The Tree House and the Sky-Ride

We lived in El Paso during two different time periods. During the first period, from roughly 1975 to 1979, we lived in an area that was called the Upper Valley, located outside the city limits. We lived on an acre of land that had previously been planted in cotton and alfalfa, and therefore was devoid of any trees or grass until we planted some. Our house was about six months old when we moved in. We bought it from another company employee who was quitting or being transferred to another location, I forget which.

Anyway, I should have said when I moved in, not when we moved in. You see, I moved to El Paso about two months before Elaine and Neal and Glen did, because although we had a buyer for our home in Rodeo, California, the sale had not yet gone through closing. I thought I got a pretty good deal on the Upper Valley house, but Elaine never particularly liked it. Let this be a lesson to all husbands: Do not ever, ever buy a house to live in, without first letting your wife inspect it.

Being young and active at that time, I was always involved in one project or another. In addition to my work for pay, that is. There was a huge cottonwood tree on the edge of our property adjacent to a county road that passed by. I decided that that tree desperately needed a well-built tree-house in it. The trunk of the tree divided into three main limbs about 15 feet off the ground. I designed a tree house with a cantilevered support for the fourth corner of the tree house floor, using two 4” X 6” X 15’ beams that I hauled up into the tree using ropes and pulleys, since I had nobody to help me, and that I secured to the tree with 60-penny nails.

Sixty-penny nails are six inches long and almost a quarter of an inch in diameter; technically, they are spikes. I got really good at driving nails. I learned how to hold the hammer near the end of the handle, and haul back like a major league baseball pitcher and let ‘r go, and I got to where I could drive a 60-penny nail in with two strokes, three maximum, the first to set the nail and the second, or third, sometimes, to drive it home. Before I got that good however, I smashed the you-know-what out of the end joint of my left little finger. Ever since then, it has been a little bit flattened-out and about half again as large as the end of my right little finger. Moreover, in the last few years I have developed a big ugly knot on the end joint of the left one.

I built the tree house floor out of Douglas fir, tongue-in-groove, 2” X 6” X 10’ planks. I got the wood from a retired and dismantled railroad caboose at a wrecking yard in Canutillo, New Mexico, located approximately 20 miles from where we lived. The tree house had one hundred square feet of floor space, ten feet by ten feet. I built side guardrails and benches around the inside, put up a roof, and also I built a window facing a telephone pole that stood out at the back end of my property, about 75 to 100 yards away, in slightly diagonal direction.

Then I built a sky-ride, as I called it then, but known as a zip-line nowadays, so I have been informed by my now-grownup children. I got enough ¼” steel cable to reach from the tree to the telephone pole. I attached one end of the cable to the tree, at a point about ten feet higher than the floor of the tree house. I attached the other end of the cable to the telephone pole, about six or eight feet off the ground.

Elaine’s sister, Jane, and my brother-in-law, Ricky, happened to be visiting on a weekend that I had planned to be working on the sky-ride, so I took Ricky with me to a local wrecking yard to look for some kind of wheel contraption suitable to install on the cable that would allow you to ride it down to the ground. After a couple of hours of searching, we found a slaughterhouse hook with a ball-bearing-swivel-pulley-wheel assembly, which henceforth I’ll just call the pulley. It was perfect. I immediately bought it and took it home and installed it on the cable.

Next, I attached a horizontal piece of pipe to the pulley to serve as a trapeze bar, and I made a string pull-back system, so that after you rode the cable down to the end, the next person in the tree house could pull the trapeze back up. Finally, I roto-tilled the ground near the telephone pole, from the pole back to about 20 feet up the line, so that when you rode the line down, you would have a soft landing. The more that you weighed, the farther out from the pole you touched down.

Neal and Glen really liked playing in the tree house and riding on the sky-ride. Neal would sometimes turn upside down and swivel round and round on the way down. Here he is in this picture.



Glen was not heavy enough or tall enough at that time to touch down on the dirt with his feet at the end of the line before he slammed into the telephone pole, so some of us in the neighborhood would stand a few feet in front of the pole and catch him, more-or-less softly, before he hit it.

I must have worked at least five hundred hours to build that tree house and sky-ride, and I was really glad they were such a success. I was so happy that my children liked it. I had put my heart and soul (and little bit of my left little finger) into building them, and I was very proud of the result. To tell the honest truth, I myself thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the tree house of an evening and riding the sky-ride down from time to time.

Neighborhood kids liked the sky-ride so much that I had to lock it up when I wasn’t around. In about 1977, I met a French engineer named Herve (pronounced kind of like Airvay), with whom I worked for a couple of years. Herve had three daughters, all under the age of ten or twelve I think. One weekend afternoon, Herve and his family came out to visit and have a cookout or something like that. Herve’s daughters immediately started lobbying him to let them ride the sky-ride. After awhile he agreed to it, and his girls and my boys proceeded to have a blast! I can’t recall if Herve himself rode the sky-ride, but I know I did.

In August of 1977, one of my nephews, Howe, and his mom, Vicki, one of my sisters-in-law, came out from Georgia to visit us. Naturally, we did some fun and touristy things. For example, we went to Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands, New Mexico, and we went to a bull fight in Juarez, Mexico. However, whenever we were at home – da dum – we rode the sky-ride!

Here is a picture of Howe about to jump out of the tree house window.



And, here he is going down:



Sometimes, Neal and Howe would both ride the sky-ride down together, as they are about to do in this photograph.



I think about that summer visit from time to time, and I wonder if Neal and Howe and Glen remember it the way I do. In early 1979, we had to move to Washington, D. C., and we had to sell the house (and the tree house!). By that time, Elaine and I had done a substantial amount of landscaping, and we had a slatted roof built over the patio that ran the whole length of the back of the house. This was the second time we had busted our butts for two or three years to landscape a home, only to have to move out right after we got it done. It kind of bummed us out, but at the time I believed that my career potential would improve significantly if I accepted the D. C. assignment. Having to leave the tree house behind especially stuck in my craw, though.

We lived in D. C. (actually, McLean, Virginia) for about three years, but after about two years there, I had to go back to El Paso on a business trip. When I got there, I couldn’t resist driving out to the Upper Valley for another look at the marvelous tree house and sky-ride that I had built and that the kids had universally loved. But when I drove by, I was stunned. I was so grossed out I almost ran off the road, because I saw that the people living there now had torn it all down! I was depressed and disappointed all the way home.