Aerie tale

SOMEWHERE IN WESTERN MAINE -- If a treehouse gets built in the forest, does anyone need to know why?

Apparently, people think they do, at least in the case of the two-story, hexagonal marvel that Peter Lewis and a friend erected out behind his house. (To avoid an onslaught of surprise visits, Lewis prefers to keep the location secret.) Everyone seems ''absolutely enchanted" by it, Lewis says, but that doesn't mean they don't also have questions: How? How long? How much? And especially, why?

So OK, why did he do it?

''It's just something I wanted to do," says Lewis at first, as if that's all he has to say. But he follows up by e-mail a few hours later, allowing that there might be a little more to it: ''The deeper meaning has, I think, much to do with my upbringing. My parents were both very creative people who thought way outside the box. Mom told me that dreaming was important and that dreaming big was what set people apart." The catch, she told him, is to act on those dreams. ''In other words," he says, ''go ahead and think up great and sometimes odd ideas, but then make them happen."

Fair enough. But now that you have, what are you going to do with a two-story treehouse?

''I mostly come up here to take naps," says Lewis, who has a dry wit and the manner of pulling someone's leg even when he is not.

But the treehouse is also an office, a place to get some writing done. Although it's not wired for a phone or electricity, it is insulated and has a woodstove, so it can be used most days of the year. It's a retreat that allows Lewis to get away from the hum of technology and commune with nature and his own thoughts, which can in turn lead to more naps. It's also the ultimate sleepover venue for his daughter, Amanda, and her friends. And it's a place to play -- where Lewis, 45, and friend and fellow builder Ted Walsh, 46, spent hours contriving Rube Goldberg-type contraptions such as a retractable staircase ''to keep the girls out."

On some level, however, no explanation of greater purpose is necessary. ''It's a treehouse," says Lewis, with a shrug. ''It's cool."

''There's something intrinsic in all of us, in wanting to get off the ground," says Walsh. And it's fun. ''Even the most hardened, practical adults lighten up when they get in here," he says.

The story of why and how Lewis, a man with a day job (he and Walsh are co-owners of TMC Books, a publishing company in Conway, N.H.), a family, and not an especially large bank account, spent three years building a fairly ambitious treehouse is the subject of a 130-page autobiographical coffeetable book, ''Treehouse Chronicles: One Man's Dream of Life Aloft." The book, like the building process itself, is part vision quest, part how-to, and part meditation on nature, family, and community.

Prior to this project, Lewis's construction background included a simpler treehouse he produced as a boy and timberframe houses he worked on as part of a construction crew in earlier years. Though he's obviously comfortable with a hammer and nails, it's Walsh who's the master carpenter, says Lewis. Walsh is also an artist, whose drawings (along with Lewis's photos) are a major component of ''Treehouse Chronicles." The book, published this month, has recently received an American Design Award, and is also garnering good reviews and sales thus far, according to Lewis.

A book was in the back of his mind all the time he was thinking about the treehouse, say Lewis, because he's been a writer most of his working life. But ''I would have built the treehouse even if there was no book," he maintains.

As it turns out, Lewis says that publishing the book was an easier project than erecting the treehouse.

Finances and life conspired to make the building project challenging. At one point in 2003, the $2,500 he had saved to finish it had to be put toward a new furnace and chimney in the main house. What saved Lewis is that he's a scrounger, always on the lookout for free, useful materials. The old barn on his property provided a wealth of such items, including the treehouse's windows. Another snag was the sheer length of time required for the project; Lewis had not envisioned taking three years. As the work dragged on, he sometimes became frustrated, even testy.

''The last year, Peter was really itching to get it done," says Walsh, tactfully.

Says Karen Lewis, Peter's wife, ''At first I thought the whole project was going to be much smaller. I thought it was just going to be a platform in a tree." She was disabused of this idea, however, when she saw the walls of the house go up and learned that a two-level plan was in place. She tolerated the long hours her husband spent out back in the woods, she says, because she knew it was his dream.

One of the best parts about the treehouse project for Lewis was that it involved family and friends. His dad helped him plan and provided materials. Son Jeremiah, now in college, played a major role in designing and building, and daughter Amanda helped as well, Lewis said. Others vital to the process included not only Walsh but a great many friends and neighbors, including those who showed up on ''Raising Day," the equivalent of an old-fashioned barn raising held one June day to erect the foundation.

The finished treehouse, which is clearly visible from the road, often surprises passing motorists, who've been known to leave skid marks after spotting the peaked roof, windows, and trim of the stained-wood structure, not to mention a ground floor 21 feet up. Lewis and his family have grown accustomed, if not inured, to the sounds of screeching brakes and hollering.

Approaching the treehouse at close range, you start to get a sense of what Lewis calls its ''organic funkiness." First, it's not built in the 105-foot-tall pine tree, but around it. The entire timberframe structure sits on a hexagonal steel collar suspended from cables threaded over a fork near the top of the tree. The collar is larger than the circumference of the trunk to allow for growth, and is stabilized by supports from the ground and between the collar and the tree. No nails or other materials were driven into the tree to build the house; everything is either hanging off it or braced against it or the ground.

When Walsh and Lewis demonstrate the use of the elaborate folding-stair drawbridge they designed, it's as if Gilligan's Island is meeting Swiss Family Robinson. When the stairs are in the raised position, the only way to reach the treehouse is to clamber up the old-fashioned way. A wooden cradle of rocks hanging from a rope is the counterweight necessary to bring down and unfold the staircase, which occurs with a certain amount of creaking and groaning. It's a delicately balanced affair, and Walsh and Lewis, in order to get it working, communicate swiftly and unintelligibly in the manner of people who have put in long hours together. ''We've had to change the rocks three times today, because of the humidity or something," says Lewis, sounding more pleased than irritated.

Going up the slightly shaky staircase is a little unnerving for anyone wary of heights. But once inside the treehouse, there's a feeling you're in something substantial, an actual shelter, albeit a small one with a huge pine tree growing through the center of it. The house measures 250 square feet, including decks and not including the tree. The wood floor is shellacked, the walls are painted white, and the trim is green. There's a strong smell of fresh-cut wood.

But all the same, you know you're in a tree. There are tree branches outside the windows, for one thing, and upstairs a tree branch passes through the house. Lewis and Walsh decided to leave the large limb intact, fashioning canvas panels with gussets around it at either end to keep out the cold but still allow the branch some play.

The wood stove and the checked-fabric couch next to it are focal points of the main living area on the first floor. Both Walsh and Lewis relate how odd it is, in winter, to be outside in the cold one moment, then up in a tree, yet toasty warm, the next. On the same floor, there's an Adirondack chair, a desk for working at while standing (Lewis's preference), and a few ornaments such as a hornet's nest with leaves tucked into it, exactly as Lewis found it on a ramble one day. The effect is spare, woodsy/artsy, and somehow both cozy and spacious. Should he ever need more space, Lewis has designed the desk to fold neatly against the wall.

Upstairs is the chess room. It's furnished with chairs that Lewis crafted from branches and canvas, a chess board with squares at different heights that seems to hover above a nest of twigs, and wood-bark-and-metal chess figures stored on shelves along the wall. Walsh crafted the board to have an organic nature to suit its surroundings.

The treehouse is organically elegant throughout but fairly sparse. Lewis says he likes it that way, even while describing himself as ''a slob and a pack rat." It's just easier not to clutter it up with gewgaws, he says, though he concedes he is contemplating some curtains and possibly even window boxes in the future.

Lewis is adamant that he didn't build the treehouse as the result of a midlife crisis. He didn't do it to learn how to be a kid again, he says, because he has never stopped being one. And though it was a great and sometimes overwhelmingly difficult experience, he wouldn't describe it as cathartic. ''I tried to come up with some deep, philosophical reason for building the treehouse, but it was just a silly idea and I felt like doing it. Fortunately, I had a very understanding wife and enough scrap to pull it off."

But there is a flip side to Lewis's flip side, and he returns quickly to his parents and their influence. ''They encouraged me to think of the fences that enclose convention as simply things to jump over as I wandered around looking for wonder in the world."