Like most boys, I loved having a treehouse. Our first one was a rather straightforward affair. Well, not exactly straightforward. As we know by now, my father never did anything the simple way.
His idea was to bring home a pre-fab treehouse. He had scammed an old Boeing shipping crate, about 10 feet square. It was a monster to be sure. With a few modifications, it would indeed make a nifty treehouse for we four boys. We could use it as our headquarters for the various missions we ran when playing war. It could also be used to harbor the enemy, allowing us to retake it at all costs, sacrificing all of us if need be. Well, at least until we cooked up the next scenario.
While the crate would make an ideal treehouse, we lacked a tree. It’s not that we didn’t have any trees at all – the back half of our acre was wooded. There were fir and hazelnut trees all around us.
But this crate required a different kind of tree, something in the deciduous family. Finally, we narrowed the choices and found the perfect one near the cliff. It was a madrona, I think. What was more important was the fact that not five feet off the ground, it quickly branched out into a tripod of trunks.
After a little handy work with some saws, we had a lovely tripod for mounting the new fort/treehouse.
I’m not sure if my dad had ever taken the time to figure out how this fort was going to make it up on the new foundation. But, being in a neighborhood filled with kids, we made pretty short work of it, all the kids doing what looking back were extremely risky maneuvers to get the fort onto its three legs and actually stay there.
I was just a little tike at the time, but I still remember how cool it was to climb up the ladder and get into the fort. I think it was only about eight feet off the ground, certainly low enough for my brothers to jump from it and take the ladder away, leaving me stranded in tears.
Eventually, that treehouse ended its useful life. The tree rotted away a little bit at a time and each year, the old fort would list a little more precariously.
Thankfully, I was no old enough by then to build my own fort. I found a great new site behind my bedroom. It was a stand of douglas firs, topping out at about 30 feet. The trunks weren’t so wide that it would be tough to mount beams on them, yet stout enough to hold me and my friends.
There was only one slight problem. I didn’t have any wood. Well, I didn’t when I started. Eventually, I decided that the back fence, the one between the Smith house and ours had more boards than it really needed. So I removed every other one. Not all at once, mind you, but a little at a time. And wouldn’t you know it, but those 10 foot 2x4s that were holding the vertical fence planks up looked kind of rotten, too. Certainly, me taking them down would be only in the interest of safety; I might even end up saving a life.
While these boards were no longer suited for fencing, they still looked like they were good enough for a treehouse. The first floor went in about two feet from the ground. It was too open to the elements, so it eventually got a roof and then some walls. My dad being a TV repairman, I asked him for some old TV glass. These became the lovely windows in my new abode.
One day, I began to think that the roof would make a nice sun deck, so I chopped a hole in it and built a ladder up to it. It wasn’t particularly safe, however, so obviously there would need to be some walls on it, too. Since I was out of windows, I opted to hinge open the one wall on chains, creating a nice little bar/table there.
The two floors were coming together quite nicely. But if the roof of the first floor would make a nice sun deck, I bet the roof of the second one would be even better. So, another hole in the roof, another ladder, more boards and posts harvested from the now fairly barely there fence, and soon, another floor.
Now we were talking. Still, there was another roof just begging to have something done with it. I opted not to open that can of worms again, I was near the top of the tree by now and the weight of an additional floor would have created a dangerous situation in a classic Northwest windstorm.
So there I sat, pondering what to do next. The answer actually presented itself in a very Winchester Mansion sort of way. I had built a door into the wall of the top floor. It opened out to nothing. I was originally was going to hang knotted rope out it, a fire escape of sorts.
As I looked out the door, I saw that there were still four other trees not too far away. Now there is the place for a sun deck, I thought. So I expanded out, probably 20 feet out in a zig zaggy, precariously supported extension, complete with a hidden compartment under the floor, courtesy of the city street department and their lovely signs.
As I grew older, the treehouse went from a place for me and my guy pals to hang out to a make-out palace. It came in quite handy in that respect. I would just happen by it and unsuspecting girls would ask if they could see it. Of course, I would happily oblige, unlocking the door and giving a tour of its many floors where I would hope they would eventually make out with me.
Few did. Let’s face it. Who wants to make out with a teenage dweeb who still has a treehouse under construction.
In the Emerald City, thinking that the fence surrounding my rental may have a few too many boards.
– Robb