Climbing the Trees

Here's the view, or something close to it, from "Site B," We will give each of the tree houses local Native American names eventually, like Mattawaska, which means where two rivers meet. In the distance of this photo, just beyond the speck of Crow Island, the Kennebec and the Back River come together and head off towards Popham Beach and the blue ocean world beyond. Climbing theses trees to snap this shot was an expansive and welcome diversion from my shop space across the river. If you could pan this photo a few (at arm's length) inches to the right, you could see my father's boat yard at the tip of the peninsula pinning the south westerly bend of the Back River. Here the tide rips through the ledgy narrows at five knots and the water rises or falls between ten and fifteen feet every six hours and eighteen minutes. And here, in the middle bay of the boat shop my father constructed here some forty years ago, with a foundation dug by hand (and ledge blasted with dynamite you could buy down the road), the boots-on-the-ground practical side of our dream began.

In January, my wife Ida and I started into a five weeks journey of discarding and organizing the junk that seems to cling to some invisible magnet around this and every boat shop. We pitched and hemmed, exhaled and hawed, tossing, lifting, stacking. We insulated and lit, and powered up, and tore and pieced, bitched and laughed and jammed to good tune the whole while, and ended up with a massive usable shop space, heatable and loveable. Our first project was a six weeks sprint of renovating our vintage camper that we'll live in thie summer, a 1958ish Spartan Royal Manor. You can read about that here: spartanrebuild.blogspot.com  Here she is rolling out to make space for the tree house operation:

And, it's a shop with a view, at least with the doors open.

It's amazing how fast a structure can come together in an enclosed space with all the right tools, especially one that's only 12 by 12.

An honorable mention to our younger brother Stig and his ballerina nail gun moves.

More to come. For now, the sun is creeping down the trees towards the horses in the pasture to the west. If you look west in the morning, the sun comes down, not up, and today it hits the pasture at 6:35 am. I've been here writing, if you can believe it, more than a half hour now, and will have just the right twenty minutes or so to make some Scottish oatmeal on the stove, fill my belly with its warmth and sustenance, and be in the shop by seven, living and working out my visions.