible to see the top of the tree if you're standing directly beneath it. Furthermore, beeches are among the last trees to change color and lose their leaves in the fall. This should give you extra time to climb your tree without being noticed.

Like most trees, beeches drop their seeds beginning in the late summer. The thought of thousands of beech nuts may seem like an inviting bounty to animals of every stripe and stripelessness, but beech nuts have a bitter taste so it's unlikely that you'll have too many unwanted guests foraging on the ground below your new home.

If you're exceedingly lucky, you'll find a beech that's surrounded by ginkgo trees. In the fall, ginkgoes also drop their seeds in the form of fruit. The seed vessels are the size of a crabapple, yellow-brown, and extremely foul-smelling. When the fruit rots, the ground around the ginkgo smells like vomit. As a result, it's a great deterrent to all those humans who might think of exploring your turf. And it is your turf.

For these reasons, my choice among all the trees on Earth is the beech and the time for me to climb my tree is the early fall before leaves have turned and the branches are bare. I realize that there may actually be better choices than the one that I've made. Just some other tree. In some other place. For reasons that I never thought of. But clearly, no one can know everything and no one can think through every option. After all, there are trillions of trees on Earth. But that doesn't matter because I am happy with my choice. I think of it as historic. And it really is historic because everything is history, my dear ones. Everything. Everything.

History is not just what is written in books or daily papers. Even the smallest of the small is history. A cat's twitching whiskers. A cherry dropping from a branch. The slow transformation of leaves into soil. Gravel into grains of sand. Even a man climbing a tree is history. It's just history that never gets noticed or recorded.

And among all these fabulous historical events, there are only a tiny fraction that we will ever remember, many more that we will forget, and a surprising number that we will misremember and cherish as certain truth. So, my dear ones, cherish what you want. Forget what you must. And remember if you can.