Once upon a time, Samuel Swerling, a World War II veteran and inventor, decided to build a park. It would be filled with trees trained to grow in such a way that children could easily climb them. He hired Alonso Hannah, a one-armed arborist, and b...
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Chapter 1 "Young Samuel Swerling"
Trees get to know a lot of people.
The longer we live, the more people we know.
And the more we know about them.
Over the years we, meaning my fellow climbing trees and I, have developed a huge vocabulary of human beings. Mostly, they are city dwellers, except for the arborist who shaped us.
His name is Alonso Hannah, he came from the Pacific Northwest, and he only has one arm. He lost his left arm just below the elbow in an accident that he never discussed. But the loss didn't seem to affect him, because he was bigger and stronger and more capable than ninety-nine percent of the men out there who weren't missing a limb.
Early in his association with Mr. Swerling, I heard him grunt, "A man only needs one shovel, and a shovel only needs one arm to dig a hole to plant a tree."
At first, Alonso wasn't a friendly man. But he knew what he was doing, and nobody has ever quite accomplished what he did in terms of shaping trees. I'm not sure if some of the ideas were Alonso's or if all of them originated with Sam Swerling. Either way, you can't argue with results, and by the time they were finished with us, we looked great.
Well, we thought we looked great. So did Sam. And so did all those children.
That's what counts.
Or what used to.
Back then, I thought of Sam as Mr. Swerling. I still do. But he didn't like formality, and made sure everyone involved in creating the park called him by his first name. Not Samuel Swerling, either.
Sam. Just Sam.
I tried. I still try.
Sometimes I call him Sam. Sometimes I refer to him as Samuel. But in my heart of hearts, he will always be Mr. Swerling to me.
That is how much I respect him. That is how much I love him.
He's gone now, of course. He was born in a big slum in our big city in the year 1911, and he died at a family picnic in his very own park – my park – two weeks before his ninety-first birthday. You don't have to know much about Sam's early years, except that he survived the grim and gritty streets of a childhood during which, he later told newspaper reporters, he never saw a tree. That's right. Until he was eighteen years old, Samuel Swerling had never seen a tree, a lawn, a garden, or a park bench.
But the city college he attended had a small quadrangle of grass surrounded by classrooms, and thriving within that lush green quarter-acre were half-a-dozen large and lovely elm trees. In the early 1980s, the Dutch elm disease killed them and all the other elms in the city, but before they died, they were magnificent. When Mr. Swerling talked about those trees to interviewers, he always used the same four words: "They stirred my soul."
