A Place of My Own Read Online Free PDF Page B

because it was due solely to his confirmed unhandiness that I ended up with the fanciest tree house in the development, one that boasted a pair of shuttered windows, a pine-plank floor, and a shingled roof. But the very best thing about my tree house (and the thing about it that, as a parent now myself, I find most astounding) was that no one but a kid could possibly gain admittance to it: the only way in was by climbing up a flimsy rope ladder and squeezing through a trapdoor in the floor that couldn’t have been more than eighteen inches square. As much as the tree house itself, the tiny trapdoor was a gift of extraordinary generosity: my parents had underwritten my dream of a place from which even they would be excluded.
    Arguably this was a foolish thing for them to do, because later on the tree house would serve as the setting for various illicit activities. Though even then, it all seemed something less than authentically depraved—a matter of symbolism mainly, not that that was unimportant. Paging through a Playboy or smoking pot up in the tree house, the point was in many ways less sexual or pharmacological than sacramental, odd as that might sound. For this was high childhood ritual, and more than anything else, it was the tree house itself that these ceremonies commemorated, this airborne room of my own, which I came to regard as a temple of my privacy and independence.
     
    Even more than adults do, children seem instinctively to grasp the deepest meanings of houseness— the full significance of territory and shelter, the metaphysics of inside and out, the symbolism of doors and windows and roofs. Shelter, for example, is a concept that nothing could underline as emphatically as a hail of well-thrown rocks. When I read Beowulf in college, all those vivid scenes of the mead hall under siege from Grendel made me think of those first thrilling nights my friends and I spent sleeping out in the new tree house, withstanding the predawn assaults of our enemies. Our local Grendel was an older boy named Jeff Grabel, who took it upon himself to terrorize us for reasons that were never articulated, but which we spent hours speculating about. The prevailing theory held that the dispute was territorial, since the tree house had been built in the middle of the half-acre wood that separated his family’s house from mine. Though this property technically belonged to my family, Grabel had had the run of it before the construction of the tree house, so it made sense he would have regarded our outpost as an alien incursion. For more than a year he dedicated his every effort to erasing our presence from the woods while we, with a matching tenacity, dedicated ours to preserving a toehold.
    “Every child begins the world again,” Thoreau wrote in Walden , and it’s certainly true that the games of boys can be almost cartoonishly atavistic, dredging up from who-knows-where the primordial struggles of the race. Between Grabel and me the cause was nothing less than that of chaos against civilization, Grendel against the mead hall, the Sioux against the settler. (The first time I had occasion to meet Jeff Grabel off the field of battle, years later, I was surprised to find he could form an English sentence; during raids he had whooped exclusively.) The symbol of civilization we’d set out to defend was my little stilt-house in the woods, four walls and a gable roof, its archetypal form signifying home, settlement, and in the context of that forest, defiance. The hearth around which we gathered after dark was a flashlight, whose beam reflecting down off the ceiling held us in a warm circle of light. For mead we had cans of Hawaiian Punch. And outside all around us chaos raged.
    Grabel and his allies chucked stones that would thud against the wood walls of the tree house with enough force to rock it on its posts. We would retaliate with water balloons, frequently delivered by catapult. Usually we felt fairly safe up there in the trees,