Tree houses are for everyone ~ April 28, 1994

by David Heiller

Tree house. Those two words can fill a kid with bliss and a dad with fond memories. My son and I built a tree house on Saturday and Sunday. We chose the box elder by the outhouse. It is easy to climb, and has four trunks that come out of the ground like giant weeds.

First we rounded up scraps of lumber. Rule number one about tree houses is that you can’t buy materials. You have to scrounge them.

The inspiration for 
Noah's tree house dreams

We nailed three two-inch boards to the tree for the floor support, eight feet off the ground. I showed Noah how to use a square for cutting straight ends. I showed him how to read a level for a level floor. I was glad to show him this. No one ever showed me when I was his age.

Then we nailed the floor boards onto them. We had to notch some of the boards so that three of the tree trunks could come through. The end result was a platform that seemed part of the tree, like it belonged there.

While we worked, I told Noah about the tree houses we had when I was young. They weren’t really houses, rather just a couple of boards nailed onto two branches.

They were in the elm tree beside our house. One was about eight feet off the ground. That’s the one I liked. The other was level with the bedroom window on third floor of our house. That’s the one my brother liked. He would climb up there, and then grab a branch overhead and swing out over the ground, then dare me to do it. I think I did once, and that was enough.

You couldn’t beat elm trees for climbing and making tree houses. That tree is gone now, thanks to Dutch elm disease.

Kids and trees go together.
Malika and Noah in our maple tree.

Saturday night, Noah showed me some tree house drawings from a Calvin and Hobbes book. That’s how he wanted his to look. So the next day we made walls like Calvin’s. He tied a rope above the walls so he could climb in just like Calvin does. Noah didn’t want a door in his tree house. I’m glad he didn’t. That’s getting too fancy for my tree house tastes.

My daughter, Malika, objected to this. She couldn’t get in using the rope. I think that was Noah’s idea all along. But Cindy and I made him put a, ladder up for her.

He has to share his house, and not only with his sister. When we were done, Cindy announced that she couldn’t wait to use the house. It will be a great place to read, she said, and she was serious.

Noah felt proud of his house when it was done. He sat up there after supper. He felt eight feet tall, in more ways than one. It was a beautiful spring evening, with frogs peeping and tree swallows making nests. And only 29 more days of school left! he said.

Life couldn’t be any better.

I looked at the house with pride too. It was no great feat of carpentry, but Noah couldn’t have made it without me, and I wouldn’t have made it without him. That made me feel good.

Maybe I’ll do some reading up there too.

Put the memories where they belong ~ April 20, 2000

David Heiller

Every once in a while the bitter memories return.

David was pretty good at keeping things in perspective.
 Of course, we all get hurt, by people whose 
aim is to hurt us, whether we are 12 or 50.

When I was going into eighth grade, I decided to leave my elementary school a year early, and go the high school 12 miles away. I did this because I wanted to play sports. Most of my classmates were staying at the old school for their final year. They thought I was a snob and a deserter, and they let me know it. “Νο one likes you anyway, Heiller. Everybody’s glad you’re going,” one kid said. Boy, did that hurt. The memory is so vivid that I can still remember where I was standing when he said it. Just a couple of cruel sentences, but they have stuck with me for 30 years.

Then there was the time at the playground, when I wanted to join in a game with some kids who were sort of my friends. I didn’t feel like I could just join in, so I asked if I could join them. Big mistake. “God, Dave’s got to beg to play with us,” one of the girls chided. She laughed at me, made me feel like an outsider, a loser. She had bully power and she wielded it in merciless kid fashion.

I don’t think I’m alone with experiences like that. And I wasn’t always on the receiving end. I inflicted a few wounds on others.

The only thing more painful than some of those old childhood memories is seeing them repeated on my own kids.

I wish I had some magic words when that happens. I try to say the right thing. You’re a good kid. Be yourself. Do the best you can. We love you. I might tell of an experience of my own that was like theirs.

But I know that the hurt feelings ultimately have to be processed internally. You look at the words that are said, see how many grains of truth they contain, and try to understand why they were spoken and the person who said them.

Figuring out who you are is tough when you are age 14 or 16. It’s sometimes still a challenge at age 46.

But it can be done. I want to tell my kids that, by example if not words.

“Life won’t get much tougher for you than it is right now. Hang in there. The bitter memories won’t go away. But they’ll be put in the closet, right where they belong.”

Old Man River has his way ~ April 26, 2001

David Heiller

Cindy and I stood on the observation platform of Lock and Dam Number 10 last Wednesday, April 18.

Locks and dams on the upper Mississippi.

The Mississippi River was high. It was almost flowing over the top of the lock. A lock is like a long cement chute with a gate on either end. The locks are used to move boats past the dams. In normal weather they tower over the boats, except for towboats. But the river had swallowed up the locks.

We talked about the houses we had just seen upstream in Guttenburg, Iowa. Dozens of them were flooded. The road ran between them had been replaced by the main channel of the river. It was a strange sight.

I struck up a conversation with another guy on the platform. “Did you see those houses under water up there?” I asked.

“Yeah, we live in one of them,” he answered. He and his family had one of the few houses that wasn’t yet flooded on the island. He had come to town in a boat, going very slowly and carefully. You would not want a floating tree to catch you in that water. I thought it was kind of funny that after he came to town, he went to the dam to look at the river. Didn’t he see enough of it from his kitchen window? But the river in flood holds that kind of fascination for some people. I include myself in that category, although I like to think that I would not live on a low-lying island along the Mississippi.

The man’s wife said it was the third time since 1993 that their neighborhood had been flooded. The only other time before that was in 1965. That tells me that we must be doing something to help Old Man River with his spring tantrums.

Look at Brownsville, my wife, Cindy, said. In 1965, the water came up and over the banks of the river. It spread over many acres of bottoms and beach, all the way to the railroad tracks. They called it a 100-year-flood. Yeah, right.

But now there is a housing development at that spot, as well as huge sand dunes left by water Army Corps of Engineers dredging. The water can’t rest in Brownsville anymore, so it hustles downstream and finds another spot to flood, like Guttenburg.

I don’t have much sympathy for people that build in flood-prone areas. But then again, they aren’t looking for sympathy. The people that live there take floods in stride.

With David.

Cindy and I spent four days last week along the Mississippi. It was a vacation for us, although it sure wasn’t for the people who live there. We didn’t time the trip to coincide with the second worst flood ever. That was a grim and awesome bonus. The grim part was obvious. The fascination came with the magnitude of the flood.

On Friday evening my mom and I walked down to the first spillway of the Reno Bottoms, seven miles south of Brownsville. Normally there is no water over the spillway. It runs through a big culvert. But we watched as four feet of water rushed over it. One spot where many people fish was eight feet under.

“Think of the treasures that will wash up back there,” I told Mom. I could see the tip of a canoe protruding from a tangle of water and wood. Suffice it to say that Mom did not share my enthusiasm.

I told her I would be back in a couple weeks to find that canoe, and maybe some more goodies. It will take more than a couple weeks for the river to return to normal, she replied. She’s probably right. Then we can wait for the next 100-year flood, which will probably happen sooner than that.