The last morning

By the end of the week the Tree had stopped being a structure people visited and became somewhere they stayed. They climbed it at sunset and did not come down. They brought blankets up to the summit. They fell asleep in the weave at the base, half a dozen at a time, and woke when the light came back over the mountains.

That is the part we could not have designed. You can engineer a canopy for shade and a lattice for wind; you cannot engineer strangers deciding your sculpture is the safest place in the city to sleep. The last morning had a dozen people on the crown watching the sun come up through the chimes, and a huddle of them wrapped in blankets below.

Every photograph on this page is from those final days. The Tree came home after them — it travels now, and it books. But this is the version of it we will keep: full of people, at dawn, on the last morning.