Growing up wild in Georgia for me meant living on a small 15-acre farm. We had 11,000 laying hens and that was our main business, selling eggs to local stores. We delivered to small mom and pop country stores that sold a few dozen each week up to the local A&P and Winn Dixie where we delivered about 30 cases of 30 dozen each, twice a week.
We also raised hogs for the market, with a farrowing house for a dozen sows to the shelter where the pigs were fattened up for market, usually about 60 at a time.
For years we had two or three milk cows and I grew up drinking “raw” milk and eating “clabber,” which I found out was homemade yogurt when I went to college. We had two ponies for my brother and I to ride and we cut hay from the field for the horses and cows. And we had a huge garden every year and mom spent hours so we could eat canned and frozen vegetables all winter.
Although there was some kind of work to do on the farm every day during the summer, I spent many hours building tree houses and huts in the woods with my friends Harold and Hal. They ranged from simple platforms with two or three boards nailed to branches somewhat parallel to the ground to elaborate sleeping structures in the trees.
We often labored for hours dragging boards, hammers and nails to the selected tree. Many of my tree houses were built with old barn boards from one we tore down when I was about six years old. And many of my nails were straightened after being pulled from those boards.
My friend Harold’s parents owned a planer where trees were cut into rough planks then planed down to smooth building wood. When Harold was involved, we had access to good wood, sometimes rough cut but often planed boards that were culled for some reason, usually a bend in them. But they worked great for treehouse and huts.
We built a huge – to us – platform in a big pine in the woods behind Harold’s house. It was about 200 yards from the back of his barn where the road access ended. It was about 12 feet square and so high we put side boards around it to make sure we didn’t fall out. That was the only one we ever did that, all the others were low enough they didn’t scare us.
We spend a lot of hard work pulling boards up with a rope then nailing them in place. One time we carried our sleeping bags to the tree planning on sleeping way up there but chickened out and slept on the ground under the tree.
That made us decide we needed a structure on the ground. Someone had the bright idea to build a prefab hut and carry the walls and roof down in sections rather than make multiple trips with individual boards.
That was not a great idea. The three room walls were about five feet square and the top a little bigger to overhand the front. They were heavy! It probably took us longer dragging each one a few feet and stopping to catch our breaths than it would have taken to haul individual boards to the site.
Harold, Hal and I spent a few nights sleeping in that hut. But we ended up with so much stuff like dry firewood, emergency canned food, matches in a jar and other essentials for wilderness living inside we eventually had to put up our pup tents to camp and just use the hut for storage.
My favorite tree house was in a pecan tree in front of our house on Iron Hill Road. It was beside the ditch so only a few feet from the road. And it was very simple, three or four short boards nailed between limbs of a fork that ran out toward the road.
Short boards nailed to the tree trunk made my ladder to get to it. That platform was just big enough for me to sit with my back against the tree or lie on my stomach and read. I usually had a cool breeze and was well hidden from the people in the cars that I watched as they rode by.
Many deer stands now are more complex and detailed than our tree houses back then. But they served our purpose of a place in nature to get away from everything. My parents were far from “helicopter” parents. As long as I got my chores done I was free to roam until supper time, and I did almost every day.
I am afraid those kinds of days are mostly gone for most kids.