The Tree Sitting Contest

“Vern would tell you I enter a lot of contests,” Betsy said, as she stabbed a needle through her needlepoint hoop. Even though it had nothing to do with the question I asked, she kept on talking. I let her. I just let her talk, even though it told me nothing about why she came and what kind of help she needed.

“I entered the contest you see at the County Fair where you guess at the number of rocks in a water cooler jug. The winner gets water enough for the year. I didn’t win no water, but I was only five off. It’s OK though, we get plenty of water from our well. When they drilled it, the drilling man only went down thirty feet and he got soaked when he hit a vein and it came up like a geyser. It was all he could do to get a cap on it and now we don’t need no pump because the water comes out of the ground on its own.

“I entered my grape pie in that same County Fair. I didn’t win, but the pie got ate up by the judges. My friends all went to The Fair and they said to me, ‘I thought you put your grape pie in the fair?’ I said, ‘I did, but the judges ate it all up.’ You couldn’t see even a single piece on the shelf with my name, Betsy Campbell, on a tag next to it. My friends said, ‘Betsy, if they ate it, every bit, how come they didn’t give you no prize?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, maybe they didn’t like it.’

“I even enter those contests that say I might have already won. I like them the best because when I peel the sticker off that says on it that I’m interested and place it carefully on the outlined box on the reply card, I’m thinking all the while about the money I already won, and how I’m rich, but no one knows it. Wouldn’t Vern be surprised? He’s always going on about needing to put a garage next to our doublewide, but we don’t got the money. Even if he had his garage, he wouldn’t have nothing to put in it, so he’d have to go on about that. I don’t need much money. I like doing hair so much I do it for free, but I would like a new set of rollers to do the hair with.

“I enter a lot of contests, but I never entered no contest like the Tree-Sitting Contest. I was having a cup of coffee with my friend, Becky, and we saw the notice of it in the paper. I said, ‘Now that doesn’t look so hard. I can sit under a tree with the best of them. Just get me my needlepoint and there I go.’ The winner gets their picture in the paper and a hundred dollars. So I filled out the entry blank and sent it in.

“They were gunna have the contest during the Fall Foliage Festival. Becky and I go every year to look at all the crafts. It’s during bow season and Vern couldn’t care less what I do during bow season. Becky said they needed something to bring the people in to the festival. ‘Why would anyone come to watch people sit under a tree?’ I said. ‘They don’t want something people would want to watch,’ Becky said. ‘They need something cute to put in the ad so that people know there’s a festival going on. Then they’ll come in and say, there’s the tree-sitting contest, and when they turn away to buy the crafts, they won’t miss none of the contest because there’s nothing to miss.’

“We got to the festival and everyone that entered the contest gets shown a big maple tree alongside Maple Street. ‘This is your tree,’ they say. ‘When we blow the whistle, that’s the start of the contest.’ I thought, well, that’s silly, I don’t have to wait for no whistle to start sitting under a tree. I can get started right away. Becky had helped me bring my lawn chair and I set it up under my tree on a flat spot where the roots wouldn’t make it rock and made myself comfortable with my needlepoint right there on my lap.

“I just got settled down and looked around and saw none of the other contestants brought their lawn chairs. I said to Becky, ‘Now you look at that, none of them come prepared to sit. How do they think they’re gunna win?’ Just then, before she answers, the whistle blows and I see all the other contestants climbing up their trees. I just sit and stare because I can’t figure out what’s going on. Becky figures it out before I do and she yells, ‘Betsy, get up in the tree! You’re supposed to sit up in the tree, not under it!’

“’Now, why would I want to sit up in a tree?’ I said, ‘I’m no squirrel.’

“’I know you’re no squirrel. That’s just what the contest is,’ she said. ‘It’s a tree sitting contest.’

“’Boost me up, then,’ I said. “And hand me my needlepoint.’”

All the while Betsy had been talking; her eyes had been down on her needlepoint project, which she pierced repeatedly. My eyes were on it too, for that matter. Although I couldn’t make out the face of it, I could see the back. She was working with one color thread at a time and it was difficult to tell from the back what the image was because they formed no clear outline, loose ends dangled, and a thread connected one blotch of color to the next.

Watching the needlepoint pattern form from the back of the work is a lot like listening to people tell their stories. Not all of them are good storytellers: they use indefinite pronouns, jump topics, assume I know what they knew, and fail to lay a groundwork of understanding. It was all just a lot of noise, but little meaning. Of course, I could interrupt and clarify, but more often than not, those attempts just muddied the waters even more. I practiced listening to the music of what people were saying when I couldn’t follow the words because the inflections and tone often revealed the clearest meanings.

“I wasn’t up there more than an hour when I dropped my needlepoint. It fell down to the ground through the tree and sat there right where my lawn chair had been. Becky was gone. She’d taken the chair away so it won’t get stole and went to look at the crafts. I knew I couldn’t come down out of the tree without losing the contest. I called to people to hand my work up to me, but the wind was making so much noise in the trees they couldn’t hear me. The needlepoint looked like leaves on the ground that the wind took down, so nobody even noticed it there.

“There was nothing I could do but stay up in that tree and listen to the noise it was making. I like people, and I’m always talking with somebody, but there was nobody up there but me and the tree. I’m ashamed to say I tried talking to the tree, but the only thing it said back to me was, ‘Foom.’ Anything I had to say, it only got one answer, ‘Foom.’ Sort of like talking to Vern when his mind is on something else and he’s not listening, except then Vern’ll start to talking and I won’t listen. I listened mighty hard to this foom, and it got to where I didn’t have nothing more to say because I knew foom was the answer to everything. Everything else just disappeared. No more Becky, no more festival, no more me imagining Vern saying after I got home, ‘You entered what?’”

For the rest of the day, her hasty roost with no hammock or padding on the swaying branch of a wind-tossed maple might have been more comfortable if she was sitting on a deer’s antlers. In her snorkel coat and snowmobile pants, she was as prepared as she could be for the wind and cold; but, she hadn’t brought a bathroom up with her. And she couldn’t very well get up and stretch her legs on the tree limb.

Despite all the hardships, they were counterbalanced by the pleasures of towering over the rest of the world. She had the foom to listen to; and there was something about seeing the tops of people’s heads, and not the sides, that put her in a different frame of mind. When dinnertime came and passed, she didn’t even care that Vern would come home from tromping through the woods, after ineffectually stalking deer with a compound bow, upset that dinner wasn’t on the table. When the whistle blew for the contestants to come down out of the their trees for a bathroom break, she came down. All the serenity in the world can’t stop a bladder from filling. But she didn’t even look for her needlepoint in the mess of leaves under her tree before she got back up.

When it got dark and everyone went home from the festival, the tree sitters were still in their trees. There wasn’t much to see down below, but the stars came out all above. Looking down at the tops of heads milling around the festival and looking up at the pinpricks of stars circling heaven was much the same thing. Some of the contestants tried talking with one another, helloing from one tree to the next, but the noisy wind blew away most of their words. That’s what Betsy liked best about being up in the tree: there were no more words, every word another prick, another stitch, in her otherwise clean canvas.

Throughout that day and the night and the next day, contestants gave up and came down from the trees like the red and yellow leaves that released their hold from the branches. After a while, Betsy paid no attention. Indeed, a delegation had to come to the base of her tree to call her down when the last other contestant gave up.

“’Come on down,’ they said to me, ‘you won the contest. You don’t have to sit up there no more.’ But I wasn’t ready to come down. Oh, I was hungry and I had to go potty, but I was afraid if I came down, they’d be all over me, congratulating me, and I wouldn’t be able to go back up there again.”

“You must have come down eventually,” I said. “You’re here now.”

“Yea, they all went away; everyone but Becky. She brought out the lawn chair and sat under the tree where I was once going to sit. I hardly paid her any mind. Here I was, the winner of the contest, but it was like I never even existed. It was like I was part of the whole world and the whole world was part of me.”

Just then, up in the tree, Betsy moved her foot a bit, lost hold of the trunk. In horror, all her identity returned as she grabbed for the nearest branch and hovered over actual non-existence.

“I came down right fast then. I was ready to go back to my life, but not all the time. I started climbing trees and sitting up in them, till Becky told me I ought to see a counselor. She said I was touched.”

I leaned towards the needlepoint. “What are you working on there?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet,” said Betsy, showing me the front. “I don’t like getting needlepoint kits with the outline already printed on them no more. I like making up my own picture. It’s like drawing, except with thread.”

“Looks like it’s going to be a maple tree,” I said.

“Yea,” Betsy smiled. “I suppose you’re right. That’s what it’s gunna be.”

Keith R Wilson is a mental health counselor in private practice and the author of innumerable articles and six books including Fate's Janitors, from which this story is adapted.