Illustration by Erick Ingraham.
The summer I was 23, I lived in a treehouse in the Maine woods. My boyfriend, Curry, and I had just returned to the state after an unsuccessful attempt to start careers in Colorado, near my family. His father had lured us back with the promise of a job for Curry and a free place to stay for us both. But after a week in the family home, we needed our own space. We were young, adventurous, and flat broke – good enough reasons to move up into the trees.
Ours was not an artisanal treehouse, the kind you might see in a coffee table book, with balconies, cedar shingles, and stained-glass windows. Rather, it was a platform of rough-sawn pine, about 8-by-10 feet, with knee-high walls and a roof of clear, corrugated plastic suspended about 7 feet above the floor.
We built the house in Curry’s dad’s barn and loaded it on top of our friend’s small pickup to transport it about a quarter mile down the road and along a grassy track to a quiet stand of eastern white pines on the northern edge of my father-in-law’s property. There, we hoisted the platform, walls, and roof into the trees with block-and-tackle and a fair amount of cursing.
I didn’t want to harm the trees we would live among with bolts or screws, so we hung the treehouse between two tall pines via a network of ropes. We knotted four ropes under the corners of the floor to hold up the platform, threaded two beneath the floor joists for stabilization, and balanced the roof overhead with another pair.
One of our supporting trees had a double leader, and both had crazy limbs sticking out in all directions, typical of the unruly growth pattern of pasture-grown pines. Looking out from our treehouse, we could see nothing but trees: other tall, scraggly pines, as well as young oaks, maples, birches, aspens, and balsam firs filling out the understory. Our neighbors were birds, frogs, and squirrels.
We furnished the treehouse with a pair of camping pads and sleeping bags and two duffel bags full of clothes. We tucked mosquito netting around us when we slept and unfurled green plastic tarps to close the gap between the roof and walls when it rained. We accessed the treehouse by way of an aluminum extension ladder and used a 5-gallon bucket on a pulley to raise and lower books and laundry. In a nearby clearing, we set up our kitchen: a stone fire ring and a screen house that held a cooler, two lawn chairs, and a plastic water jug.
Living in a treehouse in the woods surely had its inconveniences: cooking over a fire, reading by candlelight, no running water, everything sticky with pine sap. But what I most remember about that summer in the trees is coming home from work in the afternoons, climbing the ladder, and lying down on my sleeping bag. The pine boughs overhead swayed in the breeze, dark green and blurry through the plastic roof. The treehouse rocked gently, like a massive, wooden hammock. Pine needles whispered secrets. I remember feeling completely at ease – at one with the branches and bugs and birds all around me.
Our treehouse summer came to an abrupt end in late September, after I was thrown from the semi-feral horse I’d attempted to ride bareback. I sprained my ankle and bruised just about everything else. I could no longer climb the ladder, and we moved back into Curry’s father’s house. After my ankle healed, I returned to the treehouse site to dismantle the kitchen. By then, it was too cold to sleep outside, and we’d signed the lease on an apartment. We lowered the treehouse to the ground and gave it to Curry’s mother, to be converted into a chicken coop.
In the quarter century since that summer, Curry and I again moved to Colorado and back to Maine, this time to stay. We got married and built a house, one firmly grounded on the earth. We had three babies and raised them into young men. I’ve never again slept in a house that swayed in the trees, and I’ve rarely felt so at peace as I did lying in the treehouse those summer afternoons. Sometimes, though, when I lie in my hammock and look into the pine boughs swaying overhead, I can almost hear the needles whispering their secrets.