On the day before he and his wife are off on a motor trip to visit family in Alberta, Canada, Bill Anacker takes a trip across his house -- on a swing.
"Wheeeee!" cries the spry man wearing brown work pants, a T-shirt and a baseball cap that says "80 isn't old for a tree."
Clutching the swing by its single rope, Anacker leaps from a cedar-log stairway and soars across the sprawling, open interior of his octagonal cabin, a terrestrial tree house that appears to have risen of its own accord beneath a grove of towering chestnut and oak trees in northern Baltimore County.
"Wheeeee!" the man cries again. Eighty isn't old for Bill Anacker either.
Anacker's wooded home in Freeland has become a natural amusement park where children of all ages can take wonderful, gravity-defying chances on Anacker's 20 swings -- five inside, 15 outside. There are single-rope "Tarzan" swings, pancake swings, bucket swings, floating seesaws, bucking-bronco spool swings, group swings and less-daring "grandma" porch swings.
A self-proclaimed "ordained arborist," Anacker has evolved into a whimsical folk legend, a Johnny Appleseed of swings traveling from one wooded expanse to another around Maryland and the rest of the country, installing untold variations of the ancient staple of child's play.
Motivated more by joy than profit, he makes swings for modest fees, $60 to $150. As Anacker sees it, where there's a tree, there's fun. And if it were possible, he would put a swing on every tree, everywhere he went.
Anacker isn't the type to become overly introspective in his musings about swings. When you ask him to describe their appeal, he simply says: "It's delightful!"
It falls to Nathan Dunlap, his good friend and protege in the tree-tending and swing business, to probe the meaning of Anacker's good works: "It's a way of bringing into people's lives something that Americans are often missing. In general they are so busy, they have no real time to just simply enjoy the simple things of life, like getting on a swing and going back and forth and feeling the motion of the rope and the wind and the excitement of falling through the air as you jump off."
Anacker's swinging ministry began by accident.
Growing up in Baltimore, he was destined for a minor league baseball contract with the Orioles, but that providentially went kaput when he wrenched an ankle at Prettyboy Dam. So Anacker spent a picaresque youth laboring around the country, then returned to Baltimore.
There, in 1949, he founded A&A; Tree Experts. Scampering fearlessly up trees, judiciously wielding a chain saw to prune dead and crowded limbs, installing cables to keep grand old timbers from splitting, Anacker cultivated a tripartite passion for nature, holistic living and God.
Eureka
Then one day, 30 years ago, a client asked him, while he was aloft, to attach a rope to a limb for a swing. The request had a profound impact on the man. It was as if the scary/wonderful sensation of flying rhythmically to and fro was the missing link in Anacker's spiritual cosmos.
Since that moment, he has preached the ecstasy of swinging. "The higher you go, the better the swing you get," Anacker instructs one and all, as if grooming his students for faith on a much more exalted and risky plane.
Anacker estimates that he has installed 100 swings in the Baltimore area this past year alone. He has built swings at the homes of friends and relatives around the country. The high-flying swings daredevils dote on at the Milford Mill Swimming Club in Randallstown are his. He frequently spots a home with kids and trees that beg for a swing and installs it gratis.
Anacker's own home is a panoply of ponderosa pine, tulip poplars and cedar timbers built in the late 1970s by him and his brother-in-law. Inside it, besides the Tarzan swing, there is a wide swing for two, a hanging hammock positioned to watch "Jeopardy!" a bungee swing and a climbing rope that takes the adventurous up to the rafters, where, say, at a birthday party, they might find treasure. All swings dangle from the cabin's huge central space, which combines kitchen, dining room and living room.
"We're swing-happy," says Anacker, who spent many days as a kid swinging from monkey vines and hunting for frogs in Baltimore's rural reaches. With his piercing blue eyes, gaunt face and spry posture, Anacker could pass for Cal Ripken Sr., minus the baseball legend's hard glint.
Treehouses
Anacker also builds spectacular tree houses with Dunlap, whom Anacker met in 1975 after he placed an ad in the Mother Earth News, hoping to find friendly folks to stay with on a cross-country trip. As Anacker remembers, the ad went something like this: "58-year-old, still climbs trees, likes kids and trees, willing to stay with people on the way to Ca." Anacker received responses from people in Georgia, New Mexico, other far-flung states and from the Dunlap family in Kentucky.
The Anackers remained in touch with the Dunlaps after their first visit to Kentucky. After his sophomore year at Berea College, Nathan Dunlap came to Freeland as Anacker's apprentice arborist. "He paid me much better wages than I deserved, gave me a little trailer to live in, and paid for food and transportation," Dunlap says.
Anacker did the same more recently, when Dunlap was struggling to find stable work in Kentucky and called his old mentor. "When are you coming?" Anacker simply asked. In return for their assistance, Dunlap, a trained carpenter with a mechanical bent, became the Anackers' handyman.
Anacker is not wealthy, but he is frugal, always looking for a deal and prospecting for Dumpster treasure. He gets a lot of mileage out of carpet remnants, which he uses to upholster furniture and to pad swing launching sites. Such habits allow him to be extraordinarily generous, Dunlap says. Anacker once bought a woman a car, he recalls. When she asked how she could ever repay him, Anacker said, "Well, you've got chickens, don't you? Pay me back in eggs." And so she has, for several years.
As beneficent as he is, Anacker is not afraid to speak his mind. If he sees a child whacking a tree with a stick, he orders a halt. "Would you like someone to come up and tap on you with a stick?" he asks.
Anacker is retired from A&A;, now run by his son. He still takes tree-pruning jobs, but they are "things that require more artistic ability," such as opening up clotted shrubbery and trees to the sky.
On a recent blessedly breezy morning, Anacker and another apprentice, 16-year-old Aaron Merrill, installed two Tarzan swings the front yard of Peggy and Louis Sachs' Freeland farm. The old man and the young man trimmed four limbs from the first tree, a venerable Norway maple, then screwed a "lag," a large threaded hook, into the tree. To that, Merrill attached a "thimble," a metal ring around which a steel cable was passed. From the cable, Merrill and Anacker hung a thick, knotted rope that held a particle-board disc to sit on. With one of the Sachs girls on the swing, Anacker yanked it back and let go, making sure that it was obstacle-free in any direction.
Next, Anacker assembled a launching pad; a tower of three wooden industrial spools, from large to small, and nailed them together with rusty nails stored in a glass jar. He placed a frayed carpet remnant below the first spool-step, a whimsical welcome mat.
It was time for Kate, Maggie and Evie Sachs to mount the spool tower and lift off on the Tarzan swing. "Stand up straight, go off to the edge and go!" Anacker said.
Kate was the first to take the plunge. She climbed the spool while grasping the rope with one hand. From the top, she pulled herself onto the disc. Away she flew, golden hair flying, in a long, luxurious arc.
Last-minute reminders
The day before his departure on vacation, Anacker is instructing Merrill where to place lags for a tree house built around one of those used wooden spools he gets for free from a Pikesville company. Bread is baking in the Anacker cabin, which is filled with Biblical quotations, books, copious files, health food and religious tracts, and photos of the Anackers' four grown children and their offspring.
On the front porch, Margaret Anacker cleans a mountain of dewy spinach picked that morning from the couple's lush vegetable garden. What is it like living with Bill Anacker, a man who so loves swings he puts them inside his home? "Every day is a day of expectancy," she says.
An extension ladder, at least 40 feet tall and placed on top of a spool, leans against a tree in front of the cabin. The Anackers' grandniece, Lucie Hopkins, 11, and a visitor from the Bronx, Chin Ajunwa, 12, take turns mounting the ladder and leaping on a Tarzan swing that might make Evel Knievel blanch.
Then, Kate Stello shows up with her daughter Amy, 9, and a gaggle of other local moms and children. Soon, 15 kids are dashing from swing to swing, squealing as they try them out. Merrill, finished with his chores, takes the Tarzan swing for a ride, flips upside down in midflight, for an impromptu, yet breathtaking acrobatic performance. His cap falls off, to everyone's delight.
Anacker gives a newcomer a tour. There is a "lover's" swing, built like a love seat, to facilitate kissing, he says. And there's the grandma swing, suspended from a cable, where Lucie and Chin now sit.
The phone rings. Peggy Sachs' husband isn't pleased with the )) ramshackle spool tower in their front yard. As usual, Anacker doesn't mince words. "Just paint them green," he says.
Anacker stops to talk to a plant. And to a swinging kid: "Are you going to get off so I can give you a hug?"
Give and get
When friends come to Anacker's house to swing, they often leave thank-you notes, essays, flowers, cookies. One year, as way of showing her gratitude for the Anackers' generosity, Kate Stello helped Anacker plant 2,000 annuals. The more you give, the more you get back, Anacker says. It's as simple as that.
Soon, he will pack his pickup truck for the cross-country trek. Along with clothing and gear, he'll load the truck with swings, carpet remnants, lags, spools and other hardware for swing installations along the way.
Nathan Dunlap says it would not be reaching to view the older man's quest as a spiritual mission. Invoking a contemporary Christian song lyric -- "Jesus is the only way, but there are many ways to Jesus" -- Dunlap says, "There are a 100,000 different ways to come to know and understand Christ. Why not through && swings? Why not through some man, because he loves God's creation, because he loves people, shows Christ's love in a very practical way, [by saying,] 'Here, I want to do this for you.' He blesses you with a swing."
Pub Date: 7/14/98