A Key to Treehouse Living

by Elliot Reed

  CANOEISTS IN THE REEDS, RESCUING

  If you listen closely to the reeds and cattails around the banks of a pond on a breezy day in spring, you might just hear the beautiful sound of grass blades singing. The hum of many reed and cattail stalks singing in the breeze is like music. The hum rises and falls and stops on notes, just like a bugle. At first, you might think you’re hearing a flautist in the reeds and you may want to find her. If you hear someone whimpering somewhere off in the humming reeds, get ready for a rescue operation. Beginner canoeists, not having checked their boats for snakes, go out on windy days and get blown sideways into the reeds and the cattails that grow along the edge of the pond. If you hear a canoeist whimpering, it’s because she’s hung up in the reeds where it’s dark and where strange things like to live. In the reeds and cattails you find green, spherical seedpods covered in tiny hairs that explode when you touch them, thick webs with fat black-and-yellow spiders at their centers, and complicated nests like tiny treehouses that are guarded by tiny birds. There are tangles of water snakes, beehives, and the FLYNN GUIDE’s least favorite: the cocklebur. A beginner canoeist blown sideways into the reeds and cattails will flail and paddle in a panic and get more and more stuck. She won’t know that the key to getting free of the reeds is to stay calm, wait for the wind to take a breath between blows, and pole backwards the same way she came in. If you hear a canoeist whimpering in the reeds, yell out that you’re coming and head in the direction of the whimpering. Carefully stand up in your boat, slowly so you don’t tip it, and scan the reeds. This is how you find the lost canoeist. You’ll scare off all the bullfrogs you might have been trying to catch, but it’s important to remember that you, too, were once blown helplessly into the reeds and would have died if it hadn’t been for your uncle coming to the rescue. It’s good to have a chance to repay your debt to the canoeing community. Once you find her, get the lost canoeist in to your canoe. She may not want to paddle after what she’s been through. Tie the lost canoeist’s boat to yours and paddle out of the reeds. It’s a good idea to ask the canoeist questions to calm her down and distract her from her recent ordeal, questions like, “Do you often come out to the pond?” “Do you know where to find arrowheads?” “Did you once have a plastic fort where you carved flowers on the inside?”

  CREATIVE ACQUISITION OF EASY SNACKS

  When you’ve got a lot of things on your to-do list and you hope to do them all in one day, you better hope you’re prepared with some kind of an easy snack you can reach for in order to keep your blood sugar up. If your day involves working in the deep woods of a mid-city park, in a stand of trees from whose canopies you can see skyscrapers, you might consider routing your approach to the park in such a way that you pass by a couple of street vendors selling hot food. You should especially be routing yourself past those street vendors on days that are windy. Street vendors are a distractible bunch of people as a whole. When the wind blows steadily, say on a warm spring day before a thunderstorm, street vendors are often so distracted by the dispersal of napkins and plastic utensils that you can just walk up and pluck a swollen hot dog right off the hot grill with your fingers, then disappear unnoticed. That’s an easy snack. Other easy snacks include granola bars and small bags of nuts. At Ned’s house, snacks were always easy. His mom made popcorn that had yellow cheese mixed in with the popped kernels and she’d bring a bowl of it to us every time we were over there. She even bought us pizza once, then ate with us while we watched a movie in the living room.

  CAMPFIRE

  A fire built outside. This is very important: you build a campfire outside, never in. It may be cold in the treehouse, and you may build a fire in there to stay warm, but believe me, you will regret it. Here’s how a campfire works: heat comes from burning wood, cardboard boxes, leaves, or tires. Plastic is no good. Your warmth comes from the heat of whatever you’re burning. Old wood is what’s best to burn. Old wood comes from the pile that sits beneath your treehouse, where it stays mostly dry. Start with little sticks and work your way up. Use gasoline if you want, but take your hat off if you’re going to start your fire with gas, and, if you’re a girl, tie your hair up in a ponytail. I once wrote an entire glossary just about campfires, but in the amount of time it took you to read the glossary you could have built a campfire and learned about campfires that way, and when I realized that, I burned what I wrote about campfires in a campfire. If I had it to do over I don’t think I’d have burned what I wrote since it’s wrong to burn books and since you never know when you might want to read about a campfire instead of actually building one.

  COINCIDENCE

  When you see a connection between two separate events. Coincidence is a link made up by your mind. Any two things can be a coincidence if they occur near one another in time and if a person believes these two things have one specific thing in common and everything else not in common. Some people, when they see a coincidence, point to God—as if something or someone planned for two unrelated things to happen, for someone to see those two things happen, and for that person to draw a link between the two things and find meaning there.

  CAST

  A word with several meanings. If you’re near water you might cast a pole, cast a net, or cast a line, and the purpose of casting all these things is to bring something back to you. A different kind of cast is the cast of a play. Then there’s the cast of your memories, a cast which might also help you bring the forgotten stories back. The cast of this glossary so far: my uncle, El Hondero, Ned, the Midway Raptors, Carla and Liz, a dog breeder, some dogs, a clown, street vendors, a vaporized child and a vaporized horse, a dead boy in a pipe, some normal children and some normal horses, several snakes, strangers in the outfield, my parents living in a school bus, and a canoeist lost in the reeds. A cast is also what I wore on my arm for six weeks after a rotten board caused me to fall out of my treehouse.

  CYCLE

  Spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring, summer, autumn. Storm, heat, storm, cold, heat, storm, night, lightning. The first list is a cycle, the second list is more like chaos because you can never really know what will come next. What’s interesting is that chaos is embedded within cycles. Storms, for instance, happen regularly in spring. And this: grow hair, shed hair, grow hair, shed hair. This was the cycle of my uncle’s cat. If you didn’t know anything about cycles, you might be sitting in your chair petting your cat and looking out your window one day in October and you would say, “What a coincidence! That tree starts losing its leaves just as this cat starts to shed its hair!” and you would waste time wondering, for a while, what this coincidence could mean for you.

  COOKOUT

  One of the first signs of spring, a cookout is when people start fires in grills and then the cookout attendees stand around the grill smelling the meat, commenting on the smell, and drinking alcoholic beverages. Sometimes a cookout also involves organized games such as lawn darts and croquet. Sometimes the attendees light fireworks after the sun has gone down, the meat has been cooked, and the children have begun playing flashlight tag. One time I was at a cookout at Ned’s house. It was late, and we were playing flashlight tag with a couple of his neighbors. After a while, their parents came and picked them up and then it was just me and Ned and Ned’s parents sitting in the dark backyard. Ned’s parents asked me how I’d come to know so much about nocturnal animals, and that’s when I realized I’d been talking for a long time about the bat colony I’d seen in the woods while nobody else was saying anything. Ned just sat there smiling because he liked hearing about weird things but also because I was the fastest runner in tag and I’d been on his team. Then my uncle showed up with a huge firework in a bag. He was late because he’d been looking for this special kind of rocket. Ned’s parents said it was okay for Ned to light it, so he lit it, but first he went into the shed and got everybody a baseball helmet to wear during the explosion. The boom echoed, and there were lots of little lights. Ned’s mom screamed. A door slammed from the next house over and a fat man wit
h no shirt on came out and started yelling at us through the fence.

  COOLER SNAKE

  A snake found in an abandoned cooler.

  CREPUSCULAR

  The word CREPUSCULAR describes animals that are neither nocturnal nor usually found in the day. Crepuscular animals come out right at dawn and dusk, when the sun is gone over the horizon but somehow light still lingers like a ghost of the sun, or when the moon has long risen, raced across the sky and set, when you can still see stars but the sky is going from black to ultramarine. Crepuscular animals appear in this short-lived light and disappear when the light is more decisive.

  CHICKEN HAWK

  This is a raptor that favors the common barnyard chicken as prey. Somehow the fox escaped being called the chicken dog. No one can explain why. Language is a mystery. Also CHICKEN HAWK can refer to an adult male who is attracted to young boys. This slang term originated in Little League bleachers as a reference term, used by parents, referring to strange adult men spectating from beyond the outfield.

  COURT ORDER

  Have you ever wondered why there are some things you can do and others you can’t? Most good people have a natural idea of what’s right and what’s wrong, and so they can figure out how to live the type of life that doesn’t hurt others. Most children, as a rule, have not figured out what’s right and what’s wrong quite as well as most adults, but some children have a pretty good idea of right and wrong from the beginning and only have to learn the subtler rules, the ones made by adults in courts. Who decided, for example, that it’s wrong for a child to build a treehouse in a public park? The court did. The thing is, there are lots of things you can do that the court hasn’t made a decision about, and so often you just can’t know. You don’t think you need to know, either, because you have your own idea, but then the authorities come and see you doing something they don’t have a name for but still they think that thing is wrong, and then they go to court and make a rule about it or figure out a way to make it part of a rule that already exists. For this reason there are courts all over the place, and each city has several of its own. Every court I’ve seen is inside of a stone building with stone columns in front. At dusk, little birds fly into the courthouse chimney. Stone steps lead up to the court entrance, which is usually guarded by two stone lions and a policeman. Once you get past the lions and the policeman and you’re inside the stone building, walk until you find the two big wooden doors with frosted glass windows in them. Behind these big wooden doors is the courtroom—the wooden room where the judge in the black robe hits the wooden block with his wooden mallet. People go to the courtroom to listen to the judge talk before he hits the wood with his mallet. When he says your name, you stand up and he says his thing and smacks his mallet and you’re supposed to react. If the judge orders you to clean up garbage for a week because for the second time in a month you were caught building a treehouse in a public park, it’s better to thank the judge and leave than to explain to him that you were actually building a blind from which you could watch birds—it was my uncle’s idea that we say it was a blind, and he’d dressed up in a suit and come down to the court with me to explain it to the judge, but also to say that if my mother were still on this earth she’d have been the first to teach me some respect for private property—either way you’ll be issued court-ordered community service. The judge can order anyone to do anything he wants. He has an old woman named Patty who he sends to carry out court orders. You should hope that he does not unleash Patty, or anyone like her, to come get you. If you see her, don’t even try to run. She is much more powerful than she looks. The best plan is to do as she says, act nice, and nod at the strange things she says to you. Patty is about five and a half feet tall and has short gray hair that looks like it’s glued to her scalp. She wears between ten and twenty jingling bracelets you can hear from fifteen feet away, carries a black leather bag over her shoulder, and holds a thick stack of papers against her chest as she walks—though she doesn’t walk like anyone else. She waddles, never changing her pace, never actually bending her knees properly, and she always smells like soap. The scariest thing about Patty is her fingernails. Her fingernails are more a residue than a body part. She chews them past the cuticle, or else some disease is eating them away, but whatever the reason they’re horrible and she likes to touch you with them. Her job, as she sees it, is to find you (she once found me in the dumpster behind the dollar store collecting cardboard for use as insulation) and to “find out how you’re doin.” If you run from her, she’ll just find you again later, and when she does she’ll have brought along the policeman who guards the court. When she finds you, she’ll make you get in her red car, which is always parked around the corner. She’ll make you get in there and she’ll put on classical music and hum along to it while she fills out papers with a golden pen with a blunt end she chewed the gold off of. You’ll spend an hour in the car answering questions about your uncle, questions about what you eat, questions about any bruises or cuts you have on your body (which she’ll touch with those nails). You should answer as sincerely as possible while always making it sound like your life with your uncle is as good as you can imagine life could get. Patty will smile and act like she cares about you and her whole act will be as fake as her teeth but you have to act like you believe her or else you’ll end up at an orphanage in Oklahoma. Don’t be tricked into thinking that she knows about you or that she will tell you anything useful about your absent parents. You are in the custody of your uncle, is all she will say, as if you didn’t understand that fact very clearly. She will touch you with those hands and look at you like you’re the dog with wheels instead of back legs and she’ll say how “confused” you must be and how “sad” it is that your mother “was who she was” but Patty won’t ever say anything that makes any sense.

  DRAFT

  This is another word with many meanings. (1) My uncle’s boat, which was a canoe, had a shallow draft. This meant that there was very little of the boat that spent the whole time beneath the surface of his pond. A shallow draft allows easy turning but offers almost no resistance to the pressures of the wind. The gentlest of breezes will push the boat sideways across the pond and into a thicket of snake-filled cattails. (2) In Little League, when the coaches pick teams by looking at a list of names and circling the ones they want on their team, they refer to what they’re doing as “drafting talent.” (3) A special kind of draft known as an updraft is a gust of air blowing directly upward, often at the forefront of big storms, and always in the middle of them. Picture a column of air. Updrafts make rain go up as opposed to down, and then the rain freezes and comes down as hail, like it did one day in spring when I was canoeing on my uncle’s pond in the hopes of spotting the snapping turtle. Although the untrained eye sees all pieces of hail as identical, close inspection reveals that there are four standard shapes of hail, each with dual subvarieties. There exists a gypsy psychic who collects hail, studies the shape of each piece, and uses this information to talk in detail about specific events that have not yet happened.

  DREAMS OF THE BETTA FISH

  If you use the fish-tasting method of nightmare aversion, you must prepare yourself to deal with the following inevitable side effect of using the Betta Fish: the Betta Fish Dream. In Betta Fish dreams, you will be in an enormous tank of bottomless water with an enormous Betta Fish. You will be much smaller than the Betta Fish. The Betta Fish will be like a submarine compared to you, and it will be terrifying. In your Betta Fish dreams, you will sometimes find the courage to coexist with the Betta Fish. You will find that you have no fear, at all, of the fish’s flowing fins or its compassionless gaze. You will float there in awe of its beauty. Sometimes you will paddle your hands, and your strokes will take you shooting like an arrow through the water. Sometimes you will expand to the size of the Betta Fish, other times you will watch the fish change into other things or shrink to the size that it is, in reality, floating in its little tank across the room from your bed. Still other times you
will find yourself asleep, staring at the Betta Fish in the bottomless bowl of water, and you will fear it. When you at last awake and look over at the Betta Fish floating innocently in its bowl of water, you will be able to tell—in its eyes—that it knows you have just now dreamt of it. It’s not just me who has had the Betta Fish Dream. My cousin Isabella used to have it, too.

  DADDIES

  A Daddy is a false authority. There are many different kinds of authorities someone may talk about, like, “The authority on grilling steaks is Bob,” or, “I’m not the authority on huts made of mammoth bone, though I’d bet money they held up better than tepees,” and if your uncle says, simply, “The authorities are on their way,” he is referring to the police who show up when high-powered fireworks are detonated within city limits, when a mansion has burned down, when strangely behaving people wander into the outfield at Little League games, or when an adult at a cookout notices that his or her child has disappeared while playing flashlight tag. A Daddy, on the other hand, is a guy who thinks he’s an authority figure but is not. Let’s say you’re in your treehouse playing dice with Ned when a man appears from the bushes at the base of the tree and says you’re not allowed to be up there. Let’s say you then ask him who he is and why he thinks you can’t be up there. If he says he’s a fireman but doesn’t look like one and if when you tell him you’re not coming down he starts to come up the ladder, you’ve got a Daddy on your hands.

  DERELICT CHILD

  A derelict child, also known as a wild child, is a child who has been living in the outdoors, away from civilization, and has learned how to exist as one of the animals. Wild children have long hair and skin caked with dirt, are commonly naked and like to eat raw meat. Some wild children have been raised by wolves, others by coyotes. Some wild children have been stolen by animals at birth. Wild children have their own idea of what’s right and what’s wrong. Several wild children, for example, have been captured in the act of freeing farm animals. Some wild children don’t speak any human language. Others speak the language they spoke as babies. Some children become wild children after getting hopelessly lost and then staying lost while surviving off their animal instincts. El Hondero once told me that he spent a whole winter as a wild child. He disappeared from a hog roast when he was nine and came back when he was eleven, said he’d gone for a really long hike. My uncle saw a wild child once. He was sitting on the porch of his mansion practicing the bugle when he saw, by the edge of a pond far off by the tree line, a naked boy burst from the forest, catch a goose with his hands, and return to the woods with it. He summoned the authorities, who searched the forest around the pond and found little footprints in the mud but never found the child.