The King of the Neighborhood

My job affords me plenty of windshield time.  I pray.  I listen to four different podcasts that I follow, ranging from Outdoors issues, Biblical Worldview, Current events, and History.  I was driving to my first stop to a community in north Allen Parish at around 8 am last week and was almost to my destination when I observed something that made me stop my vehicle in the middle of the road, get out and admire someone's handiwork.  Take a look at this!:

What you are looking at is a four-story kid's playhouse.  It as an engineering marvel that rivals that of the Egyptian pyramids.  This man LOVED his kids.  I can imagine him dreaming up the idea of this playhouse, drafting the rough drawings on a legal pad and smiling to himself as he thought of how happy his kids were going to be when done.  His wife probably quizzed him about safety precautions and the inherent danger of a project of this magnitude.  Were building permits obtained?  Did it pass inspection?  So many questions...

This construction must have taken hours to build and quite a sizeable investment in lumber and materials.  You may be saying to yourself, "Meh, it's pretty cool, I guess, but what's so great about it?"  I would agree with you, except you may be missing the cherry on top of the milkshake.  If you look to the right of the photo below, there is a large pipe running downward diagonally.  That is a long pipe slide ending up in a swimming pool in this family's back yard!

Can you imagine how many times the owner's kid and those in the neighborhood climbed those stairs, slid down the slide and plunged into the pool at breakneck speed?  I mean, this is better than an amusement park.  I bet the Dad was proud of this accomplishment when he had completed this 8th wonder of the world.  This no doubt scored him "Coolest dad of the year award," for sure.

I'm sure it also earned him dirty looks from all the neighborhood dads as their backyard treehouse/jungle gyms suddenly looked small, puny, insignificant and insufficient in comparison.  Their kids quickly ignored their fort in the backyard while they flocked to the Six Flags over Oakdale Flume Ride that just opened next door.  Why an enterprising youth might have sold admission tickets for this adventure.

I spoke to someone in the community who told me the playhouse has since been condemned by the city.  You can note a marked lean to the top story house.  I'm not sure it is OSHA or Underwriter's Laboratories approved, but man, this thing is a testament to ingenuity and a man's desire to make his kids happy.  It now sits precariously abandoned and unused, but back in the day this was the cat's meow, the icing on top of the cake.

As I drove home, it made me remember our treehouse that gave the kids hours of backyard fun.  It was nothing like the Taj Mahal of treehouses we saw above, but we had fun with it.  As sands pass through the hour glass, people and things age and fall apart.  Our tree house certainly did, but you can get an idea of it's former glory.  The stump below was the tree that had a deck that ran all the way around it.  There was a ladder with a trap door and a pulley and rope from which to pull up buckets of toys, food or whatever you wanted to pull up.  Many Air Soft wars were waged from that tree house.

My dad helped me build it for the kids.  The coolest thing about it was it had a long zip line that ran from the south side of the tree down to the far end, running beneath the cool shade of some pecan trees and ending against the goat barn that has an American Flag painted on it.

Looking at it from the bottom of the zip line, you can see the stump of the treehouse tree in the distance.  You can see the cable of the zip line and the horizontal base support was a repurposed 2x4 metal tubing from an old John Deere disk.  The treehouse tree as well as the tree at the base were water oak trees that have since died.  I will be cutting up the logs and splitting them for firewood in the upcoming weeks.

Here is the handle for the zipline with a pulley the fits on the cable.  The handle was made by a local welder from some scrap.  I purchased that pulley from Jenkin's Hardware in Oberlin.  It's now closed, but I think about how cool that store was right there on Main Street by the court house.  It had everything you'd need for a project like this.  The kids would fly down that zip line and end up right where I'm standing taking this photo.  Then they would grab the yellow rope tied to the handle and pull it all the way back to the top and ride it down again.  Over and over and over again.

The trees have died, the kids have grown up and moved away, but the memories remain.  If I stand real still and listen real hard, in my mind's eye, I can hear the whirring noise of the pulley turning on the tightened cable and hear the laughing of my kids as they enjoyed the thrill of backyard fun.  I'd wager you had a treehouse that makes you smile right now if you think about it.

The Red Oak Borer Strikes Again!

There was a telltale sign sitting at the base of the big water oak tree in the pasture.  A big branch had broken off and fallen to the ground.

I looked up and saw more limbs without leaves on them!  Water oak trees without leaves in the middle of summer is a bad sign.

Looking over the canopy of the tree, there were leaves, but they were turning brown.  Not a good sign at all.

I walked around the tree and could see bark falling off the big tree in big sheets.  This tree is not dying.  It's dead.

At the very base of the tree, I could see holes.  This is evidence like you would find at a crime scene.  The holes are the fingerprint of the killer.  The borer beetle!  He strikes again.  He's killed several trees in our side pasture.

To give you an idea of the size of this tree, it measures 3 feet across.

This tree has some sentimental value.  Seventeen years ago when we moved into this house, we built a tree house around the tree using the wood from a pine tree from mom & dad's house that had been struck by lightning.  We fastened a cable around the tree about 15 feet up.  You can see that the tree has grown around the cable in places.

The cable runs down in a southward direction toward the barn.

It meets a horizontal crossbeam and there is a pulley and a handle that is our zip line.  Our kids, their friends and the neighbor kids have spent countless hours playing on the zip line, laughing, screaming, and enjoying themselves.

Here is a look from the bottom of the zip line back up to the dead tree.

The tree at the bottom of the zip line has completely grown around the landscape timber crossbeam behind the tubing of an old John Deere plow.

I'll have to call someone to take this tree down.  It is just too large for us to try to do it ourselves.  Bringing it down will be a sad time in many ways as I'll think about all the good times had under the shade of that old tree.  We'll get a lot of firewood from the tree, but we already have a pretty good inventory of firewood thanks to the work of the borer beetle on other water oaks we had!

Looking on the bright side, we were looking for a place to plant our Anniversary Live Oak.  I told Tricia when we take the old water oak down, we'll plant our Anniversary Live Oak right near where the old water oak stood.  Perhaps it can provide shade and fun for our future grandchildren and great-grandchildren one day.

The Incredible Growth of the Water Oak Tree

It wasn't but a couple of years after we moved into our home in 2001 that we erected a zip line in the back yard for the kids.  The picture below shows the zip line from the bottom looking up toward the top.  You can see the handle hanging from a pulley on the cable.  When we originally built it, there was a tree house at the top that you catapulted yourself out of.  The neighbor kids still come over and ride it.  It has provided many smiles over the years.  You can read the First post about the zip line by clicking that underlined hyperlink.

The brace that supports the bottom of the zip line is a piece of steel tubing that was once part of a John Deere Vibra Shank - a farm implement that was in the scrap iron pile and was re-purposed from a work function to one of recreation.

That piece of steel tubing was nailed into a landscape timber with 6 inch nails.  It was anchored into the tree pretty good as it needed to be to support the weight of those children (and adults) who ventured to zip down the zip line.  Over the years the water oak tree has almost completely grown over the landscape timber, only leaving a small portion that it hasn't completely devoured!  It is now working on enveloping the steel tubing.

Here is a little closer look.  I guess this should serve as motivation to us all to keep moving or life will pass you by or grow over you!  It always interests me to see how trees have grown over fences, benches, signs, etc.

Here is a different angle looking at it from the front that shows the portion of landscape timber that hasn't been eaten by the tree.

While one side is anchored to a living water oak tree, the other side is bolted into a portion of an old telephone pole.

Although the kids that once rode the zip line have mostly grown up, the portion of the zip line that remains that hasn't been 'eaten' by the water oak tree stands as a testimony of the fun and joy of childhood and a reminder that time marches on.