Nicholas Howe [01/29/2008]

By Nicholas Howe

Counter talk at Yesterdays Restaurant in Jackson can take unexpected turns, and last week it touched for a moment on tree house. Then, as quickly, it veered away again. The moment could have lingered longer. And, since I was there, much longer.During my grammar school years I built so many tree houses and spent so much time in them that I might have grown feathers. That was in Deerfield, Massachusetts, and there were so many trees in the town that Main Street was practically a tunnel through the greenery. The street was said to be a mile long, and although I never measured it on a cars odometer because my family never had a car, it was probably just about that, maybe even exactly that. Westover Field was just beyond the ridge of Pocumtuck Mountain on the east side of town, it was a training base for medium bombers during the war, and twin-engine B-25s would go hurtling the length of the street, so low that wed rank the skill and daring of each pilot by how many leaves his propellers sent raining into the street.That wasnt the only material falling on us. Main Street in Deerfield was lined by elm trees and Dutch elm disease came to down. This is a fatal condition and a quick remedy was needed or the town would be stripped. The answer was believed to be arsenate of lead, so something like a fire truck with a large tank and a nozzle on top would drive slowly through the streets blowing this toxic rain into the highest branches. Then it would come back down in what must be equally toxic arsenic showers, a problem that seemed to be unavoidable and almost certainly bad for those of us who were not infected trees.My family lived in a large 19th-century house with eight or 10 trees on the lot and several of them were suitable for climbing, which meant they were suitable for tree houses. It seemed obvious to me that a tree house should be as high as possible, which meant that the branches holding it up were correspondingly smaller than those lower down. The first tree house was near the top of a horse chestnut tree and that was the first one I fell out of. It seemed to me that I hit every limb on my way to the ground and it hurt a lot, but not enough to discourage further tree climbing.Those first tree houses were all in the same tree, one after another, and they were rather flimsy because they were made of whatever scraps of wood I could find and could get to stay in the top branches, though they did not always stay very securely. That never bothered me, because I thought no fall could be from as high or hit as many branches on the way down as the first one, and that wasnt so bad.Then I moved to a larger and higher tree and, emboldened by the apparent lack of much gravity in my near vicinity, I built larger and higher tree houses. Still, though, there seemed to be an absolute limit in the relation between dimension and altitude. This meant that any advance must be gained by a change in tree house fundamentals, so I launched a new generation of arborial architecture that did not depend on the convenient placement of limbs and forks, these tree houses would be hung by chains. Moving quickly now, I left the original perch-like format behind and built a platform with a house on it, the whole suspended from a long horizontal limb, then several of them. Access in this series could not be made from below, so I dropped onto them from above. Further studies by the R&R department suggested a ladder, so I scrounged neighborhood garages until I found a tire chain and made the cross links into the rungs of a ladder and climbed up from below.By now Id gotten just about all there was to get from single-tree designs, so I turned to three backyard trees that grew in a long narrow triangle. This opened a future of joist and floorboard construction with a house partway along and a chain ladder at the wide end. Then, in case an alternate exit was needed should an emergency strike, I made another tire-chain ladder at the narrow end that was disguised by a trap door. Then I made a roof for the porch and a door on the house.Then I finished grammar school and started Deerfield Academy, where the required athletics in the afternoon and meals in the school dining room ended my life in the trees. Thus deprived, I decided that my future lay in photography. I had a small plastic camera, hardly larger than my small fist and without any adjustments at all, and one Saturday afternoon I went to watch a varsity lacrosse game, a sport in which the academy teams were perennial New England champions. Seeking an angle that would mark me as a young professional, I climbed a tree that grew near one of the sidelines. Another student came over and stopped by the tree. He was the son of a world-famous movie maker and he asked who my tutor for tree-climbing was, which told me all I needed to know about students at high-end private schools.My life went in different directions after those years and I moved to the familys summer house here in Jackson and I rarely went back to Deerfield. Not long ago I did go back and I was struck by how small the trees along Main Street are now. I decided that this must be the effect of how much taller I am now, then I asked around and learned that all the old elm trees on Main Street had died of Dutch elm disease and these replacement trees were not elms and they really were smaller. The house we used to live in was now owned by an academy student who was the son of a household-name fortune and I didnt dare linger long enough to see if the trees were still in the back yard and if anything remained of my last tree house. I Googled tree house after Id written those words and was rewarded by about 8,840,000 hits. Oprah was one and there was a Tree House Workshop with consulting services in planning, design, engineering and construction, and the Guardian of London had news of tree house hotels in India, Tanzania, South Africa, and Australia. My research and design department had gotten out of hand. Nicholas Howe is a writer from Jackson. E-mail him at nickhowe@ncia.net.