by Jf Perkins
Mom handed us both a paper bowl of the endless oatmeal, and we ate and watched Dad work. It became quickly apparent that he was making benches out of the split logs. He was notching the longer logs to fit on the shorter pieces, which became stable legs to raise the seats up off the ground and to keep them from tipping over. When he had fitted everything to his satisfaction, he drove long spike nails through to make the connections permanent. He gave each bench a shake, stood on them and walked end to end, then smiled with the satisfaction of a job well done. He slid them over to where we had become accustomed to gathering at meals, and greeted us for the day by waving us over to the new seats.
Kirk and I got up and tried the benches. They were much better than sitting on the ground. Just having an official place to rest our butts made our lives better. It was amazing how fast we were reduced from 300 channels and Xbox to the simplest pleasures.
“What do you think, boys?” Dad asked, yearning for some compliments.
We stopped spooning oatmeal long enough to mumble a couple of variations on, “Great, Dad.” It was hard to admit how nice the benches really felt, for some reason. Dad accepted our comments like we were the President, pinning him with some kind of medal, so I suppose we said enough.
Our brief conversation was enough to bring the stragglers out of the tents. Lucy and the boys looked like they would be happy to sleep until noon, but Francine came out of our parents’ tent with her mouth already in high gear. Being boys, we tuned the old lady out immediately, but Mom nodded in Francine’s direction as if she were hanging on every word. Lucy accepted her bowl of oatmeal and sat next to me. From the look grumpy look on my sister’s face, I didn’t even attempt to speak to her. Tommy and Jimmy split up at the bench, with Jimmy settling next to Lucy for his breakfast. He wasn’t ready to sing yet.
Ten minutes later, breakfast was eaten, and Dad was ready to get to work. He dragged us over to the maple, almost physically dragged us. We felt like we had been beaten with a baseball bat that doled out sore muscles but left no bruises. Then, Dad did a magical bit of mind job on us. He told us to make a muscle. We held up our arms and flexed, wincing with the sharp pain. He felt each of our biceps in turn and said, “Yep. Hard work makes for big muscles. I looked at my arm, and probably imagined it, but sure enough, it did look bigger. Just like that, our heads were in the game and we were ready to start again.
By lunch, we had built another ladder, chopped some more young trees, and were well on our way to the second, larger level of our tree house. Dad nailed the second ladder to the tree, since it didn’t need to move for security, he told us. The first platform had been built out of straight logs, arranged to act as a flat frame that hugged the trunk of the tree. It had not been quite strong enough, and he was forced to brace it with diagonal pieces. Dad had apparently been doing some engineer-type thinking because he built the second level with a primitive truss system. He took the heavier logs and made them the long linear side of each truss, and then used a short spacer piece of wood, attached in the middle of that log. He used thinner saplings to wrap around that spacer, making a curved side to the truss. He strapped each end with the split vines and cut off the extra length from the curved piece. Kirk and I weren’t impressed. Why not just nail the straight log to the tree?
By midafternoon, we knew. He had four trusses nailed to the tree and attached firmly to each other; we were forced to make the second pair up in the tree to get them all to cross to his satisfaction. In addition, we had half the platform covered in long, narrow logs. Dad tested his new innovation by bouncing slightly on the outer edge of the new deck, and found it quite solid. Once again, Dad’s brains found the solution. By dinnertime, the rest of the deck was “planked” in sapling logs, except for the opening for the ladder, which fit nicely between the second pair of trusses. It was strange to be twenty-five feet up the tree while being able to look through the little cracks to the platform below, especially when the whole tree swayed slightly in the breeze, but nonetheless, we were all three proud of what we had built.
It took another three days to finish another ladder, a third platform, jokingly called “the kid’s room,” and railings around all three of them. Kirk and I were becoming quite adept at tree-construction, even as our amazement grew at what the project had generated. Standing back and looking from the ground, we thought that it was every bit the coolest tree house we had ever seen, but dad wasn’t done yet. We built roofs for the second and third levels out of the thinnest straight trees we could find. Dad wrapped the roofs carefully in tarps from the stack Mr. Carroll had given us, and left extra plastic hanging around the edges. The roofs were attached to the main tree and the extra-tall posts Dad had left on the corners of each platform. Kirk and I learned that any time Dad’s work made no sense, it eventually would. Finally, Dad made some clever braces any place that the spreading branches of the tree could add some extra support, and finished the job by adding a short, sloping bridge from the top of the third level to a final, small platform far up in the tree. He built a short railing around this crow’s nest and named it, “The lookout.”
As our tree fortress grew, Lucy began to take an interest in it, but had no desire to climb around in a tree. She compensated by using a scrap of plastic tarp to create a flag. She had used a Sharpie to draw nice cartoons of our entire extended family. I had no idea she had any talent until then, but it was easy to recognize all of the figures on our flag, from little Jimmy all the way up to Francine. We were quite proud of her. Dad made a special ceremony out of hoisting the flag onto one of the tall corner posts on the top level of our new home.
As we stood back and admired it as a family, all of us probably held as many turbulent thoughts as I did that day. It was only the tenth day of the Breakdown, although it already felt like a lifetime had passed. In the supreme adaptability of childhood, the old life was fading quickly into the past, and the new life was taking solid shape. In the moment, Mom probably expressed it best when she said, “I wish the camera still worked.”
Chapter 3 - 9
Terry waited to see if Bill was finished. When the words appeared to have ended, he said, “The tree house tradition goes back to the beginning. That’s remarkable.”
“Yeah, it took us a solid week to do it, and I still think that’s incredible, even though I was there, and even though we build them in less than a day now.” Bill said softly, his mind taking its time coming back to the present.
“That wasn’t far from where we took the Judge,” Terry said.
“No. Not far. It’s still over there, or at least the parts that haven’t rotted away are still up in the old maple.” Bill rubbed his eyes. “I still wander over there from time to time.”
Terry waited respectfully.
“It changed quite a bit after that. It didn’t take long to learn that it was drawing bad people in like flies. Those tarps are easy to spot. We ended up covering them with branches, and we learned to put larger branches around the outside of the railings to break up the lines. Eventually, it looked like part of the tree, and we carried that trick with us. Almost everything we build in a tree uses the same kind of camouflage. The other thing we had to do was to take down Lucy’s flag and nail it flat to the trunk of the tree. The noise of it flapping on the post drove us crazy at night. She didn’t mind.”
“You folks picked things up quickly.”
“I like to think that we still do, but I can feel myself slowing down these days.”
“I doubt it. I saw how well your plan worked today.”
“Yeah, it did, but can you imagine what might have happened without Kirk? I’ve relied on his spooky quickness so long, I’m not sure I could have avoided being shot.”
Terry was disturbed by Bill’s tone. In a few short days, Bill had become larger than life, and the young engineer did not like to think that Bill, himself, did not believe as Terry did. “Well, the important thing is that you didn’t get shot. I’m sure you planned for it.”
Bill off
ered up a tired smile and said, “Thanks... Let’s head down to Sam’s and see if we can’t get some early supper. We have room at our place. You need to get your rest tonight.”
“For training?”
“Not exactly. I’ve got some special training in mind for you,” Bill said, holding quote fingers around the words. “You’re going to help me deal with our Jerry Doan Jenkins problem. Tomorrow, we’re going to the State Capitol.”
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Author’s Note:
It’s an interesting exercise, trying to imagine what a typical middle class American family might do in the event of a total breakdown of society. Like most writers, I make the assumption that this family is a little bit smarter and more capable than average, probably smarter than I would be in the same situation. I imagine that each of them would have many private moments of anger, fear and doubt that never show in front of the others, but the important point is that even though the rules have changed radically, in a very short time, they try hard to hold onto their values. David is a builder, a generous man, and that’s how he tackles the problem. Bill grows up to be the purest reflection of his father’s ideals, and continues to try to operate in a giving and broadminded way, even as the rest of his world has reduced itself to a selfish scramble for survival. For me, there is an ideal of how society should work buried in here, and I hope that if we are ever faced with radical change, we will pick ourselves up and proceed on the basis of that sort of ideal.
About the author:
Creative people tend to be lousy at self-promotion, and I fit the cliché almost perfectly. After many years of asking myself why I have anything to say that is worth writing, the answer can only be that I have finally, in middle age, managed to make enough mistakes to say something solid about how not to live life. If I hold up a mirror to my own life, I get a backwards reflection that may actually contain some value. More importantly, I have been fortunate enough to know many people who may have suffered, but did so with far more skill and grace than I have, and set a solid example for a realistic method of how to live well.
In the meantime, I live in Washington with my wonderful wife, who happens to be one of those good examples, and our five rescue dogs, who manage to encompass an entire school bus full of joyous, childlike personalities. And to add to the rapidly mounting collection of loose fur and allergens, I also share the house with two cats; one with no social boundaries, and one who is nothing but social boundaries.
In a difficult denial of the self-promotion bit, I must suggest that you stop by my semi-neglected blog and leave me a note. That way, I’ll be able to say that not everyone who signs up is preparing a spam attack. http://www.jfperkins.com
Thank you for reading.
JF Perkins