When I was growing up, my mother explained, again and again, the importance of being closely engaged with what you did for a living. You had to get something out of it, something more than a paycheck and a gold watch after twenty-five years. She was an old-fashioned country woman who spent her life teaching young children, and of her many unbearable lectures (there were many), that one struck me. In my twenties, I knew what I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to work in an office, or on a factory line, or anywhere you had to clock in and clock out. Fifteen years of heavy-handed Catholic education spent staring out a classroom window, combined with the fact that both my parents were schoolteachers, had produced an intense loathing in me for sitting down and using my head. I wanted to be outdoors, I wanted to be in a different place every day, and I wanted to be doing something dangerous.

Risk has a certain attraction for young men. We live in a culture with a very ambivalent attitude towards it. It’s good to join the army and risk dying for your country, but it is bad to drive a stolen car a hundred miles an hour the wrong way down a motorway. It’s easy to get confused. They both involve a quasi-suicidal pursuit of glory. As a young man, I believed that danger could somehow purge me of inadequacies. I thought I could temper myself in it, pound myself sharp and lean and deadly. When I heard about tree surgery, I felt it was the perfect opportunity. It’s a high-risk occupation, I had a good head for heights, and you can travel easily with it. The specialised nature of the work means it’s fairly straightforward to find employment. It’s hard to find people who are willing to climb up a hundred-foot oak with a chainsaw and then have the ability to get that twelve ton or so of timber safely on the ground without demolishing everything in sight.

There’s a lot that can go wrong. Every year, for every one hundred and twenty people that work in the business, there’s one who will get seriously injured or killed. You work in a saddle, or climbing harness, that’s attached to a crotch in the tree by a rope. Tie in to something that’s not strong enough to hold your weight or has an internal fault, and you’re going straight to the ground. Cut your rope by accident with your saw, and you’re going straight to the ground. Cut yourself badly, and you’re going to hang there bleeding until someone comes up and gets you – and that can take a while. If you fuck up an important cut, then that half a ton of timber you’ve just severed loose can decide to peel out and take you with it.

On takedowns you wear climbing spikes, metal braces that fit around your foot and lower leg with a protruding downward point that’s positioned at the instep. Your whole weight is resting on two steel spikes that you’ve kicked half an inch into the side of a tree. Ever see those logging competitions where people scamper up skinned pine poles like squirrels? They’re wearing spikes. In the South of the US, where I spent a long time working, they called them hooks, or spurs. If your spurs kick out, you’ll be dragged down that pole by your climbing strop, getting third-degree burns. If you were running a saw at the time, then it’s going to land on you, still running.

Starting out, climbing trees felt nothing like work in the usual sense. I had laboured on building sites before and done heavy, monotonous tasks that involved a lot of clock watching. You could never forget where you were – you were at work. You were killing time, staring out that window again. Up in a big tree in high winds, seventy or eighty feet off the ground, cutting out a thirty-foot top, you forget about everything else except you and that tree. You’re so scared of killing yourself that everything else, all other concerns, vanish. They don’t fade into the background; they completely fucking evaporate. You can hear every noise that tree makes, every creak. Every time the winds pushes it, and it moves, you move with it. Looking down all the way to the ground you forget you’re at work, you forget about the fight you had last night with your girlfriend; you forget all the bullshit we carry round with ourselves to amuse that chattering voice in our heads, the talking part of us. Your physical perceptions become heightened. Colours and vision intensify. You can taste the cool salty tongue of the wind in your mouth. There’s a beautiful calmness in the rare moment in time when you are not looking backwards or forwards but are fully engaged in the present. You make a kind of peace with yourself. Amid all the noise – the screaming of the chipper on the ground, the howl of the chainsaw in your hands, the shuddering snap of the wood as it breaks and moves – there is a perfect silence.

And when it’s over, and you’re back on the ground, and you see that look in the eyes of the men around you, older, tougher men, that look of respect for doing something they were too scared to do – fuck, that’s better than drugs. That’s the glory.