Wood Monkey

Monkeys do not have a fancy French word that means climbing. To claim that David Belle invented Parkour is like saying Christopher Columbus invented America. Parkour is life is health is flight from persecution and bounding over obstacles in the path to a goal…it's what primates do, what they have done from the earliest demarcation of their order, and what they are likely to keep on doing for their continued existence. David Belle only named it, the same way Adam named the monkey.

The great apes' taxonomic line diverges from the monkey branch at the height of true brachiators: the gibbons and the siamangs. On the monkey side, you have the animals with prehensile tails, which assist with gripping, the quadrapedalist climbers (really pentapedalists in some cases). And on the ape side you have the knuckle walkers and the bipedalists, that's us! All great apes climb at some point in their lifespan, but maintain a larger proportion of terrestrial lifestyle than do monkeys. From the baboons (a bridge species often not considered a true ape) to orangutans to gorillas to chimpanzees to humans, we are generally well-grounded. Humans as a whole are particularly bad climbers in comparison, so we've had to grow our brains and come up with other pursuits. David Belle and Mark Toorock have decided to go retro, and they're not making a bad show of it really.

Let's face it, though, for the rest of us, we got laughed out of the trees years ago. Gibbons and siamangs are also known to be the most vocal of the primates, so we probably got howled out. And yet we retain this primordial reverence for trees. Think about it in terms of the importance of Biblical trees: from the Tree of Knowledge (symbol of original sin) to covering up sin with fig leaves, to Noah who preserved countless species in a wooden boat, to Jonah who was comforted and discomforted with the life and death of a tree, to Jesus' earthly father, Joseph, who shaped wood in the practice of carpentry, to the cross itself—a specifically wooden object of modern worship. We worship trees. We build and furnish houses with them. The Bible from the Gutenberg forward is printed on trees. We may not climb them so much as other animals, but we are a species of tree worshipers. Is it because they have defeated us? Did humans create fire in order to get rid of them? Are current deforesting practices a sign of the ongoing conflict?

My cousin ran a paper mill so I asked her how much of a tree was used to make one ream of paper (I was concerned, of course, about the great sacrifice of the forest to my meager writing); however, she being an engineer, could not give me a concise answer. She said they lose a quarter of material off the tree in debarking, which is a very important process, especially for the removal of dirt for the end product, “dirt” being a technical term with weighty implications for the paper industry yet still just means dirt. A quarter of the weight after that is water. So off the top, fifty percent of a live, healthy tree is unused and discarded. Depressing isn’t it. Probably analogous to what happens with my query letters.

One year I bought a palm tree at the beginning of Lent and by Easter, it had one frond still alive. I can kill a houseplant at a glance. The ones that do survive are rather honest life forms. When I get them, they look like they’ve never lost a leaf in their lives. Now they seem as if the color green were only a tentative hue, subject to change at any moment. I’ve managed to kill egg carton gardens and had bean seeds with a failure to launch.

And now I’m busy butchering trees with moderate prose. If in the beginning was the word, and the word was God, then trees were the most damned race of beings ever invented. Maybe if we go to Hell we grow up as a tree, the fodder of flame. That or we’ve made a huge error of printing medium. Probably we were supposed to use stone as God did for the Ten Commandments. Maybe that’s what the eleventh commandment said: “Thou shalt use rocks on which to build my laws.” Rock, paper, scissors? Ah metal. Joseph Smith of the Latter Day Saints had the tablets of gold. When I get to Heaven (if), then I shall open the bedside drawer and see what stationary the Gideons have left.

(Yes, you may notice a slight reprise here, a composting of “Garden Ashes” for a richer, nutrient base in support of my new idea. I’ve recycled words to cut down on emissions, to be AlGorical through my actions.)