Grabbing hold with sap-sticky hands, my arms were outstretched along with my legs straight up. The sting from blood-streaked appendages mingled in my senses with the smell of fresh pine as I hung there dazed, feet caught, hands gripping branches tightly and instinctively. My near-death experience was frozen for an hour, at least, as I surveyed my dilemma. Or more like a few minutes—well, maybe a minute. My eyes cleared from the blur of the fall. My back was dangling a few inches from the ground, maybe twelve at the most. Hard to remember the details from that long ago, fifty-five or sixty years.

It all began when I was a budding teenager, not more than about thirteen years old or so, just old enough to be adventuresome and daring, hiking to the ancient cave on the opposite side of the valley from where we lived, trekking long distances, climbing tall trees. The terrain sloped out back from our small, four-bedroom brick bungalow in Blacksburg, Virginia—that was my gateway to exploration. Striking out on my own, the first frontier was found in a pine stand down and to the right from our back door. Tall, straight fir trees. Hardly could a young boy walk through a place like that without the desire to climb, resulting in sap all over his hands and face and clothes. Yes, that was me; I could not resist.

These particular trees were obviously second growth; I am sure some pioneers from the old days cleared the side of the valley long ago, maybe even during the colonial days of Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone. This was the new era of exploration, and I was on the vanguard. Those trees were to become my home away from home. I kind of lived up in those trees. Images of Tarzan supplied my motivation.

Climbing them was my first challenge, about 150 feet tall. To my young eyes, they were giant sequoias, like those I had seen in our “Popular Science” encyclopedia that occupied a long shelf at home. Since I discovered this stand of trees, I had the authority to define how tall they were—after all, this was my story.

Pine trees grow branches in clusters of five or six coming out of the trunk in different directions. These clusters were vertically about four feet from one to the next, going up the tree from bunch to bunch, branches decreasing in size as they got higher. There must have been six or seven of these clusters per tree. Like I said, at the time, I estimated they were probably a hundred feet tall, every one of them.

After conquering a few of these mammoths, I noticed some rather smaller trees lying about, brought down by who knows what. Idea: maybe I could bring those smaller trunks into upper reaches and lay them across from one tree’s cluster of branches to the next tree’s bunch at about the same level. My skyway began to form, and before long, I was walking from one side of the pine stand to the next, at the lofty altitude of the upper parts of the forest. The skyway stretched across about five or six trees, like I said, from one side of the forest to the other.

One of the significant characteristics of pine trees, I discovered, was their flexibility. I supposed at that time they were grown to withstand the forces of hurricanes and tornados, both of which I could easily imagine roaring through those parts.

Maybe it crossed my mind to test the flexibility, or it was just the idea of having fun. Up in the stratosphere of the forest, about five or six clusters high, I selected a worthy pine for my pleasure and stood on the cluster third or fourth from the top (which one, exactly, eludes my memory with the decades that have since come and gone. But it was way up there!). Like a rubber pole, the tree began to sway back and forth as I shifted my body weight, going forward, and then backward. Forward and back, with each swing, I could almost reach out to grab the adjacent trees, with the hopes of imitating Tarzan by swinging from one tree to the next. Of course, the logistics of doing this was not quite like swinging from vines, but imagination conveniently takes over in the mind of a thirteen-year-old.

Clutching the tree on whose branch cluster I was standing made for an awkward reach at each far sway of the tree, bending backward. The threat of danger was not part of my imagination, and therefore not part of my conscious thought patterns at the time. SNAP. At my feet, the bend was too far on the backswing. I don’t remember much of what happened next, but my young life flashed before my eyes. Not really—what did flash before my eyes were the blur of branches, the sting of scratched arms, my hands grasping wildly.

When I came to my senses, I found myself hanging with my back only a foot or so from the ground, my hands grabbing hold of some branches, finally making a successful snag, and my legs and feet caught in the branches. My body had folded into a U-shape. But I was alive.

Looking back on the near-death experience, it was indeed a near-death. I could have died, really. Had I plunged head-first, I would have been a goner. I was able to dislodge myself and drop the remaining distance without any further harm. But not without a profound awareness of life at that moment. It was the first time I realized that I could have died. I can still picture the sensation of hanging there, the smell of the pine, the sap on my hands as vivid today as they were fifty-five or sixty years ago. I was not yet ready to meet my Maker; he was preserving me for that which wouldn’t come until eight to ten years later.