Location, Location, Location

Beneath the layers of aesthetic refinement built up by hours of reading Architectural Digest—reading it in wonderment in the privacy of my bedroom, as though it were porn, every page glossy with vicarious gratification—and, deeper still, beneath the pragmatism and bourgeois sensibility that years of homeownership have lent to my life, there exists a primeval part of me that really only wants to live in a tree house or a cave. A cave to call my home in the winter, and, for a summer place, a thatch-roofed platform nestled in the sturdy branches of a tree somewhere in an unknown forest.

The only running water in my tree house would be the rain falling through the interstices among the leaves and limbs and thatch above my head, along with the sap—like an unhurried guest taking a slow elevator—rising from the trunk downstairs. My rough-hewn timber floor would groan, I imagine, during a storm, but given that it snaps and creaks in placid sunlight anyway, I would see no reason to call in a contractor for consultation on the matter. And that’s the point. Living atop a tree, I would be out of the reach of repairmen and cable guys and mailmen, whose comings and goings do not, by and large, come free of charge.

The taxman, whose official notices often prove more costly than the postman’s two-ring visits, also would have no power or jurisdiction over me. His feudalistic stranglehold on my finances would end, for what conceivable assessed value could a tree house in the middle of nowhere have? Its address would be non-existent; its floor neither carpeted nor made of very hard wood; its bathrooms would consist of nothing but bare forest floor. Indeed, the price of the window treatments alone, in any house featured in Architectural Digest, would likely exceed the value of my arboreal abode, even counting the assets belonging to my myriad insect, avian, and reptilian neighbors.

Speaking of whom, how can any condominium association possibly beat having such neighbors as these? In the morning, the birds sing; at dusk, the crickets begin to chirp, and depending on the season and the vagaries of plate tectonics, frogs might belt out their nocturnal mating calls, or wolves howl, or chimpanzees might smash the furniture at another of their rowdy assemblies. There are no by-laws applicable to such behavior. Civilization is miles away, its nearest outpost a rusted cell tower entangled in ivy, like some long-forgotten Mayan temple.

Yes, my tree house would be as silent as a temple. It would not be disturbed even by the murmurings that sometimes hover over sacred sites. There would be no appliances to go kaput; no fixtures to adjust; no unusual noises to investigate; no controls of any kind whose unseen wiring might, for all one knows, lead serpentinely to CIA headquarters.

I realize that in pursuing—or, more precisely, in pokily trailing—this lifestyle, I am repressing the human predisposition to advance. If it had not been necessary to invent the wheel, or to draw symbols, or to harness steam from boiling water, civilization would never have been born, and technology would have remained at the level of sticks and stones, and I would not now be in this quandary. I have the human gene, and yet I seek to excise it. I possess it, and therefore despise it. Therein lies the dilemma, the drama, the damnable decision. “To bite,” Adam wondered, “or not to bite?” Hamlet asked, “To be, or not to be?” And Robert Frost, approaching a fork in a yellow wood, took the road less traveled by.

My choice? I choose not to plunge into this century’s maelstrom of materialism. I believe I have found my niche in society, my place in God’s creation, a balance between ego and amigo. Still, I can’t help wondering whether somewhere in the human gene there is a default setting for happiness.

St. Augustine thought so. A “God-shaped hole,” he believed, was the cause of human anxiety, and relief from that distress came in the Person of God. Other theologians had other opinions. They decided the solution was a God-shaped theology, and then their assistants and acolytes formed their own theses, and compiled newer commentaries, and invented rituals and liturgies and programs and visitor surveys, and before you know it, the church was empty, and young people were having hallucinations and dancing nude in the grass, and older folks, far from dreaming dreams, were bent over, insensate in their wheelchairs, and everyone forgot what the original question had been.

I think it had to do with a tree house.

I see myself recumbent in that tree house, a hemispheric husk for a pillow, watching a re-run of the moon (ah! it’s a crescent again), and nibbling on some deep-fried beetle larvae (great neighbors, and handy protein). From memory, I quote Basho:

Ah me! what a time
To rain—the night of Harvest Moon.
Oh, fickle northern clime!

Basho, too, had only a hut for a home, built on the banks of the Sumida River. It was a gift from one of the poet’s admirers. Unencumbered by a mortgage, Basho was able to embark on a literary pilgrimage across Japan, accompanied only by a disciple and a bagful of possessions. His lone home-improvement project, history records, was an imported banana plant installed and tended by him near his hut. In the shade of this plant, Basho sometimes composed his haiku, and sometimes napped. That was his home office, rigorously spare to the point of ethereality, reflecting Basho’s art and life.

I long to mimic his life and philosophy. And if he were alive today, and if my tree house were finished, I would invite Basho to drop by for a chat, some tea, and a line, or two, or three of poetry.

I would invite Jesus, too, He being ruler of the universe, and thus technically my landlord. God owns “the cattle on a thousand hills,” and the earth serves as His footstool. Chances are that I’m squatting on His property. He charges me no rent, and desires only my obedience. He endowed me with free will, with which, suicidally, I could refuse to obey Him.

Jesus would arrive at my doorstep, if I had a doorstep, clad in sandals and a simple robe. The same God whose power is “throughout the universe displayed” had, at some point in His career, “nowhere to lay His head.” I’d offer Him week-old bread and some stale wine, I suppose, along with some freshly gathered figs, and I’d start out the conversation by observing, “Lord, you could have come cloaked in glory, amid lightning and thunder, with clouds parting before you, and all of nature, even the rocks and stones, bending its knees in your presence. Yet you come humbly, like a backpacker.” And Jesus would say, as though delivering the punch line of a parable, “Your place doesn’t look big enough for a host of angels to party in.” And I’d smile, appreciative of the divine wit, and fearful of boils spontaneously erupting from my skin. “Care to try some tea?” I’d ask, knowing full well that green tea does not complement red wine. And then, turning to Basho, I would make the necessary introductions.

But of course all this is diaphanous, dead-end daydreaming, carried out in my tree house during that empty but fertile time between the birds’ singing and the crickets’ chirping. Thoughts and feelings waft in my head, as though stirred by the only ventilation available in my habitat—the ventilation offered by unforced, unhindered, unfiltered air.

Daydreaming isn’t all bad. It is the currency of youth; it is what poets do when they are not transcribing their visions; what inventors engage in between manic calculations and diagramming. Daydreaming is not indolence. On the contrary, it is essential to the health of the human psyche. It beats fixing a leaky faucet, that’s for damn sure.

I like to daydream. I wish I could do it all day long. I understand that eventually, depending on what I’m daydreaming about, I would have to write that novel, or climb that corporate ladder, or seduce that shapely woman, in order to bring my imaginings to some meaningful fruition. Done in the confines of a tree house, however, daydreaming need not be coupled to the noisy locomotive of action. It need not, as it were, ever leave the station, for otherwise half the train would find itself dangling absurdly from a tree house.

In my tree house, youth ceases even to be a memory, having been erased by the timelessness of homogeneous moments. In my tree house, the first drafts of inspiration and their associations constitute the sum of my quotidian poetry. The enterprise of invention is reduced to starting a decent fire that day. Mankind, in me, will have come full circle: the utility and sanctity of fire discovered anew; the foliage of trees serving once more as sleeping quarters; the clock de-constructed.

Daydreaming—as Archibald MacLeish would have suggested, had he had a tree house of his own—“should not mean, but be.”

“Amen to that, brother!” I can hear Basho exclaiming in response, he being made suddenly evangelical in speech, if not in spirit, by his social interaction with Christ. (Green tea and red wine, a potent brew; who knew?)

After I have made my fire, and had breakfast, I would clamber out of my tree house, and traipse into the woods to collect berries and mushrooms, and to check my nets in the river for any trapped and bewildered fish. Afterwards, I would hunt for small mammals to cook for dinner. In my excursions, I would scoop up, or break off, whatever handfuls of honey, or grubs, or succulent blossoms, or medicinal bark, or discarded popcorn I might espy. This would make up my work day, lasting till noon, hours occupied with activities aimed at simple survival. I would be a latter-day Dick Proenneke, he of public television fame, a wiry fifty-something individualist who built his own cabin by a lake in the Alaskan wilderness, and who lived there alone, with no more than his guileless resourcefulness and unflagging stamina to keep him alive, and vital, and fully functioning for another thirty years.

After lunch, I would slip into a different persona, turning into an iconoclast modeled after Andy Goldsworthy, the naturalistic artist celebrated in the documentary Rivers and Tides. Mr. Goldsworthy is noted for making ephemeral constructions out of elements of nature: dirt and gravel, ice and water, plant matter and wind and such. He is an accomplished artist, unique in his perceptions, and painstaking in his technique. I, during the afternoon, could emulate him by lying on my back, and humming a shamanistic tune, thereby adding a new acoustic element to the range of trills and chirps and buzzing emanating from the woods. My musical collaborators would be my captive audience as well. It would be an original and expedient project, utterly spontaneous, requiring no commission or governmental patronage. It’s perfect for me.

That done, and following a dinner of stewed squirrel, I would climb back up to my tree house, swaying on the rope ladder, my do-it-yourself umbilical cord, and prepare for a night of regular R.E.M. dreaming, something any old Joe can do.

But in fact, unlike Joe Proenneke—unlike Robinson Crusoe—unlike, let’s face it, half the retired men on my block—I have no carpentry skills, no hunting or fishing or trapping or gardening experience, no knowledge of herbal medicine or first aid, and, I must confess, no particular fondness for squirrel meat either. True, I can stir-fry almost anything, and I have two decades’ worth of lawn-mowing under my belt. But something tells me those competencies don’t qualify me to be a rugged mountain man, or even an effete mountain man.

I suppose I shall simply have to starve after spending one winter on my own in the wild, suffering the same fate as Christopher McCandless, who in 1990 cursed the world’s capitalistic ways, and braved the Alaskan wilderness, as Proenneke had done. McCandless perished from food poisoning, and died in an abandoned bus, in the shadow of nature’s frozen cornucopia.

In the fall, as my tree house sheds its leafy curtains and loses its natural, biodegradable, “green” wall insulation, I would close it up, a procedure taking all of two seconds. One Mississippi, two Mississippi. No thermostat to turn down, no valves to shut, no pipes to drain, no doors to lock, no mail to hold at the post office. Taking my bowls and bedding, I would head off to my winter habitation ten miles away—to a cave in a hidden valley.

The cave’s selling point is that it’s warmer and drier than a palletful of snow stuck high in a tree. One does lose one’s view of the mountains. It’s a trade-off, like everything else. Rivulets of spring-fed water are the only plumbing in the cave. From the ceiling hang no stalactites. The previous owner might have taken those down, to achieve a more neutral look. My cave, I must say, is neutral in the extreme. Its location, though, is perfect. The cave arches right over where I wish alternately to sleep and daydream through the eventless winter.

My cave resembles Kubla Khan’s “stately pleasure dome” only in the fact that it is structurally a dome—an earth-friendly, carbon-neutral, bat-infested dome. And the other good thing is that I may as well be in Xanadu, what with my shelter being a cavern “measureless,” for all intents and purposes, “to man.”

By “measureless,” I mean unplugged in every way. There is no Internet connection in my cave. There is no connection of any kind to the outside world. I am resigned to dying in here. In two seconds—one Mississippi, two Mississippi—this cave converts into a crypt.

But before I die, I revel in my freedom. I have no bills to pay; no subscriptions to renew; no calls to return; no emails to check and delete; no pets or family to feed; no junk mail to throw away (some junk mail would’ve been nice—kindling for a little fire); no prescriptions to refill; no RSVP’s to send out, ever, or Christmas cards, or tax returns, or rebate applications. I am entirely liberated. I am Rousseau’s Noble Savage; I have no passwords to remember. I squat here in the dark, beside my fire, and I study the shadows thrown up on the cave wall, and I think of Platonic forms, and the Eternal Idea, and I must say, I have downsized. I have simplified. Thoreau is here with me, and in the spring (if there is a spring) Walt Whitman will come for a visit, beard like down feathers, singing his singular pronouns. But until then, I meditate. The illumination is bad in here, as though a single compact fluorescent lamp were hanging from a truncated stalactite. The Lascaux cave paintings would look too modern around here, for in these premises dwells a wizened philosopher, and the exclusive objects of his scrutiny and contemplation are ideal forms and everlasting notions: life, death, love, pain, what makes a chair a chair.

I think (cogito)…speaking of pain and a chair, that I may be getting a toothache. Death I can handle. Death is its own anesthesia. But a toothache is a pain in the butt. (I agree—very few dentists, if it came to it, would care to lean that far and low to drill.) I’m speaking metaphorically, for Christ’s sake! A toothache, if nothing else, is literal. O dread adjective! O inescapable cavity! This is the worst possible diagnosis—a toothache aggravated by stark reality; for the difference between “Pain” and a toothache is the difference between a professional philosopher and a patient without an appointment.

TOOTH!

ACHE!

No echo. This cave’s a fantasy. I must just be daydreaming.
Thank God I have dental insurance.