Chapter 4

END COMMERCIAL BREAK #3

Pete and Devin stood atop a temporary platform which allowed them to look down through the hollow. The men smiled as they saw water draining away.

Pete’s cell phone rang. As Pete answered it, Devin got a knowing look on his face.

“Hello?” Pete answered. “Yes, this is Pete Nelson. Yes, Nelson Treehouse and Supply. Your treehouse ... hurting the tree? The side of a cliff!? Uh, yeah, that’s not something I’ve come across before.”

The head of NTAS glanced around the work-site.

“Um, yeah, I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

Pete hung up and looked at Devin, a bit of a guilty look on his face.

“This treehouse is dangling over a cliff,” he explained. “And the guy’s worried that he’s injuring the trees...”

“Go feed your addiction Pete,” Devin laughed. “We’re nearly finished here anyway.”

“You sure you’ll be OK?” Pete asked. He didn’t give Devin time to answer. “Thanks, man. It’s over the side of a cliff ... I ... thanks.”

The trip from Tupelo, Mississippi to the Chickasaw Bluffs near Memphis, Tennessee is not a long trip, as interstate travel goes, but Pete was confident that Animal Planet would include their animated map yet again. Why a show about treehouses was on ANIMAL Planet he wasn’t sure, but he felt it would be undiplomatic to ask.

It wasn’t long after Pete arrived in the small town outside Memphis that he arrived at the property he was looking for; everybody in town knew about the Cliffside Treehouse. In less than half an hour he was shaking hands with a man who had no mustache but did have a beard which would have reached his chest had it not been braided down the middle.

“Hi. I’m Pete Nelson,” the Treehouse Man introduced himself. “Are you Karl Altmann?”

“I am,” the bearded man answered, as if there had been much doubt. “It’s good to meet you.”

The two men walked to the top of the hill where a huge oak and an equally impressive black walnut tree grew horizontally out from the cliff face, hanging sixty feet or more over the creek below. After fifteen feet or more of horizontal growth the trees started to bend gently skyward. Thick ropes stretched between the trunks held a bridge which led to the treehouse itself, at least twenty feet out from the cliff face and at least six feet higher than the top of the hill.

Pete could hardly contain himself. “Oh my ... this is just amazing!”

“About a hundred years ago,” Karl explained, grinning with pride, “these trees were little more than saplings, and a landslide almost took them off the face altogether, but they were rooted just deep enough that they ended up sticking out sideways like this. They continued to grow, and now you have this. I had an arborist check them out before I built...”

“I should think so,” Pete interjected. Every treehouse depended on its tree, but if one of these uprooted, it was a sixty foot drop and the tree might land on top of you, roots and all.

“He told me they were rock steady,” Karl continued as if there had been no interruption. “He said I could dangle an elephant off the end of them and they’d stay put.”

Pete wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “An elephant!?”

Karl chucked at that. “Well, he did say that one elephant per tree would be pushing things, but this treehouse weighs less than one elephant, and it’s shared between them.”

Pete looked at the trees up close, checking out the roots, the thick trunks and finally he examined the heavy ropes which supported the bridge.

“I can see what your problem is,” Pete told Karl. “The trees are still growing, but the construction hasn’t left them any room to expand. The trees are being choked.”

The bearded man nodded ruefully.

“There’s several places in the treehouse itself where the same thing is happening,” he admitted. “If I were building it today I’d do things differently, but eight years ago I didn’t know any better. What I still don’t know is how to save the trees without destroying the treehouse.”