It was the warning sound from a New York City tree before a calamity: a limb as heavy as a refrigerator — or the whole soaring tree itself — was breaking loose.
At the beginning of "Die Walküre," for example, the gray flat-sided planks rise to the vertical position, and as they go, video projections turn them into round, soaring tree trunks seen through drifting snow, then they flip inward at the bottom to become the sloping ceiling of Hunding's forest dwelling and in a twinkling are transformed into milled beams.
Garbage mars the woods, but here too there are canopies of soaring trees and a luxuriously unhurried slug.
Investigators said they believed a mail carrier who tested positive for anthrax was exposed to the bacteria on Sept. 17 while she was collecting letters along a route of about 250 addresses in the West Trenton section of Ewing Township, a middle-class neighborhood of soaring trees and single family homes just north of Trenton.
During our Sunday-night stay in early June, though, the atmosphere never rose above a pleasing, low-key nighttime buzz, with a film screening on the lawn below soaring trees speckled with Chinese lanterns, and some delicious $14 cocktails.
The mossy roots of soaring trees criss-crossed the path, creating a ropy web that battered his narrow ankles.
Everything was supersized in a kind of lush, "Land Before Time" way: the soaring trees overhead, the enormous sprigs of clover underfoot, the fern fronds that reached out every which way.
Aside from the soft, black leather couches, the main feature of the room is the floor-to-ceiling window, which looks out onto the soaring trees behind Prospect Garden.
I saw the soaring trees on the high bluff of St. Nicholas Park and later learned that the Point of Rocks, near the park's southern tip, was a military campground during the Revolutionary War.
And hikers may not get the full effect of the park's coastal oak-holly forest or the canopies of soaring trees that, as Mr. Lawton says, can make you feel you have indeed been transported through space — to Vermont.
