What arborist work taught me about falling.
The knot held.
The branch didn’t.
I remember the rope tightening across my chest like a seatbelt. The world turned. My spurs scraped across frozen bark, and the chainsaw swung away from me on its lanyard.
Someone below swore.
It may have been me.
It was usually me.
I spent nearly six years working as an arborist. Tree removal, storm cleanup, cabling, rigging, climbing, and more time operating a chainsaw above the ground than anyone with my relationship to heights should have considered reasonable.
I was afraid of heights when I started.
I still am.
At first, I climbed because I needed the job. There was no deeper calling behind it. I needed money, needed something useful to do, and probably needed to prove to my father and myself that I could remain committed to something difficult.
Then I stayed.
Eventually, I began to love parts of it.
Some mornings, I would be halfway up a frozen maple with no feeling in my fingers, trying to tie a knot through muscle memory because my hands were no longer interested in precision. The wind cut through everything. My skin cracked. I regularly thought that I was not being paid enough.
I was correct.
I kept climbing.
Fear did not disappear as I gained experience. It became more specific.
I learned the difference between ordinary exposure and the feeling that something in the system was wrong. I learned to check the rope, the harness, the anchor, and the branch rather than relying on how confident I happened to feel that morning.
Confidence did not make the tree safer.
Preparation sometimes did.
The work was physical and direct. A tree presented a problem, and the crew had to solve it without forgetting that gravity was involved. We had to determine how to reach the work, where each section could fall, how it would be controlled, and where everyone needed to stand when the cut was made.
A bad decision did not remain theoretical for long.
I liked that directness.
You climbed. You worked. You solved what was in front of you. At the end of the day, the result was usually visible on the ground.
There were close calls.
The worst was the branch that split while I was roughly eighty feet up. I dropped and swung until the rope caught me. The system worked, although the branch had not behaved the way I expected.
The adrenaline stayed long after I was back on the ground.
I remember inspecting everything afterward and going over the sequence again. The knot had held. The rope had held. I was still there.
The next time I climbed, I carried that knowledge with me.
There were quieter moments too.
Sometimes I would stop high in a tree and look out over the street below. On more than one occasion, an ambulance passed with its lights and siren on.
I remember watching one of them and thinking that I should be inside it.
The thought did not arrive with a plan. I did not know much yet about becoming a paramedic or whether I would be capable of doing the work. I knew only that something about it held my attention.
There was urgency, movement, practical skill, and another person depending on you to make useful decisions under pressure.
I applied to paramedic school.
Then I continued climbing trees for another three years.
The change was not immediate or clean. I went to work, kept learning, kept climbing, and slowly moved toward another career while the first one was still paying my bills.
When I eventually left arborist work, I did not leave fear behind.
Paramedicine gave it different places to appear.
I was no longer looking down from a tree. I was walking into unfamiliar homes, meeting people on the worst days of their lives, and making decisions before I felt completely certain of myself.
Some of what I had learned in the trees came with me.
Check the system before trusting it.
Know where the risks are.
Listen to the people working beside you.
Think about what happens after the next move, not only the move itself.
Do not let the need to appear confident stop you from changing the plan.
Most importantly, I already knew that being afraid did not necessarily mean I could not function.
Arborist work did not make me fearless. It taught me that fear could remain present while my hands still did what they had been trained to do.
I miss the trees sometimes.
I miss the physical work and the satisfaction of solving a problem that could be seen from the ground. I miss the crew, the equipment, and the strange perspective that came from looking at ordinary streets from above.
I do not miss the cold.
I do not miss numb fingers or frozen bark.
I do not miss realizing halfway through a climb that the wind was worse than it looked from the ground.
I left because another kind of work had begun to matter more.
I do not think I would have entered paramedicine in the same way without those years. Tree work gave me an early education in consequence, preparation, teamwork, and the difference between feeling safe and having built something trustworthy.
Now I watch new medics enter unfamiliar situations and recognize part of what I once felt high in a tree.
They are trying to remember their training while their bodies remind them that the situation is real. They may believe everyone else feels steadier than they do.
Usually, they do not need to become fearless.
They need a sound system, a reliable crew, and enough experience to understand which part of the fear deserves their attention.
I came down from the trees still afraid of plenty.
I had also learned that fear did not have to make every decision.
Dedication
To my family, who taught me grit.
To my old crew, who taught me knots.
And to that walnut tree, who taught me how to hold on, and when to let go.
Ghosts of the Navigator 