Part One

Ever since I was Tom Sawyer, I've looked at trees critically in two ways: climbing potential and treehouse potential.  I was informed at a young age that I was born in the Chinese Year of the Monkey, and thus was provided with a bulletproof legal defense as I bounced from limb to limb giving my mother heart attacks, a natural tree-climber who never fell, at least not such that I'd admit.  I actually scurried up trees for time, imagining a magical day when the Olympics would finally recognize Arboreal Ascendance as a medal event. In the meantime, I scouted for treehouses.

Backseating through the neighborhood as a kid, I would dryly inform my parents of acceptable properties, should they decide to relocate.  My father, inexplicably, grew irritated and would attempt to educate me on what actually made a good real estate investment, but my subversive mother taught me the ancient mantra on the sly, and when we spotted a good tree, we'd just say "location, location, location!" and start giggling.  My sister Lisa's criterion was a good barn for the Eventual Pony.  Yeah, whatever.

My parents subscribed to Sunset Magazine, home to all sorts of crafty remodeling ideas.  Sunset had an entire special book devoted to playhouses and treehouses.  I studied it the way I should have studied fractions.  When my father finally caved to bilateral pressure and agreed to build a treehouse in our backyard, I had lotsa suggestions.

First of all I sketched out a basic clubhouse design, with the idea of one end attached to the big pine, and the other end supported by a thinner neighboring redwood.  I figured fifty or sixty feet up would be acceptable; I might want visitors, and I didn't want them to poop out climbing the knotted rope I intended to have as the sole ingress to my aerie.  After reading Swiss Family Robinson, I devised a really awesome pulley and bucket system for hauling loot up to my treehouse, and with Treasure Island also fresh in my nugget, I placed windows and small cannons at strategic pirate-repellant places on my floorplan.

As things began to take shape, I debated having a roof.  I mean, as an amateur astronomer, I wanted to see the stars during the nights I would be sleeping in the treehouse, but I was a little paranoid about pine needles and/or spiders dropping into my mouth as I slept.  I decided to bring my best friends, brothers Chris and Matt, in on the scheme; ostensibly to advise me on open-air vs. enclosed, but also to gloat heavily over my new domain.  As predicted, stock in Rex Incorporated skyrocketed, with the added bonus of a very sensible group decision: a glass roof, preferably a dome.  Genius.

The problem with consultants is that once they get your ear, they won't let go.  Chris brought up the question of Utilities, which I secretly found confusing I thought it was just a Monopoly term.  I was mighty vexed.  My colleagues were very much into the idea of equipping my treehouse with a TV and a fridge, but my position was that space would be limited and anyway, we weren't allowed to sit closer than six feet to the TV, else we'd go blind.  Matt wanted to know about the Other Functions (so much more to 'Utilities' than I thought!) but we quickly agreed there Shall Be No Pooping, and as Men, we could pee right off the deck I quickly sketched onto the back side of the treehouse.  Chris astutely pointed out the additional anti-piracy value of this pee scheme, and we fell to laughing uncontrollably, and spent the rest of the day playing Risk.

I spent a weekend doing lotsa drawings.  I wasn't sure what my Dad did for a living, but I knew every time he worked on the house he had lotsa drawings.  I got a little nervous about approaching the Old Man, so I stalled for a time by building a Lego model of my treehouse, minus the tree of course.  Then I decided to run the whole thing past Mom first.

My Mom proved an excellent example of why all good schemers need an editor.  She congratulated me on the sensibility of ixnaying electricity, but wondered about the practicality of my glass dome idea.  "During earthquake drills at school, what do they tell you about windows?"  But we don't have glass windows, see? "Don't you think a glass dome is just as risky?"  Maybe if we designed an earthquake-proof suspension. "What about shrapnel if a lucky pirate hits the dome with a cannonball?"  Mom could be so dorky.  It was highly unlikely for us to have any backyard cannon fire. But I saw her point about earthquakes; I was a scientist, but I knew next to nothing about suspension design.

She also thought the main clubhouse should be a little closer to the ground.  I pretty vehemently objected, even when she pointed out that she might personally want to visit from time to time, and fifty feet was just too far to climb.  This steamed me, since I had already self-limited down from a hundred feet for just this purpose.  Couldn't she do some push-ups or something and improve her climbing abilities?  I was appeased by the suggestion of a secret escape slide being added to the back pee-deck. Slides couldn't be built much more than twenty feet long, apparently.  I had been previously unaware of this.

And so it was on a footbally Sunday afternoon I approached the Den, that aptly-named 1970s lair of masculinity, books, and darkness, with my loose sheets of 8.5 x 11, to provide my father with the guidelines for the palace that would, by my calculations, increase our property value by at least a thousand percent.  Mom had given me the property-value angle to use in case I got in a jam, but she insisted that I make my presentation man-to-man.  "He's your Daddy, and he loves you," she said of the brooding superhero, "it's important that you're able to talk to him."

Now, in my experience, there was considerable evidence to contradict all three parts:  my parents had only been married for a few years, my life had since suffered numerous insufferables not born of love, and I found myself getting along fine just keeping out of my Dad's way.

True, he'd been the source of the Miracle Present of 1973, the Fisher-Price Action Parking Garage (with working elevator).  He'd also accomplished the Christmas 1977 Magic Train Table Morphification, and he'd helped build the playstructure at my elementary school.  He could build anything, probably.  So this would be a piece of cake; I didn't need to worry about my drawings at all.  The only thing was this whole 'love' business. And I didn't really trust it.

I went in and sat on the couch, not too close.  The Raiders were third-and-five and I knew that too was important somehow.  I waited.

----

Part Two

Watching football with my father, especially on the frequent occasion of an ulterior motive, was agonizing.  My cheerleading for the Raiders had that forced quality which you know, if you've ever shared a joke with a ten-year-old, is typical of the species.  In the same way a slightly clever joke could garner the overly-annunciated HA HA HA, oh, HA HA HA HA, really, oh my GOD, that's SOOO funny, HA HA HA, so it was that I extolled the wisdom of Ken Stabler's choice to run it up the middle on second-and-six.

Somewhere in my young life I had also learned the polite habit of asking questions to feign interest, though I had no idea it was called "small talk".  What had escaped me was the importance of trying to remember the answers.

MIGHTY REX:  If they get a fourth down, what then?

SUPREME BEING:  Then they have to decide whether or not to go for it.

MR:  Go for what?

SB:  The first down.

MR:  Oh.

MR:  Why wouldn't they want the first down?

SB:  We've talked about this.

MR:  Oh.

MR:  I hope they Go For It.

SB:  It's fourth-and-four.

MR:  They could do a Trick Play.

SB:  They're on their own 30.  They'll punt.

MR:  Why?

SB:  We've talked about this.

MR:  I hope they Go For It.

(pause)

SB:  Another four-and-out. Dammit. Good job, Snake. Crap.

MR:  So, about my treehouse?

The Old Man took my drawings out of my hands and laid them on his lap, his eyes never leaving the TV screen; later I learned the subtle humor of "Less Filling! Tastes Great!" and appreciated that "It Has A Third Less Calories Than Their Regular Beer, So It Won't Fill You Up and Never Slows You Down," but at that moment I mistakenly believed I held the floor, and I talked a mile a minute.

I am going to attempt a grave sin here and attempt to interpret the auditory comprehension of a now-deceased parent distracted by Dick Butkus and Mean Joe Green hocking bad beer on his one day off twenty-seven years ago, but I'm willing to take the risk of a heavenly lecture when we meet again.  I'm fairly sure that, regardless of the details of my presentation, the Old Man heard:

"Treehouse... between the pine and... so great... knotted rope... see?... catapult... bucket... easy... cool... fantastic, won't take... I can help... property value... grenades... pirates, hee hee, of course not real ones, ha ha... rocks... windows here... dome... Best Treehouse Ever!"

Then he said the words that, to me, proved his love to me in spite of so much evidence to the contrary:

"Uh huh.  We'll build it next weekend."  The Raiders evidently had a Bye week.  I still don't get this.  Whatever, soooo not the point.

The week passed with countless prognostications as I became the envy of everyone.  Sure, there were only four kids in the neighborhood, but none of Them had treehouses. It was going to be the Best Treehouse Ever, I opined, and We're Building It Next Weekend.  I showed my drawings like secret plans for uranium enrichment, and received appropriate adoration.  I was a celebrity for the first time in my life, and with the plans and schemes that flowed in that two-block radius you'd have thought we were breaking off into a self-sustaining colony straight out of Lord of the Flies.  Yet, by Friday I was starting to second-guess my Dad's commitment to the light cannonry... would he really pull through on this crucial point?

On Saturday morning I learned that the Old Man had actually gotten BOTH Saturday and Sunday off... that's how committed he was to Our Project, and I felt incredibly guilty for worrying about the cannons.  Now, as I write this, I am almost at the relevant age and proficiency in my own craft; I can't imagine an employer that wouldn't cave to the demand of "I need the whole weekend. I'm building my kid a treehouse."  All I knew as a ten-year-old, though, was This Was Special.

I was a little mystified when I was given the task of painting the ends of four long 4x4s with copper napthalate; it wasn't the (now documented) toxicity of the liquid, which turned my fingers green despite my best efforts; it was the explanation of "termites... posts... sturdy" as my Dad dug four deep holes around the base of the pine.  This was the man who had made a train table appear overnight on Christmas Eve.  Who was I to ask Qs?  I slapped on the goo.

We mixed concrete together and I grew excited at the prospect of a really serious Bunker being created... a design idea I hadn't considered: the below-ground nuke shelter. Sooo cool.  I asked if we should dig more?  But no, the day ended with four long posts nestled in concrete surrounding the tree, none of them stretching more than ten feet above ground.  I was so confused, I convinced myself this was simply an elaborate safety-net system my Dad had devised to cover the unlikely poss. of a climbing mishap.  I couldn't confirm this, of course, ha ha, as that would require Questioning, but I assumed the best.  He'd agreed to my designs; this was just an improvement.

The next day saw my Dad on a ladder, and my help largely reduced to cleaning up bits of sawn-off wood.  A few mistakes were made, as is common in treehouse construction, and Our Project stretched out two more weekends, but I was horrified at the habitat emerging from the plywood and 2x6s: an open-air platform, like a 12x12 tic-tac-toe board, with the tree growing up through the center square.  There was even a railing, for Christssakes.

I began to hate my father.  This was not what he'd promised.  What was I going to tell my friends?  The damn thing wasn't even attached to the tree!  It was only about nine feet high.  It had a flippin' railing.  When the Old Man leaned a paint-spattered ladder against the tree and called it Done, I had no way to express my thanks, mired as it was in disappointment.

It was sturdy. It was boring.  It was safe, but I quickly negated that by climbing around outside the railing and higher in the tree.  How could things have gone so wrong?  There were no trap doors, no slides, no fireman poles, no knotted ropes, and no cannons.  In fact, the final product looked nothing like what I had spent hours drawing.  Anyone could climb that stupid ladder, even girls, of which there were zero hereabouts, but still. 

There was no question as to which mountain I needed to climb to find my answers.  I helped my Mom bake cookies.

"Dreams sometimes grow bigger than the box you keep them in," she said, tapping my forehead.  "Sometimes they're real, and sometimes they can't be. You need to make the most of what you're given."   Not acceptable, but I pondered this as I shaped the lumpy Tollhouse-laden dough into balls of exactly the right size with my teaspoon.

I approached the den with no small apprehension regarding what had to be done.  As I crossed the threshold, I decided if 'twere done, 'twere best 'twere done quickly.

"Thanks for the treehouse, Dad."

"You're welcome, kid.

I thought a second.

"Want a cookie?"

"No thanks."

Who was this guy?

And then the time comes when you really reflect on a question like that.  When you try to make sense of things even understanding that sometimes making the most of what you've been given is still a losing proposition.  As my father lay in his bedroom, each breath a painful formality and a further indignity upon his spirit, my eyes wandered through the window to a sunny spot in the backyard.  The treehouse was gone, only a stump marking the spot.  I held his hand, and waited once again.

My father and I were not getting along.

I had a theory about this.  My father loved small children.  He carried on a lively correspondence with my older brother, so clearly he enjoyed adults.  But perhaps because teenagers relish their role as Supreme Callers of Total Bullshit, well, he despised teenagers.  I think adults in general do not like having their bullshit called out.

In my case, he had missed substantial portions of my childhood, and despite my superior intellect (I knew, after all, everything) I was not yet (technically) an adult.  Ergo, ipso facto, through no fault of mine, he hated me.  Which was Total Bullshit.

My mother, in her role as Best Friend and Closest Confidant, walked beside me on the dusty trail.  "Your father and you are not getting along," she said.  I could hear her cringing at the sound of her own grammar, or maybe at the thought of her two men at odds.  "It makes me sad."

"Well, tell him to knock off the Totalitarian Parent B.S.," I said. "I mean, look at him up there.  He's like some kind of Conquistador dragging us out here."

My father was hiking several yards ahead with two friends of his, a couple named Bruce and Ellen.  He was leading the way to the raft put-in on the Carson River.  My father was a weekend river guide, taking idiot corporate team-building morons on whitewater trips all over northern California.  My mother did not like the river, so he went without her almost every weekend in the summer.  It made her sad, and that in turn made me angry.

Somehow, he came to the stellar conclusion that a family getaway to the river would be just the thing to smooth things over and reignite our nuclear energy.  Now, I had an irrational fear of water, so there would be no smoothing over anything with me.  And Bruce and Ellen had been drafted to round out the boat crew, so it wasn't really family-only, either.  Total Bullshit, is what it was, and I had proclaimed it thus in a muttered moment of backseat pique.  My father had exploded, but kept the car on the road, and now he was sturdily tromping down the trail wishing he'd taken out that life insurance policy on me when I was a kid.  My father and I were not getting along.

"Maybe," my mother ventured carefully, "maybe you could meet him halfway.  Maybe you could try to have fun."

"Mom, this is not going to be fun."

"Maybe, you could pretend to have fun."

"Mom."

"For me?"

I entertained the notion that we were waterborne commandoes, and that we were led by a pain-in-the-ass colonel whom we would frag at the first opportunity.  I entertained the notion that we would then rescue a bunch of Playboy bunnies down river...

"Okay, fine."

But I knew it would suck.

We found the river at the end of the trail, duh, and picked up the eight-man raft Dad was borrowing for the day.  Even though I had dropped out of Advanced Algebra/Trig, I spotted a problem.

"Isn't that an eight-man raft?"  My dad was tossing a few supplies in the center of it.

"Yes."

"Well, there are only five of us," I said.  I was completely reasonable, accurate, and spoke without a hint of sarcasm.  He hissed at me under his breath. Hissed at me!

"Don't be a pussy," he hissed.  He liked to use coarse language to make an impact, and he saved it for when he really hated me, like now.  My father and I were not getting along.  He spoke in snippy, progressively louder clauses.  "It's only a Class 2 river.  The rapids are mild.  We don't need eight.  You and Bruce will provide the front end power. Your mother and Ellen will paddle the middle.  I will steer because I know the river.  Now if there's nothing else, Admiral, can we go?"

"This sucks."

"Well, Rex, that's tough shit.  Get in the goddamn boat."

I was going to slice my father's throat with the blade of my paddle at the first opportuni—HOLY SHIT, the river was cold.

"Holy crap!" I yelled.  "The water is freaking freezing!"

"It's not freezing, because it is moving," my dad corrected with glee.  "But it is snowmelt, so it's plenty cold.  No swimming today."

I noticed everyone else putting into the river had wetsuits.  I was starting to worry.  We seemed under-prepared.  Even with Mussolini steering.

"Should we have, umm, wetsuits?"

"NO."

Okay.

There goes the Elite Commando look.

Fragging the Old Man: still a plan.

Things were going great.

And I mean that not in a sarcastic teenager way, I mean that in a horny teenager way.  Ellen was a bit of a hippy and had hairy armpits, but her nipples were amazing and her t-shirt was perpetually wet after we got through the second rapid. 

This did not suck. 

My father's observations were of a different nature than mine.  "River's moving a bit faster than I expected," he mumbled.  "Water level is higher than usual. Must've been a heavy snowfall this year."

We paddled along.

Bruce, in his early thirties, pulled more water than I did, so we were constantly turning a little to the right. My dad, calling out directions from the rear, would correct this by shouting "right paddle".  My mother and Ellen were not especially helpful.  They were the weakest paddlers in the weakest part of the raft.

The river was actually pretty fast.

In the fourth rapid, it was loud enough that my dad was fairly screaming directions.  In the fourth rapid, we went bouncing in and at least twice my paddle bit nothing but air.  In the fourth rapid, my dad screamed something like "right paddle, right paddle, RIGHT paddle, RIGHT PADDLE!!! BACK PADDLE BACK PADDLE BACK PADDLE!!!"

And then I was underwater, frantically flailing my arms as the cold forced the air from my lungs.  I clamped my eyes shut, swallowed water, and completely freaked out.

My life vest pulled me to the surface, which wasn't any better, but I got some air and found myself facing upstream.  I could just make out our raft, wrapped around a rock and getting pounded by whitewater.  Even in my panic, I somehow remembered that going head first through rapids without a helmet was Bad, so I pivoted to get my feet downstream.  This is what they teach you to do, just in case you fall out of the boat.  Point Your Feet Downriver.

Holy Shit, the water was cold.  Cold, cold, cold.

I was pushed by the current into an eddy along the right bank.  I gave up on the Point Your Feet Downriver concept when my ass started scraping the bottom.  I stood up in barely three feet of water and slogged to shore.  My panic subsided.  I was alone on a pebbly inlet, and the bank was brush-covered and very steep. I was angry and my eyes were stinging from the water and I had pebbles in my shoes and pockets.  Oh, and one more thing: I was fucking wet and fucking cold.  Two more things, fine, whatever.

I began to shiver.  And think.

First of all, I hated my father.

Second of all, I was worried about my mother.

Third of all, I was angry that my hatred was outstripping my worry.

Fourth and finally, and this made me really angry, I would clearly not be able to get downriver over land.  I was going to have to get back in the river and swim.

And PS, the river was the source of the Fucking Wet Cold.

I began to shake. This was Total Bullshit.

I waded into the water (yes, still cold.)   My plan was to keep my head up, not drown, and drift until I saw the group.  Then I'd yell and swim, or something.  I sat down in the current and pushed away from the inlet.  I didn't want to get caught in the brush.  The river was happy to grab my life vest and pull me into the next little rapid.

Almost immediately, my face got wet again and water got in my eyes and I started to panic.  I tried to steer with my arms and stay reasonably close to the slow-moving current edge, but the deep water in the center kept pulling me like a frozen hunk of driftwood.  After what seemed like an eternity I rounded another bend and could see several boats pulled out on a wide shoal. I managed a yelp, but my legs were numb and my arms weren't working very well.  I simply couldn't swim.

It occurred to me that among the shouting people on the shore was my mother, watching her only son being stolen by the river, because that's how Nature rolls.  Disrespect me with five in an eight-man boat?  I will kill your boy right in front of you and dump the body in a lake miles away.  You mean nothing to me.

In a less literary world, the story would end here, because Nature is not often as forgiving as she was that day.  As it turns out, outdoorsmen are a tight community, and the guides of the other boats jumped into action when they heard my yelp.  They ran down the shoal and, as a human chain, intercepted me before I slipped out of view and into the next rapid.  I was shaking violently now, barely able to stand, and Ellen, who conveniently was a nurse, correctly diagnosed shock and the onset of hypothermia.  Out there in the wilderness without any blankets, the only thing to do was strip me to my underwear and warm me with body heat.  The adults took turns, bear-hugging me in pairs, and the only thing I found more mortifying than standing in my tighty-whities sandwiched between Bruce and Ellen was when my parents replaced them.

There we stood, an ironic, hugging nuclear family, each of us loving each other and hating each other and covering up everything by blaming hypothermia, the one enemy we dared name.  Huddled there in our family portrait, my mother was the only one of us who said sorry. My father and I were not getting along.