Thoughts Have Hands

A Tree House Retreat


Do you remember your childhood retreat?
We called it our fort, the three of us: my younger brother, a neighbor from across the street and me. The first incarnation was a cave like structure in my backyard made of found wood braced against a stone wall under a large bush. We would sit there shielded from prying eyes and plot adventures.

But we longed for a real treehouse. We prevailed on my reluctant father to help. I think we played on his desire to show us he could build something substantial.

So one spring around 1956 or 57 my brother and I assisted our father assemble a little getaway. A dream come true. We built it behind our garage which was sufficiently distant from the house to provide boyhood seclusion. Picture a two by four frame with flooring supported on two four by four posts soaring sixteen or so feet high. We cemented footers for the posts and nailed together the frame between the posts and the back of the garage for support. We put in a trap door above one post with a home made ladder. The siding went up five feet and gave us a tiny room just big enough for the three of us to sleep out in the summer. The back of the fort opened to the shingle roof of the garage. We often climbed the ladder and crawled out on the roof Friday and Saturday nights to talk about possibilities and speculate on prospects. Of course, we had our stash of tobacco to puff and when we couldn’t secure the real thing we’d ride bikes down to the woods and pick rabbit tobacco. We loved to read playboy magazines, maybe read is an over statement. But we had a stack of them. For girls were the unreachable object of our fantasies. No one was allowed to enter this boyhood sanctum but other boys we approved and ironically, absolutely no girls.

For three or four summers as we rolled toward more advanced teenage games, this place was a fond refuge. Our tree house was where daring things were planned like jumping off the corner of the garage into leaves; or sneaking quietly down the street under cover of darkness to see what might be going on. Once we walked to the Knoxville drive in with a stash of apples to sit and eat behind the theater fence while Robert Mitchum drove Thunder Road down Kingston Pike. We ended up in an altercation with some other neighborhood kids that night, so this adventure felt a bit like a battlefield defeat complete with scrapped knees, a bloody nose and lost apples.

On another summer night, long after we should have been asleep, we were laying on the garage roof staring at stars. We were not looking for anything in particular just enjoying the warm night air, counting stars and talking. I don’t remember if I was the first to notice the light but suddenly all of us became aware of a steady glowing object moving towards us across the sky. It had a saucer like appearance. It pulsed with a warm yellow glow. The three of us watched unsure what we were seeing. The object kept a steady pace across the night sky. It moved directly from one horizon over our heads to the other. We heard no sound. No clouds impeded our view. From the perspective of our perch on the roof, it was much larger than a star or an asteroid. It certainly was not airplane lights. When it got directly overhead I remember thinking I should call out for my Dad to see this mysterious fact passing before our eyes. But I was too immersed in the experience to miss watching it.

Ok, I know you wonder what we were smoking, but we were clear headed. This object looked exactly the way you would picture a flying saucer. We thought about Sputnik and/ or a weather balloon, but it moved too slowly and too close to the ground to be either object. It flew at the altitude of an aircraft coming in for a landing but silent.

By three am or so the object went over the horizon and was lost to view. We didn’t talk about it much probably too exhausted and we slept late.

The next morning I told my parents what we observed. Dad worked at the atomic energy commission in Oak Ridge. Excitedly, I asked him to check with his scientist friends to see if anyone had noticed this astronomical event. I was sure we were going to be famous teenage explorers, having seen a real UFO.

This event has stuck with me ever since,
my one stellar (sorry) brush with the unknown. An example to remind myself, we may not be alone in the universe. Dad was unable to find any reports to confirm our sighting, or maybe he laughed it off. UFOs were not the subject of breezy speculation in Cold War days.

Unfortunately, we were the only ones who noticed this amazing sight. No one was paying attention, or everyone was asleep. But still I don’t understand why radar or the air traffic controllers didn’t catch this blip passing over Knoxville, Tennessee, circa the summer of 1958 or 59. I remember my disappointment the evening news had no reporting of any UFOs.

Do I believe I was deceived by childhood fantasy or Sputnik buzz? No way. I know what I saw, confirmation or not. As do the guys who laid back laughing with me on that roof, and then, in wonder, stared with me for thirty minutes or more as this UFO made its lonely crossing over our heads so many years ago.

So what did your backyard retreat do for you? THH

11/9/23

This entry was posted on November 9, 2023 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Poetry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.