Rants from the Hill

by Michael P. Branch

  There is no point in pretending that my desire to build a tree house was not driven by nostalgia. It all began with the 1960 Disney film Swiss Family Robinson, based on Johann David Wyss’s 1812 novel of the same title. As a kid I loved that movie, which fueled the pastoral fantasy that I could not only escape school but even leave the earth, clambering up into a treetop hideaway from which no grown-up could make me descend—not even to wash up for supper. And I was not alone. The popularity of that crappy movie bankrolled the “Swiss Family Treehouse” replicas that sprouted up at Disney parks not only in southern California, but in Paris, Tokyo, and Hong Kong as well. So popular were these reproductions of the movie’s elaborate tree house that the Anaheim version lasted from 1962 until 1999, when it was converted into “Tarzan’s Treehouse” as a tie-in to the Disney Tarzan film released that year. The big-screen Swiss Family Robinson was itself influenced by the immensely profitable Tarzan film franchise that began during the early 1930s. In fact, any kind of tree house movie provides a quick way of separating a guy from his money.

  The contemporary version of this fantasy is evident in the passion the ultra-rich have developed for tree houses. This opulent fad has gained so much traction that there are now more than thirty luxury tree house design and construction firms in the United States and United Kingdom alone, and many of the tree houses they build are not only nicer, but also larger than the houses most of us live in. Who, you might ask, would be crazy enough to pay six figures for a tree house? The answer is simple: any guy with a ton of scratch who saw Swiss Family Robinson when he was eight years old.

  This bizarre indulgence has led, inevitably, to Finca Bellavista, an upscale tree house development, built high in the jungle canopy of Costa Rica. The Animal Planet network now features a reality TV show called Treehouse Masters, in which tree house guru Pete Nelson exposes us to pornographically lavish tree houses while simultaneously pretending that a tree house with running water, air conditioning, stained-glass windows, and a martini bar qualifies as a minimalist sanctuary enabling a Thoreauvian reconnection with nature. But while Nelson’s claim is patent horseshit, it is irresistible horseshit of the kind few of us can live a single day without. You might object that tree houses are meant for kids and that the adult longing for one is nothing more than a puerile expression of a desperate desire to escape, momentarily, the pressures of adult responsibility. To which I reply, exactly! That is what makes a tree house so cool, even and especially after one grows to adulthood, realizes that Swiss Family Robinson is total crap, and then wants to watch it again anyway.

  Believe it or not, there is historical precedent for the luxury tree house craze, as some sixteenth-century Italian aristocrats constructed arboreal retreats in their elaborate gardens—you know, just to provide them an escape from the pressures of the main mansion. In other cultures, tree houses have more practical uses. The Korowai, a Papuan people of southeastern Irian Jaya, live in virtually unassailable tree houses at least 100 feet up; this is a precaution they take against their neighbors, the Citak, who are reputed to be headhunters. There is even some argument that a desire to inhabit trees is braided into the double helix that preconditions human behavior. Roughly six million years ago, we hominids parted ways from the evolutionary ancestor we share with chimpanzees and bonobos, but there could still be some deep-time muscle memory at play here. After all, we share more than 95 percent of our DNA with chimps—and nearly the same amount with bonobos, the central African dwarf chimpanzees whose DNA is even closer to human DNA than it is to the DNA of gorillas. To judge by Caroline, the human-chimp genetic convergence appears to be closer to 99.99 percent. Could it be that there is just something in us that wants to climb trees—and, once up there, wants to build a nest, skip school or work, and hang out peeling bananas or shaking martinis?

  There is one other cultural context in which tree houses have figured prominently, and that is the amazing tree-sitting protests that have been used to save old-growth forests from logging and also to protest mining, protect Native American property rights, and preserve urban green space. A daring variation on civil rights–era sit-ins, protest tree-sits began in New Zealand during the late 1970s but spread to Australia, Tasmania, Canada, and the United States, where they have occurred in California, Oregon, Washington, and West Virginia (where they were used to protest and delay mountaintop removal coal mining). One urban tree-sit in Berkeley, California, lasted twenty-one months, and even the mainstream media covered the protest of the Humboldt County activist Julia “Butterfly” Hill, who spent a remarkable 738 consecutive days in “Luna,” a fifteen-hundred-year-old coast redwood, from 1997 to 1999. Once in the trees, activists not only build tree houses—where they live for weeks, months, or even years—but also connect those houses from tree to tree, creating a webbed network of cables and rappel lines throughout the canopy. One anti-logging protest tree village in central Oregon’s Willamette National Forest had more than a thousand activists in the trees at various times, and included such practical amenities as composting toilets, hydroponic sprout farms, and lock-on points for activists to chain themselves to during forced evictions.

  In his beautiful 1972 book Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino describes Baucis, an imaginary city that exists in the sky, rests upon slender stilts, and is populated by people who never descend to the ground. “There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis,” writes Calvino. “That they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.” It strikes me as ironic that our children are so anxious to grow up, because they desire the freedom from authority they imagine adulthood will bring, while at the same time we grown-ups crave a return to childhood in order to evade the burdens adulthood actually entails. I wonder if there will be some magic day on which my beautiful daughters and I will pass each other, they rushing forward in a desire for adult responsibility, I rushing backward through memory and imagination in an attempt to escape it.

  Our tree house on Ranting Hill, though modest in comparison to the one depicted in the old Disney film, is well concealed among the juniper and seems perfectly exotic to us. It satisfies our innate craving to retreat to a secret hideaway, one whose stilts lift us into the trees from which we clambered down so long ago. While our tree house is only about 250 feet from home, it remains invisible, secret, always ready to become a pirate galleon, desert island, lunar module, raven’s nest, hot-air balloon, or undiscovered planet—whatever we need it to be. Maybe a sanctuary for a too-grown-up writer, engaged in a one-man tree-sit protest against adulthood. Our tree house provides a place to climb above the weary earth for a moment, if only to gaze back down at that earth and contemplate with fascination our own absence from it.

  ON THE WEST SIDE of our home mountain, whose rocky crest delineates the invisible line separating the Silver and Golden States of Nevada and California, there is a curiosity that has long puzzled and charmed me. Out along a lonely stretch of two-lane not far from Hallelujah Junction, so named because it is the only place in this long valley where we desert rats can load up on the essentials—water, whiskey, and fuel—there stands a strikingly tall and graceful Utah juniper. This unusual tree rises in a grand, angular gesture from a sandy flat of sage and rabbitbrush. Its height, open structure, and twisting musculature distinguish it from the low, bushy junipers up and down the valley, making it a kind of natural monument. Any southbounder rolling in from Mount Shasta country or the Lassen lava lands can feel in the dark just where this tree stands: past Red Rock canyon, beyond the mule deer migration tunnels, not far from the Hallelujah resupply. But what makes this tree special is something stranger: it is festooned with hundreds of pairs of shoes.

  I have long wondered why the desert shoe tree possesses such appeal. How did this tree become a celebrated landmark, one we a
lways stop at, even though we can’t say why? Why do Hannah and Caroline consider it such a treat to visit the tree? Why don’t we see the shoe tree as an abomination, a site of litter at best and of desecration at worst? One possibility is that, excepting the road itself, the desert shoe tree is among the only signs of human culture along this remote stretch of the Fremont Highway. Perhaps the loneliness we feel out on the empty road is diminished by this strange reminder that we are not as alone as this valley’s isolation might lead us to believe.

  Or maybe it is pure novelty that attracts us to the desert shoe tree. If every tree in the valley were draped with shoes, would we instead pull over to photograph the one tree that lacked them? Sometimes, it seems the tree represents a kind of freedom, an unburdening that occurs when we not only throw something away but throw it with all our might, flinging some discarded fragment of our lives away forever. Or are we compelled by the pure aesthetic beauty of the form: a giant, graceful, organic structure, carved into the desert sky, with hundreds of parti-colored blossoms dangling and twirling in the incessant sweep of the Washoe Zephyr? Or do we simply crave the thrill of doing something so playful, so unfettered? Wouldn’t it be more responsible to keep and wear those shoes a little longer? Absolutely. And that is why we bust a gut trying to sling them into the very highest of this tree’s outstretched branches.

  Of one thing, however, I am absolutely certain. These shoes tell stories. Some do so literally, because their hurlers have inscribed them with a dizzying variety of names, dates, messages, and odd pearls of wisdom. Our daughters notice that “Jenny” has explained, on the bottom of her flip-flops, that she is on her way home to Portland from a transformative week in Yosemite. “William” has shed an expensive pair of wingtips, leaving a note on the sole to tell us that he has just married “Maria” up in Feather River country. The recent date on a low-hanging baby shoe celebrates the birth of “Cezar,” while a pair of deck shoes, whose rubber sole is inscribed “For Great Grandma,” may commemorate a passage in the other direction. And here we discover a pair of dangling army boots that are fully annotated with their story. They were worn in a faraway war zone by “Ansaldo,” who is, at last, home safely to the western Great Basin, and who reminds passersby that “Freedom Is Not Free.” Welcome home, Ansaldo, wherever and whoever you are.

  The less-storied shoes provoke us to craft narratives that remain unwritten, as we are drawn into making them meaningful by their type, condition, and placement. Could those dangling cleats indicate that an ace closer pulled over to toss them in a victory celebration, or do the castoff spikes mark the unfortunate conclusion of a career ended by injury? Do those high heels mean that a newlywed passed by on her way to a new life, or did she discard them to celebrate retirement from a cubicle she waited thirty years to escape? Do the work boots symbolize a flight from a lifetime of hard labor, or does the weight of their steel-toed construction simply make them satisfying to launch?

  The girls and I take turns pointing out different shoes and guessing the stories of their wearers and slingers. We make a great deal more of the shoes’ narratives than the scant evidence will support, but that may be why we love the desert shoe tree so much. It is a strange field for the imagination—one in which we discern our own feelings, memories, and hopes. Each time we return to the tree it bears new fruit, and we pause not only to collect but also to invent its stories.

  Last Sunday, our family made a pilgrimage to the desert shoe tree for two very important reasons. Hannah had outgrown her sparkly, high-top Chucks, and it was time to keep my promise that she could attempt to bola-whip them into the arms of the celebrated tree. The second and more important reason involved Caroline, who is the kind of kid for whom a parent plans not college savings but rather bail money. Several years ago, Caroline had resolved to root for the LA Dodgers, which she did solely to perturb the rest of the family, since we are, like all sensible northern Great Basinians, devoted fans of the San Francisco Giants. Although I found this mindless act of rebellion troubling, I rationalized that Caroline would soon return from the dark side—that she would outgrow this foolishness, just as Hannah had outgrown her sneakers.

  As the season wore on, however, I was reminded that Caroline’s rebelliousness is matched only by her stubbornness: she is part cute little girl and part cross-eyed mule. First, she saved her meager allowance money, bought a Dodgers cap, and refused to take it off, even in bed. When she adopted Dodger blue as her wardrobe color of choice and continued to cheer loudly for the Giants’ arch rivals deep into the following season, I explained, as clearly and patiently as a loving father can, what it means to be “disowned.” She remained unfazed, carrying her poor behavior into a third season, at which point I felt obliged to describe, in rich, imaginative detail, the terrible “kiddie prison” awaiting her if she failed to change her ways. She replied that there are probably TVs in kiddie prison, which would be convenient, because she could “chillax and watch the Dodgers kick some Giant butt.”

  After three years I at last relented and told the kid she could be a Dodgers fan so long as she legally changed her last name. And that was the magic moment in which little Caroline, having bested me, resolved to become a Giants fan. My act of reverse psychology was as effective as it was accidental, and suddenly she had joined the family in rooting for the correct team.

  “Mom and I are so relieved!” I exclaimed. “What can we do to celebrate this great day in our family?”

  Apparently, Caroline had already thought this through. “Take me to the shoe tree,” she replied without hesitation, “and I’ll climb it and leave this stinky Dodgers hat up there with all those stinky shoes.”

  We had a nice visit to the shoe tree that day. We saw some pronghorn gliding across the open desert, heard a few croaking ravens, caught the pungent smell that crests from the shimmering, wind-driven waves of this vast sagebrush ocean. First up was Hannah, who, after repeated attempts, discovered that it is quite challenging to whip a pair of shoes high into the air. It requires just the right backswing, timing, and follow-through. She soon got the hang of it, though, and managed to lodge her sparkly Chucks at a respectable height.

  Next came the main event. Little Caroline wrote her initials on the brim of her Dodgers cap, and Hannah added “GO GIANTS!!!” for good measure. Then Caroline—who by now was wearing the Giants ball cap we had given her—climbed up into the shoe tree and, smiling widely, hung her Dodgers cap on a branch of the juniper. “I’m the first one who ever put a hat in the shoe tree,” she said. “And since nobody ever did that before, it’s a hat tree now, and I thought that up.” I wonder if that is how the first person to toss their shoes into this tree also felt.

  If you are ever driving at dusk down a lonely two-lane in the western Great Basin Desert, out on the Nevada-California line, past the red canyon above Hallelujah, and you see carved into the sky a giant tree full of hats, my kid thought that up. If there is still a Dodgers cap in it, you will know just what it means to harvest the sweet, blue fruit of its small story. It means that the people who unburden themselves here have found a way to leave their past behind.

  IT IS LESS THAN NINETY MILES, as the raven flies, from Ranting Hill to Rough and Ready, California, a town in the western Sierra Nevada foothills that holds special meaning for a reclusive curmudgeon like me. Rough and Ready was settled as a miners’ outpost in 1849, after which it quickly grew to be a boomtown of three thousand. Just a year or so after its settlement, though, the people of Rough and Ready decided they were already fed up with the constraints of citizenship, and so they held a gathering at which they voted to withdraw from the Territory of California and secede from the United States. On April 7, 1850, the Great Republic of Rough and Ready was established, and for several months it made out just fine as one of the tiniest and most independent nations in the world.

  On July 4 of that same year, or so the story goes, the men of Rough and Ready ran into trouble when they rode the four miles to nearby Grass Valley to get good and d
runk. (During the mid-nineteenth century, Americans were both more patriotic and more inebriated than we are today—so much so that even temperance societies had little choice but to offer their members a reprieve from the sobriety pledge on Independence Day.) But, to their dismay, the thirsty men of Rough and Ready reached the Grass Valley saloon only to be told that they were now considered “foreigners” and thus would be served no hooch—especially not on the day set aside to celebrate the great nation from which they had chosen to secede. Sticking to the principles most important to true patriots, the men quickly convened another meeting, voted resoundingly to rejoin the United States immediately, and then returned to the Grass Valley saloon, where cheers went up as the newly reassimilated Americans set patriotically to get hammered on corn liquor along with their fellow countrymen.

  The tale of the Great Republic of Rough and Ready has a curious addendum. Just after World War II, the US Postal Service discovered that Rough and Ready had never formally been readmitted to the Union and so had, essentially, been operating as a rogue nation for nearly a century. A few forms were filled out, and on June 16, 1948, Rough and Ready formally rejoined the United States. No doubt there was more heavy drinking to celebrate the occasion. These days Rough and Ready has a population of about nine hundred folks, approximately seven hundred of whom would shoot you just for stepping onto their porch; the other two hundred are telecommuting San Francisco Bay Area software designers, which is far worse. But I do love to think of the long century during which Rough and Ready existed both within and outside the nation that did and did not quite contain it.