Golden Days and Close Calls

The Last Tree Hut

Given enough scrap wood, farm kids can build about any kind of shelter seen in a National Geographic magazine. A favorite was making a summer retreat in the spreading limbs of a tree. Being in the shade, unseen and above most of the insects, added to the attraction.

Construction plans for a new tree house started moments after a favorable tree was discovered. One summer hike took Larry and me to a faraway grove of oak trees. Located between two fields and along a drainage creek, the trees grew tall on the western slope of a natural ridge.

On the eastern edge, a tall, round white oak with outstretched limbs made a perfect location for a platform. Larry and I walked around the tree, stepping through a tangle of sharp raspberry canes and over fallen limbs and poison ivy.

The big oak grew next to a field that was in corn that year and was a favorite for raccoons. Corncobs from years before piled up around the base of the light-barked trunk, and hundreds more were beneath the outstretched limbs. Dark, seed-filled scat littered the area. The tree trunk was solid—no hollow for a coon family to occupy—but obviously the tree was a raccoon meeting hall of sorts.

“What a great spot for a tree hut,” declared Larry. “We’ll see all kinds of deer and stuff from up there. It will be a perfect spot overnight when the moon’s out, too!”

One of the best things about a tree hut was being able to look down on the rest of the world. Watching wild game was a great way to spend the afternoons on the farm, and Larry and I had stalked this very grove in the spring, sneaking up on a whitetail doe and her fawn. When she spotted us, only thirty feet away, she stiffened and stepped toward us. Larry shot up the nearest tree like a squirrel. Grounded beneath his kicking boots and falling bark, I jumped to put the hickory between me and the “charging” doe. Mom and baby ran away from all the movement and noise we made, but for a moment, both of us were trying to save our skin from an attacking deer. I wondered what Larry’s reaction would be to a family of raccoons coming aboard our deck in the middle of the night.

“This is going to take a few more boards than usual,” estimated Larry.

For a fourteen-year-old, he had a good eye for building. We decided to fashion a tree house big enough for sleeping bags and a trap door.

The limb closest to the ground was nine feet up. It would be a challenge just to get the wood up the tree. An abandoned tire chain was used as a ladder to gain access to the lowest limb. Then we scrambled around the trunk and up to the construction site. Once Larry was straddling the foot-thick limb, I would deliver boards and he would lay out the tree house deck.

We hiked back to the farm and to the pile of wood that used to be our old barn. The barn was demolished after the many accidents that followed the main floor cave-in that almost killed me. The old, rotten barn had been stripped and then pulled down, but many parts lived on. Floor planks, beams, and boards ended up as horse stalls, a stand-up bar, wall siding in a home’s basement in town, dog houses, and the huts we fashioned.

Most of the sixteen-foot siding boards had been salvaged by Todd and Brad, but a few broken ones remained, and we carried them across fences and fields the half mile to the tree.

The boards had a special provenance. The old barn had tried to kill most of us in the family. Not only had it collapsed on me, but Amy had been swinging on a rope over the hole made by the cave-in when she plunged her thigh into a shard of floor board. She had to be pulled off that. Patrice had her head rammed into the ceiling when on a jumpy quarter horse in the bottom level.

Larry and I had collected tools we felt worthy of being carried to the work site. We had an ancient pulley and lots of baler twine; a hammer; an old, dull, wood saw; and a pocket of used and straightened nails. We hung the pulley above the two limbs and then threaded a twin strand of baler twine through the pulley and down. The thin twine could work its way off the pulley and wedge between the round wood spindle and iron frame, so we had to be careful to hoist directly in line beneath the tackle.

The pine barn boards were over a foot wide and had shrunken to about three fourths of an inch thick over the eighty or so years of exposure to Michigan weather. We were able to transport about twenty boards of three- to nine-foot lengths over a couple of weeks. Larry and I carried two at a time and stopped frequently to let the blood back into our fingers. To pass the time, we talked of other historic efforts in construction. We started with the slaves building the pyramids.

“I’ll bet they didn’t have mosquitoes pestering them,” said Larry during a break.

“Yeah, I’m sure they didn’t, but if you pass out from exhaustion, I won’t use your guts to grease the way, either,” I countered.

Our trips from pile to tree gave us the chance to be soldiers climbing the Alps with Hannibal and his elephants, Lewis and Clark carrying boats over the plains of the West, and turn-of-the-century explorers going to the North Pole with barn wood toboggans pulled by huskies. “Hey, there are no trees at the North Pole!” observed Larry.

“I know that. We are going to make a raft and float home on it,” I offered. “We’ll head for home in the summer when the ice is melted, of course,” I guessed.

The V-shaped deck was level enough to the naked eye, but we put up a board railing inches above the edges just to be safe. Rolling off was often the subject of the last exchange when we settled in for a night in a tree hut.

As it turned out, we spent only a couple of moonlit nights in the old oak. It was a great retreat. We talked of building others or elaborated on improvements to other huts. We shared many afternoons watching game or stretched out, looking up through the leaves at a sparkling summer sun and talking of a new interest, the girls in our class. It was the last tree hut we built.