The Monkee Club (by Eric & Wes)

The Monkey Club inspired tree-climbing antics. Wes, Laurie, and their adored cousin, red-headed and antic Tommy Tobin, were the founding members, but the littler ones were soon sworn in, solemnly and with some magisterial words from Wes, after climbing to the top of the maple tree in the front yard on Phillips Street, much to the dismay of step great-grandmother “Nana” Grace McClellan who spied them from next door. Norway maples lined the road, apple trees blossomed in the back yard, and all provided stairways to Heaven for the merry band of acrobats. But the island had two of the best jungle gyms that the Monkey Club could scramble up, over, around, through, in and out, and down. Just to the south of the path leading to the bunkhouse and maybe six feet from the western bank of the island was a leaning birch tree, about ten inches in diameter at the stump. Mature and thick, it made a perfect horse for the climbers. The oldest would pull themselves up first, bending the topmost branches groundward under their weight. The younger ones would follow, generally in particular order of ages. God forbid that Eric should precede Marlene, or Marlene sneak in ahead of Donnie or Tommy. Once most were in the saddle, hanging on with anticipation, the heavyweights, all small for their age, whether Wes and Laurie or diminutive but daring John White, would jump off, grab the topmost branches now close to the grass, and give the others a bronco-busting ride, yanking and pulling and thrashing the tree up and around, trying to shake everyone else from their precarious perches. Success was guaranteed, for as others let go, the tree bucked higher, leaving only one or two clinging madly, joyfully to the birch’s smooth sides, until all would tumble to earth or, eventually, and to their great surprise, the tree itself followed under the weight of the entire tribe, and dropped them all with a resounding crack and dull thud into the grass. The near horizontal “brontosaurus” dropped the six little Blausses with a finality that left the younger ones sad, the older ones guilty, and Laurie and Tommy on their feet, agile and balanced as always.
Tom was president of the Monkey Club, Laurie vice president. Wes was modest enough to let others scale the heights. He was always good about including everyone in his clubs, games, fantasies, and plays. Never taking the lead roles himself, he usually played the foiled villain with a smirky, wisecracking Donnie as his retarded cohort, while Laurie and Tommy became the heroes of every game or skit that he created. Eric claimed later that he learned from Wes’s example that having a brother or sister for a hero was sometimes better than being the hero oneself. Always at the end of the line, the last on the heap, Eric and Dave frequented the island years later as young adults, and in one of their many gasoline-fed campfires burned the existing remains of the birch, long dead like the dinosaurs, flammable as ancient coal, a meager reminder of sweet summer days gone by when
"the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
--Robert Frost, "Birches"

Behind Nana and Grampa Roddy’s house on Phillips Street a cluster of maple trees stood, overgrown and heavy laden with tangled vines of Concord grapes. Large, blue, and juicy, the grapes provided a treat come autumn for the intrepid tree climbers — with Nana’s permission, of course. The island had grapevines too, about a thousand square foot of them. Probably once fruitful but now overgrown and barren, the vines, like the cherry trees, had once been pruned and tended by Eversons, the art now lost to the Blausses. Reaching as high as ten feet or more in places, strangling the life out of the sumacs that supported them, and engulfing other bushes in an ever spreading blanket of greenery, the grapevines offered a most challenging opportunity for a “Monkey.” Laurie and Tommy reached the highest spots attainable to a lightweight. The featherweights followed, eager to emulate the grand, heroic feats of their older sister and cousin. When heavier cousins Skip and Bill Tobin attempted to scale Tommy’s summits, they broke branches and crushed the flimsy sumac with their extra pounds, upsetting the Monkey Club leaders and leaving the entire tribe lower in the jungle canopy than they had hitherto been able to climb. Down below Wes warily waited. He, more than Skip and Bill, understood the near-sacred nature of these vulnerable places. What the sixty-pounders could achieve atop the trees and vines, he at eighty plus pounds could not without wreaking similar havoc on the fragile structure, and he was willing to leave the best climbs for those who didn’t weigh as much. Being small was an advantage in the Monkey Club.