Tag: CaliforniaOregon

Had a year without travel atrophied my common sense? Had I lost my mind?

Like many parents, I’ve spent much of the last year trapped inside reading the same children’s books again and again. The AirBnB listing for Out ‘n’ About Treehouse Treesort — just north of the California border, outside the small town of Cave Junction, Oregon — showed a network of narrow wooden suspension bridges connected by standalone platforms and tree-borne cabins with mossy roofs. The scene looked stolen from the pages of “The Berenstain Bears,” “Winnie-the-Pooh” or “Peter Pan.” Nearly a year into the pandemic, when so many of our adventures have been foreclosed, these books have been a reminder — not only for my five- and two-year-old, but for me — that the big, strange world is still there, full of magic and absurdity, waiting for us.

When I booked our reservation, it seemed like a near perfect solution to an impossible problem. After 11 months of a personal “no leisure travel during a pandemic” policy, my mom — the notorious Grandma Maria — had been vaccinated (miraculously and to my great relief). She was desperate to visit her grandchildren. Disabled and living alone in Ashland, six hours north of our East Bay home, mom had seen them just once in over a year — or nearly half of my two-year-old son’s life, as she was quick to point out, not pulling any nonna punches. Like all of us laymen Anthony Faucis, I struggled with the ethical, and epidemiological, calculus of the trip. Could we visit my newly vaccinated mother? And, if so, could we do it in a way that brought some much-needed joy without being entitled, reckless jerks?

The goal was simple: to eliminate as much contact as possible, just as we do at home. Flights were out and we limited our accommodation search to standalone cabins where we wouldn’t need to share hallways or elevators with strangers. Food would be groceries from our cooler and the occasional take-out. I would double mask and tip well.

With names like Pleasantree, Magistree, Peacock Perch, Treezeebo and the Tree Room Suite, the Treesort felt like a novelty for novel times. How better to social distance than to hang out in a tree, take muddy walks on new-to-us trails, and gorge ourselves on takeout from Taylor’s Sausage Country Store? A staple of children’s literature, tree houses (and their inhabitants: animals who walk upright and wear human clothing or mystical, winged, wand-wielding humanoids) seem to represent a place where nature and civilization meet. And this year, more than any other, has made me hyper aware of that intersection. Both its beauty and its danger.

So I booked the tree house and over the hills and through the woods, to grandmother we went.

But I started to question my choices even before we arrived. The convoluted directions to the Treesort took us past fields of abandoned cars and expansive backyard junkyards. There were the characteristic high fences, jacked up pickups and barely concealed hoop houses of shady cannabis cultivation, plus organic frog farms and burl sculpture studios. “GMO Free Zone” banners stood tall along the same stretch of two-lane highway as “Stop BLM” and “Farmers for Trump” signs. At one point, I attempted to count the “State of Jefferson” slogans emblazoned across barns and fences in this corner of conflicted America. But I almost immediately lost track; they were everywhere.

A messy mix of luxurious ranch homes and falling down farmhouses, funky hippie houses and the McMansions of California expats, the area, like much of deep Northern California and southern Oregon, has a split personality. It’s largely charming, but also a bit unsettling — especially in the driving rain of a frigid February day.

So when I found myself shivering in the canopy of Douglas fir on a creaking staircase with a small child clinging to my arm, I wondered if my preoccupation with being COVID-19-cautious had led me to being wildly foolish in every other way. As emo as it may sound, it was as if so much of my mental energy had been devoted to analyzing how to live day to day during a pandemic that I’d forgotten that there were other things in the world that could kill us.

The tree house roofs are covered with a bright green moss and pine needles. The bridges bounce like a floor in an ultra taut trampoline. There are horses (and horseback riding), angry llamas, wacky little parades of wild turkeys, a swim pond for the summer months, and fire pits for making s’mores. Oregon Caves National Monument and Preserve is nearby, as is the Oregon Vortex, the Trees of Mystery and plenty more of the very particular weirdness of this part of the world. It is, broadly, the place I grew up, but the specific oddity of this region has become more apparent to me the longer I have lived outside of it.

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Michael Garnier, the visionary behind the Treesort, is the kind of quixotic the area attracts. Born outside Gary, Indiana, he said he fled “as soon as I was able and ‘went west, young man.’” He went to Michigan state, studied engineering, dropped out and was drafted into the Green Berets as a special forces medic. Eventually, he found his way to the Josephine Valley and Takilma. He bought his property for $7,000. “I just knew it was for me — it was home,” he said.

“It goes all the way back to when I was in the service and doing LSD and wondering if the world was going to end,” he explained. “If there was a nuclear fallout, one of the safest places to be would be here.”

After he built his first tree house in 1990, Garnier was featured on the cover of the author Peter Nelson’s first book, “Treehouses: The Art and Craft of Living Out on a Limb,” which helped to spearhead what has become an international tree house movement. And as Garnier built more and more tree houses on his Takilma homestead, he began to turn his on-the-side passion project into a business. But even in this wild west, the regulatory authorities weren’t generous to his vision. It took eight years for Garnier’s tree house hotel to secure a tourism permit, which allowed him to host overnight guests.

At the time, he knew of only a few tree houses anywhere in the world where paid guests could stay — one in Hawaii and a lodge in Kenya where safari tourists looked out over a wildlife watering hole. (Famously, Queen Elizabeth II was on vacation there when her father died, turning her from a princess to a queen overnight.) In the years since, tree houses have become so popular, AirBnB has an entire category of “Unique Stays” devoted to these oddball accommodations.

Garnier hosts an annual tree house convention at the Treesort and sells tree house components to people who want to build their own. “I help hundreds of people a year build them now,” he said.

Among those who have learned from Garnier over the years is Dustin Feider, the founder of Oakland-based O2, a custom tree house company, and Treewalkers, a franchise-based “tree house hospitality brand.” Feider got his start building tree houses for a living after he attended one of Garnier’s conferences. “He’s the OG in the tree house world,” said Feider, who is 38 and from Wisconsin.

Feider compared the conferences to an “elven meetup” where attendees climb trees, ride zip lines and party.

O2’s tree houses are less house-like than Garnier’s. Instead, they’re shaped like geodesic orbs, hanging pinecones and teardrop-shaped bird feeders. “My first tree house was totally bizarro, like a spaceship crashed in a tree,” said Feider.

When I ask why humans are drawn to tree houses, it’s clear Feider has spent some time reflecting on the subject. “There’s a process, a journey to get up into them, kind of like a road trip — that moment when you’re pulling out of your driveway. ‘Haha, I’m getting away from everyone.” I flashed back to our arrival at the Treesort, looking up at its web of stairs, ladders and suspension walkways, and how giddy it had made me feel.

He added: “There’s probably also something to be said about our human monkey brains, something primordial about height being a place of safety—that it’s written into our DNA that getting somewhere high,” like Queen Elizabeth in Kenya, “gets you away from carnivores on the ground while you sleep.”

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We had two nights in our tree house. The rain dumped in what felt like buckets through most of our stay, which made the small space feel impossibly tiny for a family of four. The cabin was wrapped around the exposed trunk of a Douglas fir and water dripped down the tree’s craggly bark, blending in with the shiny globs of sap I’d warned the kids not to touch. I don’t know what I’d expected, but for $250 a night, I was surprised at how rustic Pleasantree was.

When we arrived, Roxie climbed to the second story, where my husband Tim and I were to sleep, and excitedly said, “It’s like camping, Mama!” The loft, which had a double mattress on the floor, was just a crawl space. And because of the slant of the roof, the person on the outside, my poor husband, was wedged into a 45-degree corner with a 4-by-4 beam inches from his nose.

But Pleasantree had heat to warm us against the 37-degree temperatures and a large window that looked out onto the bright green leaves and slick red bark of madrone and across to the zipline and disc golf course. The air smelled of woodfire, and a black-and-white acorn woodpecker entertained us with its cheerful hop.

For the kids, there were bunk beds, which I’d thought would delight Roxie, but she’d apparently had enough of the novelty of getting up high and insisted on staying down below with her brother. That turned out to be for the best. On our first night, Tim and I awoke to find her in the loft, at the foot of our bed. She’d gotten scared, climbed the 10-foot, vertical ladder in the dark and was just plopped there, staring at us, silent so as not to wake her brother, Felix.

The next day, Mom joined us. I rented the cabin just beneath our tree house (she wouldn’t have been able to climb the four flights of stairs to one of her own). And though it cost nearly half of what we’d paid for our tiny perch in the trees, it was big, with a kitchenette, a fireplace and a barbecue on the porch, where we roasted marshmallows for s’mores. Charming and comfortable, Mom’s cabin made me appreciate the way the tree house made me feel, the aliveness of it, the mysticism, even the fear.

“I always thought tree houses offer this inherent separation,” Feider told me later. “Getting up high creates a reverence and a sacredness of the space you end up in.” Had I heard him talking like this at a party, I would have thought he was, well, high. Instead, I understood exactly what he meant.

“A house in a tree seems impractical,” added Feider, “so you end up in a place where it’s okay to create fantastically, to be creative — to let those aspirational parts of life take hold.” And, of course, the aspirational parts of life were what I’d been missing these last many months, when every day had felt so much the same and the future was so obscured.

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Doing our best to avoid swapping air with strangers, we brought an ice chest of groceries and ordered takeout when we wanted a hot meal. Perhaps because of the weather, the place wasn’t busy the week of our visit, but nearly everyone there were families with school-aged kids, including a small group celebrating the seventh birthday of a girl who wore a pink gown and a rainbow unicorn horn as she traipsed through the mud.

That morning, when I retrieved breakfast — homemade berry rolls and sausage-and-egg sandwiches to go, served through a window at the Treesort’s main lodge — the server commented on how many guests they’d had. “Because kids are out of school, and we have Wi-Fi, people are coming and staying and doing their remote schooling from here,” she told me from behind a mask.

Feider’s O2 has experienced this same surge of interest in the past year. His sales have doubled since last March. Pandemic aside, Feider thinks the increasing appeal of tree houses can be attributed as much to a longer-term cultural shift among adults as to children’s enduring love of them. “We’re in a much different time than we were 30 or 60 years ago, said Fieder. “The abstract is the norm now. Welcome to postmodernism.”

“There’s this notion to be different, to be seen,” Fieder said. “Adults are punk rock — they’re like, ‘F—k yeah, we’re gonna live in a tree house.”

Tree houses, he said, “are punk as f—k.”