By: Greg Hanscom



On a starry August night in 1994, Bob Mertes traded in his motorcycle for a wheelchair.

He was leading some buddies through the rolling back roads outside Ellicott City when, to help another rider avoid an oncoming car, he veered onto the soft shoulder, catapulting himself and a girl he was dating off his bike. The girl hit the pavement, slicing her skin raw; Mertes flew 50 feet, he says. He tried to get up, but he felt pinned down. “That’s when I looked over and saw my boot lying on the road next to my head,” he says. It was a Redwing Lineman boot—the kind that laces up to just below the knee. His leg was still in it, jackknifed up along his left side.

It would take doctors thirteen hours to piece Mertes’ thigh back together. They grafted cadaver bone onto his shattered femur, bracing it with metal plates. A friend who has seen the X-rays says, simply, “Looks like somebody dropped a box of screws.” It didn’t work. It would take two more surgeries by a doctor who took Mertes on “as a project,” and years of healing, to finally make Mertes whole again. That, and the trees.

Growing up in Laurel, Mertes was drawn to the woods. “I always had a weirdness with ropes, with rope craft and knots. I was always climbing,” he says. When he was 16, he borrowed some tools from a friend and took down a huge, dying Catalpa in his mother’s back yard, launching a life-long career as an arborist—a tree doctor.

Mertes developed a “spiritual connection” with trees and an uncanny ability to find the giants hidden in the forest. (He once tried to work as a logger, but he wasn’t cut out for it. “I’d walk down into the woods and hug the trees and apologize before I cut them down,” he says.) Built like an oak—lanky and strong—Mertes speaks in low, measured words that sound like they’re coming from a hollow log.

When he wasn’t doctoring trees, Mertes made marble and granite countertops and fireplaces, and worked as a machinist and a repo man. The day’s work done, he climbed into the canopy to unwind. It seemed a little strange—“I thought I was crazy,” he says—but it kept him sane through some hard times. Sitting in some centuries-old monster, he says, “reminds you that there’s something out there that’s bigger than you and bigger than your problems.”

After the accident, suffering from chronic pain and restricted to crutches and a wheelchair, Mertes was despondent. He was on the outs with the mother of his three daughters, the youngest of whom, Natalie, was just 4 at the time. He describes sitting in front of his apartment in Ellicott City, “waiting for the vultures to pluck my eyes.” Occasionally, a friend would drive him to the top of a rail-trail that descends into Ellicott City. Mertes would roll back into town in his wheelchair. Once, he stopped to look into the woods. There, maybe a hundred feet from the trail, he could make out a dark form in the forest: the trunk of a massive tree. He named it the Witness, and he vowed to climb it some day.

Mertes’ desire to climb again kept him going through the long recovery. Lacking insurance and money for physical therapy, he went back to work with stone, slowly building his strength. A year and a half after the crash, he finally got back into a tree—a big red oak in a friend’s front yard. “I sat up there for a long time and cried,” he says.



Man aloft: Bob Mertes sets up climbing equipment in a giant sycamore he calls “the Mother Tree.”
(photo by JT Thomas)


On an early fall day, Mertes shoulders a pack of climbing gear and heads into the woods. Today, only a faint limp hints at the damage he once did to his body; when the weather gets bad, he says, his reconstructed femur aches. But Mertes has parlayed his talent with ropes and immunity to acrophobia into a job as a high access rigger—playing Spiderman on tall buildings and bridges, doing mechanical work and setting anchors and cables for window-washers and the like. After work, he gathers a few friends and takes to the trees.

Not far from a paved bike path, Mertes stops to admire an old white oak, its trunk 6 feet across at the base. About 60 feet up, the trunk splits into five huge branches, each as big around as an oil drum, spreading like fingers from an upturned palm into a broad canopy 120 feet above the ground. It’s the Witness.

Mertes is here because it’s healing time again. A romance has just fallen apart, and, adding to the heartache, he’s just dropped off Natalie, his youngest, at college in North Carolina. Natalie was the first person Mertes brought climbing in the Witness. It was three years after the accident, and she was 7 years old. “I didn’t share [the Witness] with anyone else at the time,” Mertes says. “She’s a really powerful tree.” He credits time in trees with building a strong father-daughter bond—and a tough, insightful young woman. Natalie’s college entrance essay was about climbing with her dad.

To get into the tree, Mertes doesn’t use loggers’ spikes, which can do serious damage. Instead, he produces a slingshot mounted on an eight-foot fiberglass pole. With a warning call of “headache!” he shoots a sack full of lead shot trailing a thin cord through a notch in one of the higher branches. He uses the cord to pull a rope over the branch, using a leather sheath called a “friction saver” to prevent the rope from cutting into the tree. He steps into a heavy arborist’s harness clinking with carabiners. Then he ties in to one end of the rope and hauls himself up the other end using a sliding knot called a Blake’s hitch to hold his progress.

Nine stories up, Mertes is all but invisible to dog walkers on the bike path. The leaves of saplings interlock in a patchwork of green below. A pair of barred owls sounds off in the dappled afternoon light. Mertes, usually laid back, is suddenly animated. Suspended by his rope, he dives from branch to branch, swinging like a pirate in the rigging. “Welcome to my church,” he says.

Back in town, at the bar at the Ellicott Mills Brewing Company, Mertes talks about his longtime dream of starting a tree climbing school, teaching people about the transformative power of the arboreal world. The dream helped him weather the accident and its aftermath; now he’s trying to puzzle out how to make it work as a business. He calls the school “Touch the Sky.”

In recent years, recreational tree climbing has caught on with the REI crowd. To appeal to these affluent hobbyists, Mertes is thinking about hosting wine and cheese sessions, yoga classes, and sunset dates in trees. He even wants to do campouts, where people sleep in hammocks suspended in the branches. But he really warms up when he talks about teaching kids to climb. “I love what happens with kids, especially kids who are afraid of heights or reluctant to do it,” he says. He has promised himself that he’ll look up the doctor who rebuilt his leg and see if he has any young patients who would benefit from “spending a day outside of themselves.”

Mertes has started networking with people in the outdoor education and recreation industries, and he’s working through the instructor training program at Tree Climbers International in Georgia, a national organization that promotes recreational climbing. Natalie helped put together a website, www.touchtheskytreeclimbing.com, and friends have encouraged him to apply for funding to buy equipment.

But progress is slow. Part of the problemis that Mertes spends every free moment swashbuckling about the treetops. “I’m my own worst enemy,” he says. “I’m a procrastinator.” Mertes also admits that he’s got a few butterflies in his belly. When the website went live, he says, “That was scary shit. I felt really vulnerable. Suddenly my dream is out there for all the world to see.”



(photo by JT Thomas)


A month later, Mertes is once again schlepping his backpack into the woods, this time to a forgotten corner of Druid Hill Park. It’s a chilly Friday afternoon, and the sky is spitting rain when he stops at the base of another massive red oak. Surrounded by smaller upstarts, it must have stood at the edge of a meadow decades ago.

As Mertes sets up his gear, he talks about his school, which is starting to take shape. He has been getting calls from people who have seen his website, and he’s taken a few people up. “It’s exciting,” he says. “I think people are really scared of what’s going on with the planet. That’s why climbing trees really changes people. They come away with a deeper connection, that same thing that happened to me.”

Mertes recently took a new lady friend’s nephews climbing. One of them was too terrified to try, but Mertes talked him into taking the first few steps up the rope. “Then there’s the flash in his eye—that ‘aha’ look,” Mertes says.

“Yeah,” he says reassuringly, remembering the boy’s face as he reached for the sky. “You’ll be OK.”

—Greg Hanscom


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