The Tree House

Uncle Warren was renowned in our family for his intelligence, his knowledge, his argumentativeness, his intellect. He was the uncle most likely to be caught reading the ancient Greeks and like Socrates, he loved to probe and challenge people’s assertions.

His brain was impressive, there’s no doubt. But what really impressed us kids was his handiwork. Uncle Harold played a mean game of tennis and Unkie Bud planted pachysandra on the bluff and Uncle Paul could transplant a new kidney in you and my dad, well, he couldn’t screw in a light bulb. But Uncle Warren could do just about anything, it seemed, with his hands.

He had a well-stocked and well-organized workshop in the Meadow House, and a real toolshed outside, and axes and awls and electric saws and wooden measuring sticks that folded back and forth on themselves and all manner of fascinating and faintly dangerous tools and gadgets. He designed the Meadow House himself.

He was a woodsman. He wore an olive drab woodsman’s suit and strode out into the forests to cut down trees, which he chopped into pieces and split into logs for the fireplace with a gigantic and terrifying sledgehammer and an adze. For most of my childhood, I thought Warren’s Woods over in Three Oaks was his. He was a man of the woods.

Most important, Uncle Warren built the tree house.

It was tucked among four sassafras and oak trees that grew alongside the road to the Big House, and consisted of two triangular platforms connected by a half-dozen open steps. The lower platform was sort of like an open-air deck, but the upper platform was a proper house, with a flat roof, and half-walls up to our waists, and two open doorways, front and back.

Two magnificent things about that tree house. First, it had no right angles. The floor plan and the dimensions and the way it all fit together were totally idiosyncratic. For a very simple structure, it encompassed great variety. The division into upper and lower halves facilitated that most basic of childhood games, Us Against Them. The front ladder and back ladder meant that as you chased someone into the tree house, they could be escaping out the other way. Chris, Nat, Jared, Nina, Paul, and I, along with sometimes Laird Koldyke or the Pinc brothers or John Purdy the younger and even that little weenie Peter Russell or the heralded and exciting Boston Russells found and explored every permutation of play that that unusual construction allowed us.

The second excellent thing about the tree house is that it was basically dangerous. Even if someone in the family had the talents of Uncle Warren today, we wouldn’t build a tree house that way. The world has grown more cautious in the last forty years. And anyway, our insurance company probably wouldn’t let us, because we have renters nowadays, and if someone fell off it they could of course sue us.

I’m pretty sure one of us did fall off it, at some point or another, but I can’t remember who. There were no guard rails or restraining netting or anything. The whole thing was solidly built, but a ladder is a ladder. And if Nat is standing over you threatening to step on your fingertips, it is indeed quite conceivable that you will fall off and hurt yourself. That was the thrill, of course. Yet somehow, here we all are, survivors into adulthood.

The message your uncle sends when he builds you a tree house is that he loves you. When he builds you a dangerous tree house, it’s that he trusts you. Summers at Lakeside were three long months in those days, and we spent them spinning in and out of each other’s houses, sustained by and largely oblivious to our aunts and uncles. We scrambled in and out of the tree house nearly every day, ran running through the woods pelting each other with acorns, shouting and hooting and forgetting our tennis rackets on the lawn. We dug in the sand and swam and turned the metal canoe upside down in the lake. We floated in a warm and imperceptible bath of love and trust. We never questioned our luck or even thought about it. We knew Uncle Warren built the tree house but we certainly never thanked him.

Uncle Warren invented the wagon train, too. He tied the red wagon – and if there were enough cousins, TWO wagons – to the back of the lawn mower and drove it around the property with all the cousins in the back, emitting loud monotones through our open mouths to enjoy how the pitch varied as we jounced over rocks and potholes. It was one of our most beloved pastimes. Uncle Warren sat ahead of us on the mower, and behind his benign and undemanding back we were alone together in the wagon, in our children’s world.

He was a man with a good handle on what makes childhood fun. A slightly dangerous tree house, a wagon ride, a lake. That’s really about all you need. On the beach, Uncle Warren didn’t throw a ball with us or engage much in our games. He lay back on the sand, put his white tennis hat over his face, and napped. He loved us, and trusted us, and left us alone to be the happy children we were.

In loving memory, September 12, 2009.