Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Jesus Approaches Man, Asks For Treehouse

Here is what your treehouse might look like if your Dad was a gifted and eccentric Japanese renaissance man, who lived near the beach and liked to build things out of driftwood:

Here’s what it might look like if your Dad was a Korowai tribesman, who build their houses ridiculously high up in trees to ward off mosquitoes and rival clans:

And here’s what it might look like if your Dad was a fundamentalist Christian from Tennessee named Horace, who was granted a vision from Jesus of a treehouse, perfect in its detail, that he would spend the next fourteen years building:

‘I was praying one day and the Lord said, “If you build me a tree house, I’ll see you never run out of material,”’ Horace Burgess says of the provenance of his 100-foot-high, 10-room tree house. True to his vision, Horace, a landscape architect by trade, built the tree house from salvaged and recycled materials, beginning in 1993 and finishing up in 2007.

Which isn’t to say God gave him the exact specs. ‘God didn’t do me like Noah,’ he says. ‘I never got the dimensions. If I had known it was going to end up this big, I never would have started it.’

The four-second vision, Horace says, came while he was wide awake, and showed him everything he needed, including a basketball court which now forms parts of the structure’s sanctuary. ‘I saw it like a slide show, and it showed me the podium, which rises like four crosses, two for the thieves, one for Christ, and the other cross is the one we all must bear individually.’

The so-called Minister’s Treehouse, as it’s known, is built around a live, 25-metre-tall white oak, and is braced by six other trees. By Horace’s estimate—and he says he was counting—he used 258,000 nails in its construction, and spent around $12,000.

Over the years, Horace has let a number of people take up residence in the treehouse, typically the kind of folk ‘church houses wouldn’t even let in.’ One such man, he says, lived there for more than three years, and came to be known as ‘the keeper of the treehouse.’ When he died, Horace scattered his ashes from the bell tower.

In the shadow of the tree house, Horace has planted a garden filled with flowers that, when seen from above, spell out the Lord’s name.

Shots from treehouse builder, photographer and authority Peter Nelson, USA Today, Uptake.com and Baking With Medusa.

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