Rattle dem bones

When I was in elementary school, we decided that what we really needed was a treehouse. Between Calvin & Hobbes comics, the treehouse we found near Bryan Brown's house, and the successful hours of fun we'd gleaned from playing in ground level forts in the desert, treehouse fever hit the Wharton household and we decided to make a go of it. Matt and I started with an abundance of enthusiasm for the project, but what we had in motivation, we lacked in lumber. This situation led to the dubious realization that the best source of treehouse-worthy wood would be another treehouse. And there happened to be just one such structure out in the desert. We staked it out and deemed it abandoned, and instead of just playing in it ourselves, we decided to take the wood so we could build a treehouse in our own yard. And so it was that Matt, Bryan Brown, Eric Schaumberg and I set off into the desert with hammers in hand.

We set about dismantling the tree house from the top down, stacking the wood at the base of the tree. We'd nearly taken the entire thing down, with only the enormous board that made up the floor left to go. It was at this point that Logan, a high school boy who had always been something of an intimidating figure to us burst out of the door of the house at the top of the wash.

"Hey! Get away from our treehouse!!!"

In a panic, Bryan knocked out the last supporting strut and the floor of the treehouse came crashing down. I tumbled out of the tree into the rocks below, and Eric jumped and found himself hanging from a branch high in the air. Logan had run back into the house and now came barreling out, brandishing a BB gun. Eric dropped from the tree, and the four of us scrambled about, gathering as much wood as we possibly could under our arms. In what felt as intense as any movie adventure we'd imagined ourselves in, with BBs whizzing by and thwacking into our stacks of wood, we finally grabbed up the floor plank and, using it as a shield, dashed off into the desert. We either lost him in the wash or he gave up the chase, but we collapsed behind our house in a pile of wood, thrilled and frightened and alive.

Only in the days after that did we realize that neither of the two trees we had hoped to use were particularly well suited for a treehouse, and after a halfhearted attempt at building one (resulting in more of an art piece with a rope swing than any sort of shelter) we ended up with a pile of rotting wood behind our house.


This last Saturday night, Adam and I went for a walk around Greenpoint. Since he's new to the area, we made a quick survey of a few of my favorite places in the neighborhood, and no such tour would be complete without a trip to the old decaying dock on the East River. It's a nice place to go and explore, or watch the sunset over the city, or just to sit and think. But since I decided to take him over there at ten o'clock at night and the walk over there leads through an unlit alley decorated generously with graffiti, and since there was an ambulance parked at the end of the alley, he was understandably a bit nervous. I'd been out there enough to enjoy how creepy it was and was a little dismissive of his concerns. Then he interrupted whatever conversation we were having to point out something I hadn't seen before.

"Is that a skeleton?"

And sure enough, hanging from a structure of twisted metal, with a rope around its neck and illuminated by the headlights of an unattended ambulance, was a full-sized human skeleton.


We stayed a bit longer, enjoying the macabre little scene, and then went back to Adam's for ice cream and Nintendo. The next day, I told Tom about the skeleton and went back in the evening to take some pictures. The following day, Tom was going to head out and grab some photos himself when he peeked in my room before heading out the door.

"If that skeleton is still down there, I'm going to bring it back."

I don't know if he was asking for permission or for an accomplice, but I offered my help and hopped up to go with him. As we strolled down to the water, I felt my reservations melting away, and while I didn't realize it at the time, the thrill I was tasting on the tip of my tongue was the same flavor as when we made our treehouse raid.


Since neither Tom nor I had brought a knife, Tom used a piece of glass from a broken bottle to saw through the rope holding up the skeleton, cutting his finger in the process. He clambered back down the beam and passed me the skeleton. We walked back home, as casually as two men can walk down the street holding a human skeleton under their arm. Since Tom had done the climb and the cutting, I carried the thing back to our house, hoping to earn with sweat what he'd paid in blood. We both kept looking around to see if any of the surprise in the eyes of the people we passed would curdle into suspicion or recognition, prepared to make a break for it. I started deciding whether I'd be willing to drop the skeleton and run, or if I'd be able to hold onto the skeleton as if it were treehouse lumber.

As we were walking, discussing the ethical and artistic ramifications of what we'd done to the dock, we hit upon a solution that seemed appropriate. Once we got the skeleton back in our house, Tom took a couple of photos of it comfortable in its new environs.



Today, we printed out two of the photos, put them in a beautiful bottle, sealed the bottle with a candle, and headed back out to the river. We clambered back out onto the collapsed beams and hung the bottle with some twine at the same place the skeleton had been.



If it's former owners come looking for it hopefully they'll be satisfied that it has found a home where it belongs. For other visitors to the dock, perhaps a bottle isn't as instantly and ghoulishly satisfying as a hanging skeleton, but for those that take the time to look there still one more thing to be found out there.

And after spending all day itching to get that bottle out there, I feel satisfied tonight that there's no pile of rotting wood left from this adventure.