I most certainly do.
I first learned about swearing from my uncle. He was a burst of energy, revving people up to go skiing, or sailing, or whatever fun was to be had at the moment. Every other word out of his mouth was a swear word. Opposite of my uncle, my mother wouldn’t even allow us to say “Shut up.” Dire consequences would happen if she heard that from my brother or me, and they usually involved soap.
It was most evident that I had deviated from my mother’s hope for an intelligent speaking daughter (“Using swear words shows lack of intelligence,” she often said.) when I did a tree climbing adventure for What’s a Girl to Do? way back when.
I had met a big wig at Sony Production during a golfing adventure and he was quite interested in my adventures, so much so that he wanted a video of one of the WGTD adventures.
Excited about the possibility of WGTD going out into the world, I gathered a cameraman, a producer and a couple of friends to do an adventure of climbing a tree and then jumping off of it, while connected to a belay line. I was to be guided by a wilderness/tree climber/ropes challenger-extraordinaire coach, whose blue eyes would make my stoic friend Mabel’s heart skip a beat. He certainly made me gasp for air.
At the location, the oak tree stood naked amongst giant oak trees. It was about 40-feet tall, two-feet in diameter at the base, the trunk arced slightly and tapered to the sawed-off 10-inch diameter treetop. It was denuded, except for a thin canopy at the top. It didn’t look like it would hold any weight without a lot of swaying. How in the world would I climb that?
Mr. Blue Eyes had me gear up with a helmet and harness with carabiners hooked to the belay lines. “I’ll break your fall with this belay line,” Coach said, “when you jump from the treetop.”
“F-no, that’s not going to happen,” I said. That’s when the first F-Bomb came out. Fear makes it
jump from my mouth. Also anger, and crying, but at this point, it was pure fear.
“We’ll get through this together,” Coach said in his rich, honeyed voice. What was a girl to do? Chicken out? With the camera rolling?
I’ll be brave, I told myself. And as I climbed the first rung (a fist-sized, U-shaped metal staple secured into the tree’s trunk), Coach backed away.
“Aren’t we…”
“I’ll be right here.” He pointed to the belay line, “I’m your safety net.”
I climbed the next rung, then another, and another, thinking: This isn’t hard. When I was two-thirds to the top, the tree began to sway. I bear hugged it and dropped another F-Bomb. A loud one. Coach said something but I wasn’t listening. Vertigo hit me as I looked up to the next rung.
Afraid I’d tumble backward, I clung to the tree. More F-Bombs.
I needed a strategy to get to the top. The staples were more than three-feet apart. Perhaps, I thought, if I pretended I was climbing stairs, four at a time, I’d make it. Focusing, I let out a gut-wrenching F-Bomb and pushed off the rung. My fingers snapped shut around the next metal staple and I pulled myself to a standing position.
“Yoo-hoo,” I shouted. I rested my chin on the sawed off treetop to calm my heart rate.
The tree quivered as if protesting.
“Can I jump now?”
“Some people take one more step,” said stupid Blue Eyes.
A torrent of bad words escaped. My mother would have definitely used the soap. I grabbed a branch.
“The branch won’t help.”
With the tree still shaking, I let go of the branch and took another “four-stairs” step. As I stood there with one foot on the top rung, the other planted on the treetop’s flat surface, my quadriceps burning, I screamed, “Yes!”
Coach’s voice drifted upward. “Some people stand with both feet on the treetop.”
More F-Bombs.
Slowly I inhaled down to my toes, looked out over the hills and took that last step up…onto the
top of the world, and then jumped!
It wasn’t until I reached the ground, in victory mode, that the cameraman said his first words to me, “I’d like to shoot from another another angle, do you think you could do it again, with less swearing?”
What was a girl to do?…I cried.
Lucy Llewellyn Byard is currently a freelance journalist and columnist for the Record-Bee. To contact her, email lucywgtd@gmail.com
