Treehouses Are Cool

Cherry Street Treehouse

There is something unusual about age. When you are young and small, things all around you appear quite large. When you are older and bigger, not so much. When I lived on Cherry Street in Hammond, Indiana, I had a huge front yard. It was massive and there were many trees. However if I were to look at it now, it might not even pass as moderately big. I made sure to climb every single tree. I would sit at the top and contemplate life that a six year old might contemplate. That pretty much left me with how the heck am I going to get down.

In my mind’s eye I can still see the front yard and the placement of every single tree. They were all mature trees and quite tall, at least for a small six year old. The yard was a rectangle with a short side facing the street. There was a walkway that ran right down the middle and up to the house. And yes, we even had a white picket fence at the edge of the street, honest. The tree closest to our home and on the west side is where this story begins.

I cannot say for sure how this plan was hatched but one day my dad showed up with a small truck. In the bed of the truck was a large pile of lumber, wood in all shapes and sizes. I cannot even say how he got the truck in the yard, but I clearly remember it resting right underneath this one tree. I watched with interest as he began to build a ladder up the side of the tree. It must have been twenty to thirty feet up before the trunk opened up into a spiral of mature branches. When his ladder made it this far, he began to build a floor. And then he was on it. Next, walls went up all the way around and by the next day it had most of a roof. “What is this?” I hollered up to him. “I’m building you kids a treehouse.”

And so he did. I remember making my first climb up with my mother in the distance fretting and complaining. As I climbed into the center of the room, I noticed there was a window on each of the four walls. The view up here was majestic. The roof was nearly complete. My dad was moving around enhancing and improving all things all at once. I thought to myself that I have the best dad in the world. And his smile always made me want to be with him.

A week went by with no progress since he had his two jobs and no free time until the following weekend. But when that arrived he was right back at it. He would finish the job before the weekend ended.

BANG! I will always remember that sound. It was massive.

About the bang in a moment. I need to give you some more background. My father lost his father at a very young age. The story is folklore to us grandchildren having never known him and only able to hold on to one simple sad story. Apparently when my grandfather was in his late twenties, he had fathered four sons by then, he was working a roofing job on a commercial building, three stories high. The long ladder he used just barely made it to the top. He had finished his work day and came down the ladder. Halfway down, he realized he had left his hammer and returned to the top to retrieve it. Unfortunately to his demise, he lost his balance and fell. He landed on the sidewalk where an urban tree was decorated with diagonal red bricks encompassing it. The bricks did him in. He lay in a hospital for three days and then passed.

BANG! I will always remember that sound. It was massive.

Somehow my dad lost his footing working on the treehouse and dropped into the space between the floor of the treehouse and the truck below. When gravity had done its job he slammed onto the bed of the truck, flat on his back. We all rushed to his side and were so happy that he miraculously was unharmed.

My mother can go from thankful to outrage faster than anyone I’ve ever known. She had put her foot down. “The treehouse is coming down. Tear it down!” My dad knew there was no room for debate. Defeated and a bit depleted, he climbed back up and started the disassembly.

Good old Cherry Street, I have a lot of great childhood memories there, our home for a while and a huge fireplace in the basement made out of treehouse wood.

Liable Road Tree Fort

Now living on Liable Road in Highland, Indiana and ten years older, I was surrounded by a forest full of trees. On the edge of our property was an old ancient tree. I thought it was beautiful but it was missing one thing, a treehouse. So I set out to build one. I never forgot how my dad built the treehouse on Cherry Street, and so I started with a ladder that rose up to the center of the tree. I began to build a floor with a central entrance. I sat on the newly built floor and looked around. The forest at this height was expansive. I thought about building the treehouse when I suddenly realized that this was not going to be a treehouse at all, this was going to be a tree FORT!

Walls went up around the floor and soon I had a roof over my head, but it was also going to be a floor. You see, I was already planning on a second floor. And I didn’t stop there. A few weeks later and a lot of odd looking pieces of wood, I was on the roof of the third level. Now I could see for miles. Standing back down on the ground I took a good assessment of it. It was huge and formidable. There was at least one window on each floor. The third floor roof had a handrail to make that open space safe. I invited my friends to come over and go up into the new tree fort and they did. We talked about how we could manage our young lives by having secret meetings in the fort. We would strategize ways of handling our enemies and bullies. The fort was a hit.

I secured some discarded garden hose. I attached it throughout the whole fort. On each level, there was a communication station complete with a funnel attached to the hose. Someone on the first floor could have an easy conversation with someone on the third.

The fort got more attention than just my friends. Some of the kids we avoided because of obnoxious behavior or bullying us, spotted the fort too. One Saturday while we were busy doing boy stuff in our fort, they entered the forest from a ways off. They meandered through the wood and emerged on one side of our fort below thirty feet. They hurled rocks and insults at us. We had water buckets and dumped a few of them on the hooligans. They returned with bottle rockets and filled our sky with light and sound. One such rocket came right toward me and exploded just as it neared my head. All sound turned to one loud excruciating ring in my left ear. I was disarmed and laid down. By the time the ringing stopped the attack was over. My friends found me on the floor of the third level disoriented.

Liable Road Ground Fort

I’m not sure why there needed to be another fort. But there was. Maybe we realized that girls were becoming very cool and they didn’t want to climb way up in a tree. So, we built a ground fort in the middle of the woods. It was a two room shack with a good roof that kept it dry, even if the floor was a forest floor. It took me and my tree fort friends most of a summer to build. We may have written about it when we went back to school but those memories are aged, stained paper words from many, many years now. When my older brother found out about it, he simply took it over. And we were out of luck.

I met a girl, grew up a bit and forgot all about my tree fort. Eight years later, my mother was tired of looking at the eye soar the tree fort had become and requested I take it apart and bring it all down. So I did.

There was a time in my life when these tree houses really meant a lot to me. Now they are just memories that really mean a lot to me.

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