Tree Houses

In which your building correspondent reminisces about two of her favorite things; childhood and construction, that is, tree houses.

We built our kids a tree house 25 years ago, in the trio of bay laurel trees that look out over the canyon.  It’s not far from the house, but up in the branches you feel like you are far away, on a ship sailing through air.

Actually we added in a few ship-like features, an old wheel and a flag, and it soon became a pirate ship.  Many happy hours were spent there saying “argh” and “ahoy.”

I say we build it for our kids, but we all enjoyed it.  Sometimes we would sleep up there amid those bay laurels – it was like sleeping inside a jar of bay leaves.  The sweet pungent smell filled our dreams with journeys to more exotic lands.

My husband had no tree house when he was growing up.  In the Depression on a farm I think the idea seemed too frivolous.  But he did have a barn to play in, with some of the same features, a high hidden spot for imagination in nature (well, hay.)

But in suburban New Jersey I think every home had a tree house.  Ours was in the large maple tree right in front of our house, and perhaps my interest in building comes from my five-year-old contribution to this structure, the first time I used hammer and nail to build something I could inhabit.  I actually think my mother did most of the building, but we all took part, and I recall heated arguments about whether there should be steps nailed into the tree or a rope ladder.  Rope ladder won, which meant one could deny entrance to other would-be residents, or pirates, by pulling up the ladder.

Richard Louv in his important book, Last Child in the Woods, argues that kids are suffering tremendously these days from lack of free time to play outdoors with no plan and little supervision.  He calls it “nature deficit disorder” and cites all kinds of studies about the over-programming of kids, the paranoia of parents about so-called strangers and the hyper regulation of planned communities which allow for no crazy projects like tree houses.  I am grateful I lived in an earlier and simpler era where my parents helped us kids build a crazy structure and then left us alone.

And where they didn’t sue our neighbors the Perkinses when I fell out of their tree house.  Besides helicopter parenting, that’s the other reason tree houses are actually being forbidden in building codes these days – lawsuits.  Of course they are “attractive nuisances” – that’s the whole point!

The Perkins’ tree house was in some big old cherry trees.  I climbed up there only once.  Their kids were older; the tree house had been un-maintained and abandoned for some time.  The platform spanned two, maybe three rougher, sappier big old cherries, not a lot of branches, massive trunks and the climb up was longer and harder than ours.

As I stood there surveying this new view, the platform slowly tipped forward.  I was horizontal, then vertical; headfirst back down to earth, scrapping myself on that rough sappy bark all the way.  I got a huge bump on my head, bloody knees and shins.

(My somewhat casual mother called the doctor who suggested I stay home a day from school.  No, I was supposed to be in a play the next day, a third grade presentation about Peter Stuyvesant.  I was a little Dutch girl, sitting on a low three-legged stool.  Of course I went to school.  It hurt to put my little lace cap over the bump on my sore head, and I hoped I wouldn’t bleed on the quaint long dress.  I staggered as I got up from that stool to sing the closing song.  Years later a doctor felt my collarbone and said, “Oh, you broke this when you were younger?”  And I said, “Not that I recall.”)

Our kids are long grown and gone.  A couple years ago my husband the real builder started eyeing the boards in the bay laurel tree house.  Nice two by fours that would save a trip to the lumber yard and would come in handy in other projects.  But he recalled the hours of pleasure sailing on the high seas in that structure, and carefully asked each kid if he could take it down.  Sure, they both said, with barely a thought.  Pirate days were passed.

But I objected, remembering probably not just our happy days up in the branches and nights in the bay leaf jar, but my own childhood adventures in the maple and cherry.  Ron was patient.  I spent an afternoon up there.  I thought about another bay leaf overnight, but it really was starting to tilt and rot.  Better use the wood now before another wet winter.  Really only the cat would miss a high perch from which to survey her kingdom.

Maybe we like tree houses because they remind us of our ancestral home in African trees, safe from predators, able to scan for dinner.  They certainly fulfill the promise of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, that the main purpose of any house is to give us a play to daydream.  I hope my children, if they have kids, will not object to a new tree house at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, a little dangerous, out there on the high seas.

Copyright @ 2016 Deborah Streeter