MY TREE 



I wanted very much to climb a big tree in the 

 jungle. Most of the trees on Barro Colorado grow 

 about ninety feet high and spread out into a thick 

 green roof, but every so often there is a much 

 larger tree that reaches above the smaller ones, 

 twice as high. I wanted to climb up one of these 

 tall trees above the jungle roof and see what was 

 happening there, what plants and animals lived 

 so high, and what they did. 



Naturally there was no hundred-foot ladder 

 lying around waiting for me on the island. If I 

 got up a tree, I had to make some kind of ladder 

 for myself. My first idea was to get some extra 

 long railroad spikes to drive into a tree trunk for 

 steps, but there were no railroad spikes to be had. 



The manager of the Canal scrap department 

 helped me out. He looked over his great piles 

 of rusty machinery and found some bolts from 

 the old machines that the French had used in 

 digging at the Canal, and from these he had 

 some stout spikes made for me. They were 

 fourteen inches long, not quite an inch thick, and 

 sharpened like a wedge at one end to make them 

 easy to drive. 



I took these over to the island one Wednesday 

 morning, with Linder, a tall, lazy negro from the 



38 



