Tree House

A tree house is a right of passage for many American boys. I don’t believe that girls feel the need to devolve back to the inner ape, but boys seem to have tree forts hard wired into their genetic code.

I feel sorry for boys who grow up in treeless areas, and I’m sure they must dig caves where they live. I grew up in the trees and as a kid you learn early to look at every group of trees and evaluate them for their building potential. A group of trees together was always better than a single tree with a split trunk or crown.

In my old neck of the woods, me and my cadre of friends always scoped trees along the Ramapo River. The river not only provided us with isolation from developed areas, but it also provided us with recreation, be it fishing or swimming.

The river also supplied us with building materials. After any rain we would find ply wood and two by fours that washed down stream and got hung up on the rocks or washed up on shore. Like beavers we would build our lodges, and we would make them adult proof. We knew how much weight could be placed onto the rungs we nailed to the trees. They would support less than 100 lbs. No adult in their right mind would ever attempt entry. It looked unsafe even to us, but we knew the weak links in the climb and avoided them.

I was involved in two tree forts on the river. One was a one level ranch style with a grand pebble beach and river view, and the other was a three story manse built on a cluster of trees that hung over the river. It was climbing to this house where one day I forgot about the trick steps.

Suddenly I heard a snap and just as suddenly I found myself without any weight or any part of me attached to anything connected to the ground. In my mind the fall was slow. I felt like a snow flake though on the way down images of everything were blurred. Eventually I did land, but luckily I found myself cradled in the washed out roots of the tree. My body landed evenly all at once with equal pressure. The only casualty of the fall was my left ankle which protruded past the cradle of roots. My foot snapped downward spraining my ankle. Not bad for a 25 foot fall.

They say that some sprains are worse then breaks. This was one of those sprains. I did have x-rays so I knew it wasn’t broken. I was limping for six weeks, and that ankle still swells up on occasion and I can still tweak it if I come down on that foot in the wrong way.

I did continue tree fort efforts after that, but it wasn’t long before I matured to terra based kid structures.

This all comes back to mind because of a cedar tree that was badly damaged during the December storm. When I was building an addition on my home a few years ago, I was placing a large glue-lam beam on a post about 25 feet in the air above the ground. This healthy cedar tree was near by, and for a moment I fantasized about altering my plans to include the tree in the addition.