Reader A: “A $1000 tree house! I mean, I know you were spending a lot of
time at the Orange Store, but for heaven’s sake. the essence of a tree house
is to be created with scrap lumber, salvaged bolts, and the bent nails that
you had to pound straight again. If it doesn’t end up looking like a place
that would give an OSHA inspector a cerebral aneurism, you’ve missed the
essence of the thing. Growing up, our tree houses were bare, half-rotten
platforms 45 feet up, swaying in the windy rain, slick with moss and mildew,
and significantly lacking in any safety features. A good tree house teaches
courage and sangfroid, it does. Or maybe my parents were just trying to
kill me. Hmmm.”
I grew up that way too, Sir. I don’t think it was so much that our parents
were trying to kill us as that a person can only worry about so many things.
Our parents had a lot of stuff to worry about: polio, the recent memory of
TB (there was a sanatorium across the fields from our house), another recent
memory of bombs falling from the sky, and much else — not least, the
problem of making a decent living, which was much harder then than now.
Kids falling out of trees just didn’t rank very high on the worry list. I
was a chronic climber; fell out of every tree in Delapre Woods, and once
came within an ace of hanging myself by trying to climb the household drain
pipe using rope. (I’d been reading a book about mountaineering.) Nowadays
we have different things to worry about. Most of them involve lawyers.
Reader B: “Congratulations on the completion of the tree-house. Your
comment about the amount you spent on nails reminded me of Thoreau’s account
of the construction costs of his shack at Walden Pond. He spent $28.125 in
all; $3.90 of that was for nails. I’m just about positive that my edition at
home includes a footnote indicating that early archeologists exploring the
site found quite a few bent nails, suggesting that Thoreau was a lot more
talented with the pen than with the hammer. I leave the comparisons of
Thoreau and Derbyshire to others, though I do wonder if you will use the
tree-house (once the kids tire of it) as a place of periodic retreat where
you can gain a little perspective on life in the ‘burbs. I also wonder what
$28.125 would be in 2004 dollars?”
Well, the Inflation Calculator here says
that the $28.125 Thoreau spent in 1845 would have been worth $522.07 in
2002. Which means one of the following things: (1) The Walden Pond
residence was only about half as habitable as my tree house; (2) Thoreau
used very inferior materials; or (3) Home Depot is overcharging
disgracefully. On the other hand, his $3.90 for nails would have got you
$72.39 in 2002, so I am way ahead on the nails.