Fake, Plastic Treehouses?

I don’t consider myself a particularly jealous fellow. Generally, I’m able to live with myself if someone has a sweeter car, nicer apartment, or larger slice of cheesecake. However, there is at least one man of whom I can say I am unequivocally jealous: Horrace Burgess of Crossville, TN. Why? Because he owns the sweetest treehouse in the world.

Now, I’ve built (read: mostly watched my grandpa build) a treehouse or two (read: one) in my time. And it was pretty sweet. There was (or, is; the tree’s still there) a tree in my backyard that was prime for housing. About ten feet or so off the ground, it split off, Y-shaped, and continued on. That joint was an excellent spot for some hot treehouse action. By building the base platform on both sides of the joint, we could create two—yes, two—rooms. Granted, one room was about two feet wide, but still: you could stand on either side. Awesome: my treehouse could hold three, and maybe even four, people at once. Now, I know what you’re thinking, and the answer is “yes”: there was a rope ladder. Were there hand-rails along the perimeter? You bet your ass.

I admit, though, that Mr. Burgess has me beat. Where my treehouse had 20-odd square feet of floor-space, Burgess can counter with 8,000. I had one story; Burgess has ten (and counting). This is enough to earn my jealousy, because treehouses are awesome. And this awesomeness gives the treehouse an important power; the concept of the treehouse is powerful enough to make a grown man sink a huge wad of cash into a treemansion. Even if the treehouse is to some extent fading from modern childhood[1] it remains a significant symbol of what it means to be a boy.

Of course, here is where the questions set in. Why is a treehouse a boy thing (at least in theory)? There’s no reason why girls can’t think treehouses are the bee’s knees. And gender questions aside, the treehouse is a symbol of a very specific, idyllic version of American childhood—one that probably obscures more than it reveals.

In its ideal pop-culture form, the treehouse serves as a powerful metaphor for boyhood. It’s outdoorsy and it involves a hammer, nails, and sweat; these are traditionally “male” traits, and girls who dare enjoy such things are often tagged with the “tomboy” label. Consider Calvin and Hobbes, the greatest comic strip of all time. His considerable vocabulary aside, Calvin is the prototypical boy, and so he must have a treehouse. His treetop fort is home to G.R.O.S.S. (Get Rid Of Slimy girlS), the secret society headed by Supreme Dictator for Life Calvin and President/First Tiger Hobbes. But G.R.O.S.S. lets Calvin do more than bestow upon himself impressive titles; its primary purpose is to exclude Susie, Calvin’s antagonist (and possible crush, but we’ll get back to that in a minute).

Children are powerless: they can’t drive, vote, or buy guns (not even at gun shows!). And as we all know, that helplessness can be maddening for a kid who is just getting old enough to realize all of his/her limitations. Enter the treehouse, where the kid is king—or Supreme Dictator for Life. (At least until bedtime.) It’s a space in which the child can control everything: rules, decorum, access. And as a preferred space, the treehouse holds several advantages over a child’s other choices. The bedroom is fine, but it’s only a province within the larger nation-state of the house, and as such occasionally (for example, when it’s time to pick up dirty laundry) falls under superior jurisdiction. Public places, like the mall, lack discerning taste in those allowed inside. Plus, no other choice is as ideal for SuperSoaker fights as is the treehouse.

The treehouse does have some limitations, though: namely, not having a whole lot to do once you’re up there. You can chuck water balloons, or install a piece of plywood on which to rest snacks. But really, beyond that feeling of control, the treehouse affords relatively little in the way of positive, active power. You can do anything, but there isn’t anything to do. And so, enter exclusion.

Indeed, the most important benefit of the treehouse (when properly equipped with retractable access) is the ability to pick and choose those allowed inside.[2] That’s real power—power which Calvin uses to its full effect in his ongoing struggle against the forces of cooties. As the name of G.R.O.S.S. makes clear, it is an essentially sexist organization, existing solely to isolate those lacking the slime-repelling Y chromosome.

Definition-by-exclusion is such a common adolescent process it probably doesn’t require much exploration; suffice it to say that when we’re just beginning to form self-identities, being clear about what we are not is an easy starting point. G.R.O.S.S. and the treehouse allow Calvin to physically manifest this idea, as he excludes Susie and occasionally pelts her with buckeyes.

But secretly, Calvin is torn. He puts up a macho front, but there’s a side of him that finds the opposite sex intriguing. That side is, of course, Hobbes, who frequently fraternizes with the enemy. (The enemy apparently gives good belly-rubs.) As long as we remember that Hobbes only exists in Calvin’s head, we can see how the combination of G.R.O.S.S. and the treehouse serve as a tree-top flirtation device. Since Calvin is only six, he isn’t quite ready to admit that (and part of him clings to a cootie-free philosophy), but the seeds are planted.

Assumedly, as Calvin ages his treehouse will take on a slightly different role in his life—perhaps the role illustrated in South Park. In the second-season episode “Clubhouses,” Stan and Kyle set out to build a treehouse. Since both lads are a few years older than Calvin, their goal has shifted. The treehouse is still all about girls, but now the idea is to bring them in, not shut them out; specifically, they must build a treehouse so that they can play truth or dare in it. Stan is sure that once they have a treehouse, they can use it to play truth or dare with girls, and he will get dared to kiss Wendy (his girlfriend). They still do some excluding, but instead of cutting out the girls, they organize against their friend Cartman (who proceeds to build his own treehouse). And while the rickety treehouse never does get Stan any action, in the end it saves his parents’ marriage: on the outs, Stan’s parents meet in the treehouse and rekindle their romance with a game of truth or dare.

The point here (insofar as an episode of South Park can be said to have a point) is to illustrate the power of nostalgia for one’s childhood—it’s strong enough to save a seemingly-doomed marriage. But the story of the parents, combined with what we see Stan and his friends experience, suggests something slightly different. The treehouse affects much more strongly the lives of the adults than those of the kids, because they can look back on tree-top encounters through the rose-colored glasses of time. The contrast between the experience of the kids and that of the adults is the key: the kids are living in a real-world, present version of their childhood, in which things are imperfect. But when the adults play truth or dare, they can rely on perfect memories of things that may never have happened.

Once you cut through the rest, South Park is suggesting that the way we look back on childhood deviates wildly from how it actually was. All the bad, awkward bits get forgotten over time—washed over in favor of a sterile, pleasant ideal. This is how the treehouse-as-symbol works generally within pop-culture. It is the ideal that maybe never was. But this is not the treehouse’s fault (because, remember: treehouses are sweet). Instead, it’s part of a much more general phenomenon.

Think of all the assumptions involved the aforementioned ideal treehouse childhood. For one, it’s male, erasing any female role except that of object (to be either excluded or lured inside). There’s an expectation of heterosexuality, too: no room for a group of boys playing truth or dare. And the whole picture is either suburban or rural. Calvin has a forest behind his house, and the South Park kids live in a quiet little mountain town. For any of this to work, a kid has to have at least a back yard with a tree in it. And once we’re into a rural/suburban environment, we’re talking about an overwhelmingly white setting.

The treehouse, as it exists in the popular conscience, is part of the larger tendency to consider the white, male, hetero, suburban experience the universal one. But, of course, that has never been an accurate picture. I don’t think I’m breaking any stunning new ground by pointing that out—embracing the ideal of the treehouse childhood ignores the way in which the vast majority of the country grew up.

Every time a TV talking-head makes a casual reference to white males as the “regular folks,” we’re dealing with the same tendency. Or when a major-party vice-presidential candidate talks about how small towns are the “real America.” Or when a craggy old pol writes a column titled “Traditional Americans are losing their nation,” and ends it by saying, “America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.” When Buchanan, Palin, and Matthews use that kind of language, they’re calling on a very specific type of nostalgia—the treehouse America, where everyone left it to Beaver and occasionally took fishing trips with Andy Griffith. As I mentioned before, that isn’t the America that most people experience. The chattering class is embracing a supposedly-shared cultural memory that is more fiction than fact.

So, the treehouse seems to symbolize nothing more than pure invention. As a marker of a larger common culture, it has meaning only to a specific slice of the population. And as the South Park example shows, those of us who feel a particular personal nostalgia towards the treehouse are using it to symbolize a clean-scrubbed, idealized version of our own pasts. This is an understandable situation; after all, nostalgia is a powerful force. It gives us an escape from an imperfect present by offering an imagined version of that perfect past. Unfortunately, innocent bystanders like the treehouse get swept up in the nostalgic current.

That’s where Horrace Burgess comes in. What his skyscraper in the trees offers us is a way out of nostalgia’s grip. Building a ten-story treehouse in adulthood is a statement: he has decided not to rest on nostalgia. Obviously, Burgess has some fond memories of a childhood perch, but instead of simply succumbing to some kind of falsified memory of youthful awesomeness he acted to make his present tangibly kick-ass. That’s a hard thing to do. Memories don’t take any work. You don’t have to drive a few thousand nails to remember sitting on a rickety wooden platform when you were nine. Acting on that memory to make something enjoyable in the here-and-now is admirable.

And that’s why I envy him—not because he put a basketball hoop in a treehouse (although that is sweet as well), but because he had motivation and drive enough to create a present-tense piece of excellence that takes the role of idle (and generally falsified) nostalgia. That’s an impressive display of carpe diem, one worthy of some genuine jealousy.

[1] It doesn’t seem to be popping up as much nowadays—but then again, a reliable source informs me that a treehouse makes an appearance in a High School Musical movie. Maybe I’m just out of touch.
[2] “Inside” here used in a relative sense, of course. Unless you managed to build a roof, in which case: bravo.