I assure her that it is.

A couple walks by. "I'm gonna sign you up for that, honey," the woman says.

"Uh-uh," he cracks. "My tail ain't long enough."

At the foot of Ariel, a couple from New York are sporting the first designer climbing saddles I've seen, both custom-made by New Tribe. Hers has a faux-jaguar seat, his is faux zebra. Her climbing rope is a striking coral color. Unable to restrain myself, I blurt out, "What a beautiful rope!"

She fixes me with a look that might be ironic, might not. "Well," she says, "isn't that what it's all about—your gear?"

A hundred yards up the path, several climbers prepare to ascend a double-trunked poplar tentatively dubbed The Twins. Nearby, a lone climber heads up a 120-foot cucumber magnolia as yet unnamed. He's wearing camouflage, so when he hits the foliage, he becomes more or less invisible. A TCIer and his 19-year-old daughter are making their way up Ariel with the New York couple. Ten-year-old Patrick Livergood and his father are hanging from a small maple, practicing a technique called the "body thrust." The body thrust is one of the more curious-looking methods of ascent: The feet are planted against the trunk, and the climber, horizontal to the ground, thrusts his pelvis skyward while he reefs on his rope. Talk about intimacy with nature! All this while 72-year-old Wild Bill is dozing in the sunlight halfway up a 40-foot maple.

There's a side of me that enjoys watching these tree climbers having their deep fun. But I have problems because trees are my workplace, where the daily tasks of high pruning and dead-maple removals are deemed so hazardous that most insurance companies refuse to write policies. It may be my calcifying soul, but it's hard for me to see trees as a playground. Imagine a gang of funsters piling into your office for a spin on the old swivel chair. Imagine them lying on your desk, saying things like, "Wow, that ceiling!" or "Hey! Bitchin' windows!" Imagine them wearing faux-zebra power suits.

I wander down the trail to the fenced-in plot that is the official Joyce Kilmer memorial. Every day, a steady stream of visitors hikes the one mile from the parking lot to the site; they read the boulder-mounted plaque, pausing to note the pitiably short span of Kilmer's life. They snap ritual photographs. Then, like light-seeking flowers, they crane their necks to the big trees, hoping to see whatever it is that people are always looking for up there. Which is what? A sense of scale?

"A tree that looks at God all day / And lifts her leafy arms to pray," Kilmer's poem continues, though not many get past the first line or two. You have to wonder what Kilmer would make of the scene here today: this towering forest bearing his name, the trees full of people, all this strenuous yearning for transcendence. The last lines of "Trees" ("Poems are made by fools like me / But only God can make a tree") will tell you Kilmer was all too aware of his limitations. All he ever wanted was to make something beautiful, and you can't blame a guy for that.

"Trees" is a forgettable poem, written by a young man with more heart than talent, yet it has not been forgotten. Probably because it's a poem that rather simply and nakedly longs for transcendence—not unlike the people climbing these trees. And not unlike me, now that I think of it.   

Tree surgeon Fred Haefele is the author of the motor-cycle memoir Rebuilding the Indian.