The Great Treehouse Tragedy

Children attempting to build the ultimate treehouse.

When I was a child we couldn't afford a lot of fancy store bought toys.With six kids in the family, whenever Mom and Dad bought a toy they had to buy five more of equal value lest they be overcome with wails of "no fair". As a result, toys were in somewhat short supply so my siblings and I had to improvise. One of the things we found to occupy us was building tree houses. You could get quite a lot of nails for not a lot of money, and instead of lumber we would cut down small trees with our hatchets and use them as our main building material. We lived in the boonies and were surrounded by forest with plenty of small trees to spare, but using them was a lot of extra work. Once you selected a suitable straight candidate of about the thickness of the big end of a baseball bat, you had to cut it down, cut all the limbs off, then hack it up into shorter sections. In fact, most of the work in building our treehouse actually went into the harvesting of the wood poles.

Once we had a sufficient stockpile of materail built up we started the design process, which consisted mainly of finding four trees close together that formed an approximate square. You would not believe how rare it is in nature for four trees to form a square with each other, but we persisted with the search. We weren't too overly picky about it either, because a rhombus or a trapezoid is almost as good as a square anyway. Also we always ended up with some longer and some shorter poles during the harvesting process, so we might as well build around them. Once we had the site finalized we began the actual building of the treehouse. This consisted of simply holding up a pole as high as we could reach while someone nailed it to a tree on each end. We would repeat this for all four sides of the square until we had the outlined framed in. Our preferred method of measurement was eyeball, and none of us had any idea what a level or straightedge was.

With the perimeter framing nailed up, we began building the floor by laying poles on the framework and nailing them to it. We placed the poles as tightly together as we could so that when we finished we had a sort of corduroy floor. With the floor completed we then nailed short scrap poles onto one of the corner trees to create a rudimentary ladder. We then all climbed up onto our newly completed floor and repeated the process to create another floor above. We kept building in this manner until we had ceated a four story hi-rise treehouse. The only thing keeping us from going higher was that we ran out of nails, but we never ran out of energy.

We didn't bother building any walls. We were more interested in going higher, so we did not waste precious material on walls. What we ended up with was four Gilligan's Island looking rafts stuck up in the trees. Now it was time to furnish our new home in the forest. One of Dad's friends owned a junkyard, and he let us have a couple of old worn out bench seats which made perfect treehouse sofas. Also no treehouse would be complete without candles for lighting and old comics to read by them. At last our dream house was finished and we could enjoy the fruits of our labor with an afternoon siesta high up among the trees.

Later that day when some of the neighbor kids came by to check out our new digs, we didn't hesitate to invite them up. We preferred to do our entertaining on the uppermost level, which we thought of as the penthouse. It never once occured to any of us to consider just how much weight we felt this structure could safely acommodate. We just naturally assumed our construction methods could withstand an unlimited amount of pressure. We even had the gall to be utterly shocked and surprised when under the weight of ten kids the whole top floor collapsed onto the floor below. This started a chain reaction of each floor failing and collapsing onto the floor below until there were no more floors.

The whole event was over in less than five seconds. We were all sprawled on the ground surrounded by broken and splintered poles. It was a true miracle that no one was seriously injured, in fact, no one had so much as a scratch. God certainly watches over fools, because instead of cries of pain there were howls of laughter. Our post-tragedy investigation determined that each floor was held up by only eight small nails, which in hindsight did not seem like enough.Our design was fatally flawed from the outset, and frankly I was amazed it had held up as long as it did.

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[universe-explorer]

boy, that is life! i love this