Treehouse

Living in a tree has been a fantasy of mine for a long time. Right up front, I should say that it’s the kind of fantasy I never seriously thought I’d enjoy making real. I don’t like roughing it. I like my creature comforts: a shower at least once every couple-three days, hot water to shower in, freedom from biting insects, water without Giardia in it, light to read by late into the night. I don’t even enjoy camping; sleeping in a tent is fun, but cooking over a fire is such a drag. I am a living illustration of this Modern Man classic, though I greatly prefer a nice cottage B&B to the Hilton.

But when I had time on my hands in my work-study job at the university art library, I used to pull the book Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher’s Art off the shelf and pore over the photos with a kind of envying admiration. I wished I knew how to build like that, but mostly I just wanted to be in those houses, where the trees dappled the light, and tidbits from beautiful old buildings made up the walls and windows. (You can see many of the photographs if you put “Barry Shapiro” photographs houses into a search engine.)

And a couple of years later, I discovered the book The Starship and the Canoe, by Kenneth Brower, which has remained one of my favorite books. I loved accompanying the author 95 feet up a Douglas fir to the treehouse that George Dyson built and occupied for three years. As with the houses in Handmade Houses, Dyson incorporated the branches into his architecture. It was a living structure.

Again, I would tire of living in such a place very quickly. Cooking over a wood stove, using a latrine, gathering my own water in buckets?–I already knew I was too bourgeois at heart to do any of those things for more than a few days. And yet I was, and still am, drawn to simple living, at least in small doses. A big part of it is proximity to nature and the peeling-away of the layers of stuff with which I have surrounded myself.

So I am thrilled to have found a treehouse to stay in for two days in September (I choose not to say where). It is just the right balance of comfort and simplicity. It has minimal kitchen facilities, like running water; that’s fine, I’ll pack in my food and keep it simple. It will be chilly at night, but it has walls, windows, a roof and a floor, and I’ll bring warm blankets. I’m grateful that there’s a toilet, bed, and chair. It isn’t far from more technologically equipped houses, but it’s isolated enough for privacy. Wifi is out of the question. I’ll read, draw, think, listen to the birds, watch for wild critters, and just be: my own, unstructured retreat.