Miracles & Moments of Grace by Nancy B. Kennedy

Author:Nancy B. Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leafwood Publishers
Published: 2014-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

27

A SOFT LANDING

JAMES BERTI

HAYDEN, IDAHO

My friends and I went up into the mountains of northern Idaho one day. Their dads were cutting firewood, and I came along. It was late summer or early fall, and I was maybe 12 or 13 years old at the time.

While the adults were working, Tim, Dan, Jared, and I played games to pass the time. One of the games we came up with was to pick a small pine tree, climb to the top, and hang off the top branch so that the tree would bend slowly back down and deposit us on the ground.

We did this for quite a while before moving on to other things. At some point, we all split up and went on entertaining ourselves. Tim was under a fallen tree building a fort, and Dan and Jared were using large pieces of tree bark as surf boards to ride down the side of a hill.

But I was enjoying the pine tree game so much that I continued to play it by myself. After a few solo rides, I chose my next tree. It was taller than the ones we had climbed before, maybe fifteen or twenty feet tall. Not only that, but the old logging road we were on banked sharply on one side, and the tree was growing out of the bank below the road. The embankment dropped off steeply, so it was probably another fifteen to twenty feet to the ground below the tree.

I climbed to the top of the tree and grabbed the tip of it. But when I pushed off and hung my weight off of the branch, it didn’t bend very far. In fact, it bent just far enough that I found myself hanging in the air—about thirty feet above the ground.

I didn’t know what to do. I thought about jumping off, but looking down I saw many hazards.

Below me was a large fallen tree, its trunk laying north and south in relation to my position. The branches pointed upward toward me and then bent over sideways. All around the fallen tree were jagged, broken stumps from other trees that had been cut down or broken off in years past.

As I hung there contemplating my fate, I heard Dan and Jared yelling at me from off to the side.

“James! Don’t jump! You’re too high!” they shouted.

Although only a few seconds must have passed, I started to feel the fatigue in my forearms from climbing trees all day. I knew I had to do something fast.

I studied the precarious grip my hands had on the tree and decided to let go with one hand and reach farther down the tree. As I did so, the tree sprang away from me and I lost my grip.

Frantically, I grabbed at the tree again and this time found myself hanging onto two tiny twigs, one in each hand.

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