I recently came across a quote I liked by Samuel Johnson which says, “the use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.”

To the southeast side of Scranton, if you’re looking at a map, there sits a body of water known as Lake Scranton. And in between the city and the lake is locally known as East Mountain. It’s a section of the city, if you will. There are many residential homes, and scattered around those homes are trees that grow and die, and require care and removal and contractors to do it. White Oaks and Hemlocks and Cottonwoods and Aspen and Spruce and Japanese Maples, of course.

The only times I find myself on this mountain is when I work with Alan Krieg Tree Care and Tim ‘Timberman’ Morris, who are real legends here in Scranton, and gentleman nonetheless. Their company alone is just fine and satisfying enough, but the next best thing about traveling to east mountain and climbing trees here is that this inconspicuous gradation rises up several hundred feet above the city. Not high enough to write home about, but really making for a rather spectacular view when you least expect it.

On this particular morning I found myself in a Cottonwood, or maybe it was an Aspen. I’m still getting around to ID’ing it, and probably never will, as these things sometimes go. The trees were maybe thirty feet tall at best, next to a ditch and a retaining wall that was either old or not done very well, jutting up from a forgotten lot next door. Which Populous tend to do. The undergrowth was heavy with perennial vegetation and young saplings. A few clearance cuts were needed on the house side of the trees. Dealing with a throw line was frustrating, but the cuts were small, the wood soft maybe around four inches or so, and these were the biggest climbs for the site. A removal and two trees to be pruned. Mundane really, to any hero of the trade.

Even Dirr comments in Hardy Trees and Shrubs that, “In all my traveling and consulting work, I have never recommended, at least when conscious, a poplar.”

So it wasn’t easy getting up into them though. The tight branch unions and powdery surface of the young limbs required patience and real agility, in that order, which are apps sometimes not yet uploaded in the morning before ten o’clock. Anyway, it’s easy to forget about all that after you set up a canopy anchor and start traveling through a tree crown high up in the world on East Mountain. Just because of that view.

I looked over at the Timberman next to me pitching branches down into the gulley, and beyond him, it could have been London or Istanbul or Chefchaouen. If I squinted hard, maybe Capetown or Amsterdam or St. Petersburg at sunrise, or better yet, just after, in the full brilliance of fresh daylight: Beirut, Kyoto, Queenstown. Suddenly, I was on the edge of the world, and to think I was only thirty feet high, right here on the southeast cheek of Steamtown. The Electric City.

The muse of freedom was upon me though, and now I was traveling like an adventurer, from country to country, from city to city, village to village, house to house, onward, to the backyard I went.

Some vines were growing up fiercely in two small trees, a Red Maple and a young Black Cherry, which were to be preserved, no matter how daring. Early on, in the job site safety briefing, Alan had warned me that the homeowner had cautioned him about Copperhead snakes frequenting the more wild places on the mountain. And where the saplings grew, that the vine was climbing up which needed to be removed, just beyond a thick row of yews at the top of a volcanic drop off, lurking, was one of those wild places.

And we had to get back there to cut the vines.

As I crawled through the yew hedge, I thought for sure I was going to come across a Copperhead, an encounter which would surely be unlucky for the snake now that the plot was rolling down the tracks. I slithered along the backside of the hedge methodically, like a serpent moves in wavelengths, with my my handsaw and snips scoring a line in the dirt. I was looking down a vast embankment made up of loose grass clippings, and then beyond, the neighbor’s yard. Finally, I made my way up into the Red Maple to start the many thousand cuts that would be needed to free these young trees of this misery. From here, there was no spectacular view in sight. Just raw jungle, an indistinguishable property line between two yards, and the notion that there was no way out.

Across from me, in a Japanese Maple, was the Timberman. We were discussing some poetry by the great G.K. Chesterton, right before he got stung in the neck by a hornet. The second time in a few weeks I’ve seen that happen. But, to quote old Chesterton himself, “Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.”

The Mountain is a wild place like that. To a traveler from a different land, it’s a place that is unrecognizable. Just another patch of yard and woods, just another street in another little suburb of a city that isn’t that big. But for the contracting arborist, it is a place where dragons lay in wait, where neighbors don’t get along, where snakes and stinging hornets swirl on the edge of the world. Right here in a back yard on Conroy Ave, where glory never fades.

I had finally exhausted my efforts on the vine, stripping the young trees free, and the only thing that remained of that vast jungle was a small, serpentine groove that the vines had girdled into the adolescent wood. All of a sudden, the world got smaller like a spring in slow motion, the job was coming to an end, the swelling on Tim’s neck was subsiding. I walked around the yew hedge again, into a backyard we all know, and grabbed my polesaw and reached it over the yews to once and for all hook the large ball of many hours of fantasy and folly wrapped up into a climbing, woody mess. And with one, stuttering pull, the vine came free, right in front of the homeowner watching on with real satisfaction.

“What is this stuff,” I asked the Timberman.

“Bittersweet.”