A Key to Treehouse Living

by Elliot Reed

  LIFTING BRIDGES

  A lifting bridge is a special kind of bridge that is fitted with huge pulleys and counterweights that move the road up and down when tall boats need to pass beneath. I learned all about the different types of bridges and why they looked how they did when I finally tried, one day, to locate the bridge in the torn-out photo by Howard Tyce. The bridge in the picture, it turned out, was a common type of bridge found all around the country, and so I was stuck. I wasn’t able to narrow it down to less than maybe fifty different bridges. It happened that, around the same time as I was learning about which bridges were on what river, I was also hanging out beneath a bridge near the bunkhouse pretty regularly. All bridges serve functions their builders did not intend: a roost for birds, a place from which to jump to your death, and a place to test your echo—though that’s not all of them. If you’ve escaped your bunkhouse and you want to drink a lot of beer, a great place to go is under an old lifting bridge on the banks of a river. It’s fun to watch the things that float by in the muddy water, it’s fun to listen to the sounds of birds and cars passing high above you while you drink, and it’s fun because you know nobody will care if you fall asleep on a rock there.

  LIGHT-UP WATCH

  A watch with a time you can read at night because it has a button you press that makes the little screen light up green. You have light-up shoes, light-up necklaces, and then you have your light-up watch. All of them light up but only one is truly useful. El Hondero gave me a plastic Casio with a calculator function and a light-up display. It was waterproof to a hundred meters and told the time in twenty-four or twelve. That watch was the best thing that anybody had ever given me.

  LIMBER

  Agile, bendable, spry, the opposite of stiff. The word LIMBER probably comes from someone with the ability to vault from tree limb to tree limb. Climbing ladders is only for the limber. Children are far more limber than adults, with a few exceptions. My uncle once tried to get into my treehouse through the trapdoor but could not, and he never tried again. He was not a limber man. Slipping your body through gaps in the teeth of huge cogs in the engine room of a huge, rusting machine that years ago would lift and lower the center section of a bridge: that’s only for the limber. El Hondero was a very limber man. He had what he called dexterity, and said he’d gotten it from his summers working as a corn de-tassler in Iowa. He was up the rusty ladder in a flash and climbed around on the metal bridge like a chimpanzee. I moved like a sloth compared to him, and I was no amateur. I’d been limbered by the time I’d spent in trees and I had courage I’d gained in their canopies, but the bridge was a different story. El Hondero was through the engine room and out the tiny hatch on the far side before I’d made it between the first set of pistons. When I at last came sliding through the hatch into daylight, I found him sitting at a little classroom desk on the platform above the river. It was as if he’d been there all along, quietly reading and sipping broth from the bowl he held in his hands, dribbling broth across the book that was open on the desk in front of him.

  LIFE IN RUNOFF

  When rain falls from the sky, hits the earth, and keeps moving, it becomes runoff. Drips of rain from eaves, technically, are runoff. Probably not for long, since they usually fall on dirt and sink in. In some cases, buildings are built so close together that rain flows a long way before it disappears into a creek or gets soaked up by the earth. This was how it was at the Wilson Carmichael Bunkhouse for Boys and Girls: ten squat buildings housed two hundred wards of the state, and between these metal-roofed buildings was a concrete sidewalk. When it rained hard, the runoff traveled downhill to the southeast corner of the compound, through a rusted culvert, beneath a gravel road, across a steep hillside of shifting granite boulders, and finally into the algaed face of a black-water pond overgrown by immense oak and cedar trees and bordered by wild, yellow-blooming lilies. It’s been said that prisoners love the feeling of rain on their faces. Same goes if you feel trapped in your body: you may find yourself looking into the clouds as they rain on you. You may wish you could do as rain does and transpire. You may look into the algaed face of a black-water pond and wonder how you’d feel as a part of that water, or at the bottom of it, under a rock.

  LOOT

  At the bottom of the ocean, behind an enormous granite boulder, in a cave full of eels and enormous crabs, lies Blackbeard. If you can get there he’s yours and so is his loot, though technically it still belongs to whoever it was that Blackbeard killed for it. When you come upon ancient treasure you either sell it on the streets or you sell it to a museum. Either way, someone’s going to profit, so it might as well be you. Take what loot you find. Children are trained from a very young age to be looters—think of the jelly beans and chocolate eggs at Easter. If you find the metal door to the bunkhouse cafeteria has been left open by the kitchen staff, loot swiftly. Take only your portion—what you’d eat over a month, for example—and find a good place to hide it so that your loot won’t itself be looted. All archaeologists are looters, it’s just that some have a museum to back them up. El Hondero had an Indian pot made a thousand years ago and this pot he used as a tip jar when he played gypsy-fiddle downtown—this old clay pot, which was painted with a pattern of black-on-white triangular spirals, got a lot more attention than it would have in a museum. El Hondero sometimes sold things to pawnshops and flea markets, too, but only to people who he thought knew how to treat an artifact with respect.

  LILIES AND SNAPPING TURTLES

  Clear evidence that dinosaurs are not entirely extinct, the mature snapping turtle is better armored than a truck tire and has a beak that can rip through a bicep. It has a piercing scream that can only be heard, underwater, by other turtles. A snapping turtle spends its time paddling the muddy currents of ponds and rivers with its webbed feet, waiting on the bottom and holding perfectly still, beak open, its pink, wormlike tongue squirming in such a way that fish come by to eat the worm and are snapped up before they know it. While I was staying at the Wilson Carmichael house, I once found a baby snapping turtle beneath a bridge, collected it, and kept it in a box beneath my bunk. I thought I’d heard somewhere that snapping turtles liked to eat lilies so I went to the pond and got some yellow lilies for him but he wouldn’t eat them and they wilted in his shoebox. Then I tried feeding him some copper wire and he ate that. I tried dead frogs and he ate those, too.

  LOOKING FOR GHOSTS

  A ghost is an energetic manifestation that can be perceived by conscious humans but cannot be explained by physics. People usually perceive ghosts when they’re between sleep and waking. The more we know about them, the more ghosts seem to be projections of the mind onto reality rather than vice versa. Traditionally, a ghost was imagined to be the soul of a dead person. I would say that a ghost is the projection of a memory of a person or other sentient thing, a projection so powerful that the mind cannot see itself as its source. It isn’t unusual for a person to experience a finite period of ghost-vision. Lots of people have awoken one day with an ability to perceive ghosts and then lost that ability a week or so later. Often, the ability to see ghosts comes to you during times of difficulty. The ghosts I saw during my time in the bunkhouse were the ghosts of other teenagers: dead boys and girls who had used my bunk before me and just wanted to lie down.

  LOCOMOTORY OPTIONS USED BY TEENS WHO ARE WARDS OF THE STATE

  If he isn’t getting around on his own (using roller skates, bicycle, canoe, borrowed scooter), a teenage ward of the state is subjected to regular, involuntary shipment to and from a charter school in a dented blue van driven by an alcoholic named Charlie.

  LOWRIDER DX-1

  The name of the bicycle I’d ride in the days of the bunkhouse, the LowRider was built as a hybrid mountain/BMX bike. LowRiders came in purple, red, silver, and black, but mine I’d spray-painted green-and-brown camo so I could easily ditch it in the weeds and not have it get stolen. The LowRider DX-1 had three gears you shifted by twisting a rubber grip on the handlebars. Its wheels were fat
and had deep treads. The LowRider DX-1 was marketed to teenagers and came, if you bought it new, with a book of advice written by a famous mountain biker. If you couldn’t afford to buy a LowRider new, you could check around at pawnshops or find a kid who had one but didn’t ride it and then trade him something for it. The first generation of LowRider owners didn’t generally keep their bikes for very long. The first generation of LowRider owners was quickly unseated by the second generation of LowRider owners. If you were a rich kid who got a new bike every few months and went out for a ride by yourself the day after you got your new LowRider, and let’s say you stopped to take a look at the useless advice manual that came with the bike a mile or so into your ride, on a path that led through a city park, that’s when you’d be likely to encounter a soon-to-be second-generation LowRider owner: usually a shirtless boy whose ribs you could see through his skin, whose skinny arms showed muscles like lemons when he flexed them, who could, if he wanted, unseat you from the LowRider with a palm-sized headstone thrown from ten yards out but who would, if you were lucky, first ask nicely.

  LOSS OF TRACTION

  Let’s imagine a blacktop running through the country on a warm afternoon in late spring. The road has its hills and curves, it passes through forests and fields. Imagine a red sedan with its windows down proceeding along the road at a moderate pace—let’s say the driver is Patty, for example (see COURT ORDER), and you’re watching her from the ditch on the side of the road, where you’ve jumped with your LowRider because you glimpsed her car from a distance—the red sedan, in this case, is not likely to lose traction, though you may in your mind be imagining the car losing traction and smiling to yourself as you think about it. But no, she takes the turns carefully. All of her tires remain on the road. She could drive under these conditions and not lose control. She has a distinct purpose and is advancing toward her goal at a cool forty miles per hour with no loss of traction. Let’s compare Patty’s progress down the blacktop with your own progress down a gravel road at the edge of a forest, with a field on your left and the forest on your right, in a hard late-summer rain. The sky is a graphite background across which cream-colored, smokelike clouds are rushing right to left, and the rain is coming down in sheets. You’re on your LowRider DX-1 painted the colors of camo and you’re soaked to the core, clothes like a sponge and boots little aquariums, and you’re pedaling hard on the bike and laughing aloud, spitting up rainwater, blinking to clear your rain-filled eyes, laughing because you’ve looked out across the field at the sheets of rain, one after the other bending the young corn and pattering a billion drops against the broad green leaves, and you’ve been hit with a sense of being alive. In minutes you’ll be back at the bunkhouse, you’ll be met by the warden and be punished or be told to stay out, but you’re not thinking about that right now. It’s you and your bike and you’re about to cross the creek, flowing through the woods to your right, swollen with runoff, its banks shedding mud and shucking out rocks, and then there’s a crunching sound like a mouthful of cornflakes and you’re on the ground. You’re resting with your cheek on the gravel and can see a thousand tiny rivers flowing through the gravel that looks like boulders from this close. You throw the LowRider into the woods once you’ve gotten up on your feet, and you limp onward through the rain. Then, when you look back to mark in your mind the spot where you ditched the bike you see, straddling a bike of his own, stopped in the middle of the gravel path maybe a hundred yards from where you’re standing, an adult. You can’t see his face and don’t recognize his body. You feel hot blood running down your forearm from a cut on your elbow. Then he gets up on his bike and goes back the way he came, slowly, looking once over his shoulder before he vanishes in the rain.

  LOCKED OUT

  In the middle of the night, the doorbell rings. You wake up and go to your uncle’s room and he’s not there. The doorbell rings again and you walk down the stairs, in the dark, to the front door. You open it and there’s your uncle sitting down on the front steps. Somehow he’s lost his keys between the car and the front door, and he’s locked out. Months later, after your uncle’s been locked up, on a rainy day when you’ve limped back to the bunkhouse after an unfortunate loss of traction, you find the gate locked. You’re wet and angry but you have a few dollars so you go to the gas station, go around back to the dumpsters, and find a guy who will buy you beer. It’s a full moon and the clouds are gone and you limp down to the lifting bridge and sit down on a rock beneath it and you drink the beer.

  LETTERS READ IN PRIVATE

  A letter is a symbol, no more alive than a stone, that is arranged among other letters in such a way that the combination comes alive. If someone says, “You got a letter,” though, he’ll be referring to the other kind of letter, the kind you get in the mail, the kind printed on white, semitransparent paper that’s come from a stinking pulp mill on the banks of a river somewhere. When you hold a sheet of letter paper up to the light and look past the words, you can see that the whiteness, which from a distance looks uniform, now has blotches of light and dark within it. These blotches of light and dark in the sheet of paper are like a sky socked in with cloud or a fog-covered river you’re looking down on from a bridge. If you receive a letter that’s been sent specifically to you, odds are it contains some information you might find important. Let’s say you’re living as a ward of the state in a bunkhouse. You’re wearing the same set of clothes as everyone else and you have a number assigned to you that people use in place of your name. And let’s say that one day, out of the blue, you get a letter with your name on it, a letter which is brought to you by one of the court-ordered types who up to that point had no idea who you are. You’ll clutch this letter with all the strength you have and retreat with it to a place where there’s no wind to steal your letter and no strangers to pester you as you read or take your letter away. You’ll get in your bunk and pull the yellowish-white bedsheet up over your head like a tent. In that small, private space, the most private space you can find, you’ll read the letter, and reading it will take you even deeper, into an even more private space that’s beyond the earth altogether.

  LOOSE MEATS: SALISBURY STEAK

  A sick joke, Salisbury Steak is served on special occasions at publicly funded institutions such as jails and bunkhouses. Salisbury Steak is not a steak at all but is in fact a crude loaf made from red-stained bits of discarded meat. Salisbury Steak can be cut with the thumb as if the thumb were a knife. Consuming Salisbury Steak leads to extreme indigestion and difficulty breathing. Salisbury Steak is either completely bland or salted to a point where it could be classified as toxic, and is served beneath a brown slurry that develops a reflective skin at room temperature.

  LUMINESCENCE

  Nothing glows on its own. A thing that glows is burning energy from the sun that it has locked up inside. The moon’s light, on the other hand, is a reflection. Insects that glow green in the night glow on sunlight held captive the way fire burns on dried wood—everything luminescent is feeding on the sun. To glow, you need fuel. You need to eat. Anything that glows in the darkness of the night is called LUMINESCENT. This I learned late one night beside the runoff pond with a girl, Michelle, who lived at the bunkhouse. She pointed to the green glow emanating from the pond and said it was called LUMINESCENCE. A person’s skin can also seem to glow, and you may want to be inside of it. Sometimes you may want to have another person’s skin surround you like the walls of a parachute house. Feelings can also be luminescent—physical sensations experienced in the darkness can glow with warm heat and then disappear all of a sudden as if obscured by a cloud.

  LONELY

  It’s about as possible to talk about what it means to be lonely as it is to talk about what it means to be happy, sad, or content. To say, for example, that being lonely involves actually being alone would be fallacious. I can only make guesses about what I, for some reason, remember as having been a lonely moment. The lonely moment may not have been, itself, lonely. It may be the memory recalled
after the fact—the consequence of reliving a memory through remembering it—that is evoking something like loneliness. It’s possible that my loneliest time was that night I slept at Ned’s, but I can’t really know. Ned wasn’t even there at the time. My uncle dropped me off at Ned’s and said Ned’s mom would be expecting me. I say I was lonely in retrospect partly because Ned wasn’t there—he was sleeping at a friend’s place—and because while I lay there in Ned’s bed, listening to the crickets, my uncle was burning down his mansion. At the time, was I lonely? I might have been content, lying there in the dark, listening to Ned’s mom and dad whispering to each other in the next room. I only knew what had really happened the next day, after the fact.

  “MANO-A-MANO”: WHAT IT MEANS TO “HAVE A TALK”