A Key to Treehouse Living

by Elliot Reed

  MOTH

  Moths are nocturnal insects similar in many ways to butterflies, but very different. Their drab appearance is because light doesn’t usually travel at night, so at night the eye can’t see color. Moths have thick, soft scales which keep them warm as they fly through the night. It’s been said that if a moth hits the proper light in the proper way, it can morph into a butterfly. A butterfly, on the other hand, can get bleached out and nocturnalized by a certain type of rare pollen that looks almost the same as the pollen butterflies spend all day poking around for in flowers. If their proboscis come in contact with the pollen which is not actually pollen as we know it, but a sort of crystallized moonbeam that has taken shelter from the sun beneath the petals of certain darkly colored flowers, then the butterfly will experience the total colonization of its body by moonlight and thus become a moth. Moths are like flying stones flaked very thinly. Their delicate, see-through wings are like mica. On a night when I was lonely and the rain had been coming down hard all day so I was bored and I couldn’t sleep, El Hondero looked over from his book at the school desk and asked if I had a moment to assist with a midnight study he was about to undertake. Of course I agreed. It didn’t matter what time it was. We got out a white bedsheet and a big flashlight and rigged the sheet between the rafters so the light would shine from behind it. In the space of an hour we’d collected eight different species of moth. El Hondero went along the sheet from moth to moth, looking at each with his magnifying glass, and I wrote down what he said: “Number four. Blue dot, each wing. Tiny head. No winglet. Salt-and-pepper thorax and straight, not curved, proboscis.” At the end he said that each moth species represents a species of flower which is growing out there, and he gestured toward the curtain of rain. El Hondero never asked to see the catalog I was writing, and I never asked him why we’d done it. A study is a study and you shouldn’t need a reason to do one.

  MAKING THINGS UP

  The Boy Scouts say you need food, water, and shelter to survive, but they forget to say you also need to make lists, and you need an imagination. With an imagination, you’re never quite alone, even in a fort deep in the woods when nobody’s around. Even when it’s just you, you still have the ability to entertain yourself, which is important because otherwise your brain would turn to loam, like mud, when it should be more like mica schist. The moment Hanging Frog escaped from the murder and pillage of his village, he killed a fish, took it to a cave where it was safe and warm enough, and immediately named the cave HANGING FROG CAVE. He carved the image of a frog into the stone wall of the cave and made up a story of how he’d been saved by a huge bullfrog that came to him when he was floating through the swamp, set him on his back, and brought him to safety in the cave. He said the frog was wearing clothes like an Indian but was otherwise a frog so it seemed that the frog was a man who’d been transformed. Hanging Frog said, in his made-up story, that this frog-man hung from the ceiling in a little house that looked like a basket. You make things up whether you like it or not, same as when you breathe. When you’re half-awake it’s all you’re doing. Putting two and two together so that they go.

  MORE TYPES OF DREAMS

  Flying dreams, naked dreams, chasing dreams where you’re chasing, and chasing dreams where you’re the one being chased, uncle-killing-you dreams, swimming dreams, dreams about people you used to see and never see anymore, dreams of your mother whom you’ve never known, dreams about the apocalypse, dreams about snakes, dreams about your cousin, dreams about sex that you wake up from wet, a dream where you’re standing between two rotten trees in a traffic circle and a passing motorist tells you lightning is coming, you better move, but you can’t, a dream where you’re with your father on a houseboat in the river and the sun is setting through mica hands hanging on strings from the roof of the houseboat. Your father tells you to stand there, and you do, then he tells you don’t stand THERE, stand HERE, and you do, then he starts to get frustrated but you don’t know why until you realize he is trying to take your picture, which you realize because you’ve become him, you feel the camera in your hands and you see yourself, standing on the houseboat somewhere way downriver from the bridge where you’re sleeping when you have this dream. In your dream, you see the bridge you’ve never seen in person, the bridge from the picture El Hondero tore out of a library book and gave you, except now it’s a bridge made of gold beams hanging from gold cables, and then the dream ends with rushing water and a feeling of overwhelming dread.

  MOONTAMING AND OTHER PEACEFUL DEEDS OF HANGING FROG

  When Hanging Frog was a young man, he thought that the dreamworld was just as real as the waking one. Anything you saw while you were sleeping was meaningful, and dreams were often the result of your soul transporting itself temporarily into a different body someplace else. Hanging Frog, once he’d reclaimed his old village, went right back to his youthful habit of sleeping through the heat of the day, restlessly, always going from something resembling sleep to something resembling wakefulness, dreaming most of the time. Hanging Frog’s vivid dreams were what led to most of his famous peaceful deeds, which are listed here:

  Making friends with the Medicine People of Many Cave Swamp

  Taming of the moon with the Mackinac Henge

  Discovery of the two child geniuses, killing of the evil child genius with a mica dagger

  Kicking down of the big dead tree and finding of the kingsnake inside

  Turning of the kingsnake into the Ohio River

  Construction of the lost Riverbank Earthworks

  MORTAL BETRAYAL

  This is when someone you trust does something hurtful to you and knows it. The worst kind of betrayal is when that someone who betrayed you shows no remorse or has disappeared entirely. Let’s say you walk up to your fort in a tree in a city park, a fort you helped build—with your bare hands you pounded rusty nails into warped boards but still made it work, though it took you forever and it was freezing cold out when you built it—the same way you’ve walked up to it three times that week and you find that the ladder has been retracted from within. When you yell up there you hear someone say, “What’s the password?” and it’s your friend Michelle, who you’d brought to see the fort last week, and you say the password but a new voice from within the fort says the password is wrong, and it’s the voice of a boy who a week earlier tried to beat you up and take your bike. In this situation you will feel the sharp sting of betrayal. Another example: your uncle burns down his mansion. Another example: you get kicked out of the bunkhouse, which is not at all betrayal because you never trusted the bunkhouse authorities in the first place, and before they can put into action their new plan for you that you know is going to stink you take everything you own (little bag of clothes, dictionary, letter from your uncle, plastic folder full of the most important lists) to the lifting bridge where your best friend lives. This best friend promises you a share in the mica expedition, provided you help him dig. This best friend gets your hopes up. He says you’d be living in a tent in the woods, that you’d get up at sunrise and dig in the mist, that you’d get to take breaks and go swimming in the afternoon. He says you’d make money. He says all you have to do is pay for a bus ticket to Ohio, and so you’ve saved up a hundred bucks over time selling squabs to the Asian grocery store. He tells you a lot of made-up stories and you believe them because that’s what friends do. Imagine, then, climbing up the iron ladder beneath the bridge, limberly passing through the engine room singing to yourself, and arriving at the platform to find a note on the desk reading GONE TO OHIO. BACK IN A MONTH. And that’s it. You’re abandoned. So much for the mother lode of mica, if it ever even existed. Instead of all that you get a photograph your so-called friend tore out of a library book—a photograph taken by a guy who might possibly be your father—a father who, come to think of it, also betrayed you, unless he was abducted by aliens or mauled by a bear or was totally vaporized by lightning one day on his way to meet you. It’s at this point you realize that nobody can betray you if
you only rely on yourself.

  MARITIME

  This means time of the sea, as in not land time or air time or pond time, but ocean time. Maritime accidents are bad things that happen on the ocean. Maritime legends are stories that take place on the ocean. El Hondero made up a maritime story once, about how he was in the middle of the ocean and saw the first breath of a baby hurricane. He said that he saw these two gray clouds, not much bigger than people, floating right over the surface of the sea. He was fishing for skipjack in a canoe, he said, when he saw the two cloud people. The two gray cloud people noticed each other, started circling around one another like they were about to dance, then they came together and started whirling and sucking in all the other clouds around. El Hondero and I spent hours talking about his time on the ocean. We could talk for so long about the ocean in part, I think, because we knew that the softly gurgling water below us was flowing there.

  MULLET

  A mullet can be either a type of haircut or a fish. A mullet haircut is popular among gypsies, hockey players, hillbillies, and auto mechanics. The idea is that hair doesn’t get in your eyes but is still long enough in the back so you can’t get burned by the sun back there—though the truth is most people get mullets because they look cool. The fish known as mullet is a blunt-headed, blue-colored fish kind of like a catfish but that jumps out of the water a lot and lives mostly in the ocean, though I’ve seen mullet where there’s no ocean nearby, and have in fact once caught a mullet in freshwater beneath a bridge near the Wilson Carmichael Bunkhouse, though people have called me a liar for saying so.

  MYSTICAL VISION

  A daydream of extreme power that has real-world meaning. You have your average daydreams and you have your mystical visions much the same as you have your minnow and you have your whale. In order to have a mystical vision, you must on some level be ready to receive it. You cannot receive a package without an address. You cannot get water from a tap unless you have a glass. Another thing: you cannot try to have a mystical vision. Mystical visions have you. El Hondero told me he’d had many visions. One led him to the burial mound of Hanging Frog, another to a storage unit containing ten thousand dollars’ worth of rare porcelain dolls from Pakistan, and another to where at last we reunited, six months after he’d left for Ohio (see MORTAL BETRAYAL). For my part, I’ve had my own mystical visions, most notably while stalking squab in the rafters of the lifting bridge. In this vision I saw an old man walking through a curtain of vines and knew I was supposed to follow him and that was it—the whole vision. I had another, a longer one, where I floated like a huge balloon over everything and everyone for an entire day and saw everything clearly though nobody could see me. A mystical vision has on at least one occasion saved my life. You will know you are having a vision because it will feel like you’ve stepped through a portal into a different reality and what you find on the other side of that portal is a version of earth like earth but also not at all like earth. It’s hard to describe, but you’ll know it when it happens. When you realize it’s happening, that you’re having a vision, be ready to break into a dead sprint, get out of the water if you’re swimming, or abandon your campsite in the middle of the night and strike out into the wilderness. Nobody knows where visions come from, or who sends them. When the vision comes, those questions won’t matter, all that will matter is that you act—and act fast—since somewhere near you history is being written into past and you want to avoid being made a part of it.

  MOMENT OF TRUTH

  If you say that a moment is more true than another, you’re saying that most moments are in some part false. When people say MOMENT OF TRUTH, they’re not saying that they mostly live in a lie—they’re using a figure of speech. The moment of truth is that moment when you decide to leap into the void beneath the bridge. It is that moment when you decide to push your raft out into the current of the river. The moment of truth is when you reach your arm right down in the catfish mud-hole. The moment of truth is when, after you’ve been kicked out of the bunkhouse and you’re walking down the hall with your bag in your hand for what will be the last time and you spot the girl who defined luminescence at the end of the hall and you know that this could be the last time you ever see her and she’s looking at you and you have your hand on the exit door, the door to your life after the bunkhouse, but there she is at the end of the hallway and you stop to think but your thoughts evade you—right at that moment, when all you have in your mind are the smoke trails left by thoughts and your heart is racing, that’s the moment of truth.

  MUD

  There’s black, white, and gray; so with dirt, water, and mud. It’s a constant debate what’s water and what’s mud and what constitutes a swamp versus how much flow is needed to make a river—land and water are constantly mixing. Mud settles, is kicked up, gets dried out or made into a soup. After big storms the rivers get muddy. Some rivers look muddy even when there hasn’t been a storm. Mud can be shaped, molded into a ball and thrown, applied like paint, mud can swallow things up like a mouth, can spit up rocks, sticks, turtles, and arrowheads. If it’s watered down enough, the mud can move like a cloud. This is how it was in the river beneath the bridge where El Hondero and I once lived. You can cup that river water in your hands and the brown mud will swirl in it like a mist. So much mud in that water made it easy for things to float, or at least harder for things to sink all the way. Beneath the river’s muddy surface, cruising invisibly along in a cloud of mud, emerging, once in a while, with just the slightest gurgle: whole trees, roots to branches, catfish bigger than a grown man, chest freezers, half-sunken boats. The muddy water made a taste in your mouth that was good at first but quickly got sour. Many legends tell of heroes who became one with mud—Hanging Frog, it is told, spent a month encased in mud, much like an arctic toad—but most people think mud is gross. By the time I hit the river on my raft of barrels I’d had more than enough run-ins with mud to understand that it would be better if I could just get along with it. Once El Hondero had disappeared, and I was left feeling entirely alone in the world, there were no reasons not to heed the muddy river’s mysterious call. Sitting on the bridge alone, watching the clouds of mud slide by, listening to the river babble, watching a rusty fridge bob lazily along in the current then disappear around the green bend where the river goes behind the vines, I couldn’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t go for a float myself. I thought I’d just float on the mud as far as it would take me and figure out what to do once I’d gotten there.

  MAGNIFIED LIGHT

  One look at the daytime sun is enough to understand the power of light. If you’re out on a sunny day and you’re showing skin, the sun will burn it. Hang out for just a few seconds in a beam of sunlight that’s been magnified, whether through a glass lens or by the surface of the water, and you’ll start to feel a burn. If the sun is high in the sky and you’re floating down a river, the surface of the water all around you can be blinding. Looking at the surface of the water will be like looking into a thousand tiny mirrors all reflecting the sun at once. It will be like floating in a sea of burning light, like a sea of cold fire. Get a sheet and pull it over yourself and stay there. Pole toward the bank if there are trees overhanging the bank, and try to float in the cool green shade of canopies. Problems arise with this method. There are jetties of rock that the river people call riprap, there are huge, swirling eddies, on the riprap jetties there are fishermen who want to talk to you, some of whom are drunk, some of whom will ask to float with you, some of whom are Daddies and will actually try. Keep your river-pole handy as you float close to the bank, and stay alert. There are huge pipes belching runoff into the river, and low-hanging, snake-draped limbs that will knock you into the water. Magnified light from a bulb can create photographs (see ENLARGER) by burning shadows onto sensitive paper, and sunlight can then bleach that photograph back toward white, especially if it’s magnified sunlight coming off a muddy river, especially if you’ve taped the photograph to the deck of your raft, and espec
ially if the photo contains many shades of brown to begin with. The photograph of Jim ‘River’ Swift on his boat, the one taken by Howard Tyce (see LIBRARY), began to bleach out within a few very bright, long days on the river.

  MOUTHS OF FISH

  If you’re floating along near the riverbank, or if you’re standing by certain ponds, and the wind has pulled fluff from the buds of nearby cottonwood trees and scattered the fluff across the surface of the water, you’re going to encounter the mouths of fish. Cottonwood, a tree common along big, muddy rivers, gets its name from the balls of cotton that grow on its branches in spring. When the wind blows, thin clouds of weightless cotton float in the air, eventually coming to rest in other trees, on gravel roads, or on the water. When the cotton hits the water, the grass carp will come for it. The grass carp, the big fish that deserve the name cottonmouth as much as the white-mouthed snake, come up for the fluff and suck it down into their watery throats by opening their huge carp lips and slapping them shut. The sound of many carp mouths is a PHUP, PHUP, PHUP, and if you look you can see the cotton go under and a splash come up from where the carp mouth just was.