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Through the years, the house has served as a play- and guesthouse, meditation room, retreat, rabbit's home, storehouse and fantasy space. I still get a shiver of excitement when I recall my part in leading the joyful creation of this delightful and spirited little treehouse, harmoniously nestled among the flora and fauna of a California hillside.

We still have videotape of a 5-year-old Brian playing in the treehouse with a friend. His conversation with this young pal is fascinating, as he describes his "spiky little invisible friends" who live in the bark of the tree running through the middle of the house. The young boys whispered all the time, so as not to disturb the invisible creatures.

SALVAGE HEAVEN

Sam Isaac Edwards I started building treehouses when I was about 5 or 6. I didn't read a book... I just built. As a child, what little money I could gather together I spent not on candy and pop, but on nails and other construction supplies.

Over the years I created dozens of multilevel structures using a triple-tree triangulated design. However, my permanent residence, "Sams treehouse," wasn't planned at all. I'd moved back to Calhoun, Georgia, after some years out West, an old friend asked me to start a restaurant with him. I agreed, but told him I'd need a place to write. "Go up in the woods behind the restaurant and build," he replied.

With little thought to the location (right in the middle of town), I chose a 150-yearold, 60-feet (18-meters) pin oak, sunk eight wooden supports under its north limb, and built a 8-by-16-feet (2.5-by-5-meters) box enveloping a single limb. Then I got really carried away. The result was a 600-square-feet (56-square-meters) treehouse on three levels, with limbs in every room. I simply built around them, with no design in mind.

Construction began in 1991. I scrounged old materials from wherever I could find them: windows from the old train depot, rusted tin from barns, chalkboard paneling from a closed school, pine flooring from a former slave cabin.

Once it had grown to livable proportions, I found myself in a house with no utilities. So I had to lobby the town's decision-makers to assist me. When I was finally granted water and power, possibly because my treehouse seemed to bring smiles to troubled faces, I told the city inspector I regretted placing him in such a position, and the building was the "evolution of a mistake." The inspector replied, "I don't think that could be put any better."

Soon afterward, a local farmer war discovered growing marijuana on ply wood beds in an industrial building. When the "wacky 'backy" had been removed by the police, I was offered the plywood. Two weeks later I had managed to convert them into a library and sitting room attached to the south end of the treehouse.

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