DATE: Saturday, June 21, 1997               TAG: 9706210036

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E1   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Column 

SOURCE: Larry Maddry 

                                            LENGTH:   95 lines

A BOY'S JOURNEY INTO MANHOOD MAY BEGIN IN A TREE HOUSE

IT'S THE FIRST day of summer, and that means a tree house is probably coming to a back yard somewhere near you.

I was recently thumbing the pages of a book by the von Hoffmann Brothers - both said to be living the life of a beer commercial - on manliness. The book is titled ``The Big Damn Book of Sheer Manliness.'' It's a tribute to rip-snorting, chest-thumping maleness.

But nowhere in the pages of the book are we told when this hormonal chutzpah begins to kick in.

I think it begins with that ungainly structure the tree house, although it may begin with the cave and evolve to the tree house. At least that's the way it worked for me.

The cave was excavated by Louten, age 9, a next-door neighbor. It was about 6 feet long, with a potato sack strung over the entrance.

Louten, with straight black hair and a serious manner that he retained as long as I knew him, walked barefooted to our back yard to tell me about it. He was sweating with the effort of creation and the heat from a blazing sun, which beat over his slumping shoulders.

``I ain't told nobody,'' he said. ``You're the first one. I done dug myself a cave.'' He spat.

He was not normally given to spitting so I detected his pride of craftsmanship from the gesture and spat myself to show interest.

``Hot damn!'' I said. ``Lemme see.''

A hoe and shovel lay beside the large piles of dirt at the cave entrance. We crawled inside on all fours and sat down near the end of it, bright sunlight filtering through the potato sack and splashing onto our bare legs.

I told Louten it was about the finest cave I had ever seen. Then we began to make a list of the boys in our neighborhood who should be allowed entrance to that important underground architecture.

``No girls,'' Louten said, emphatically.

I seconded the motion.

``Well, what do we do now?'' I asked, mopping sweat from my brow. The temperature was already in the 90s, and the sun seemed to have made an underground oven of the cave.

The question went largely unanswered and we crawled out minutes later, groggy from the heat. On a cloudy day later in the week, we returned to the cave with flashlights to read comic books.

I had reached the point in Batman where the police commissioner flashed a beam of light on a cloud, imprinting the bat insignia onto the cloud surface.

Then I felt a bite on my leg. ``Ants,'' I said.

``One just crawled up my hiney,'' Louten complained.

We exited the cave, swatting ants from our legs, Louten doing a little dance outside the entrance as he slid his hands under his shorts to scratch his buttocks.

It was then that idea of a tree house came to me, a structure appealing in its loftiness. No ants. No funky-smelling dirt to clog the ears. And cooler. Tree limbs for shade and gentle breezes from time to time.

A week later, the project was nearly finished, the pieces of scrap wood having been nailed onto the limbs of a walnut tree, selected because of its round, green fruit. The green walnuts - almost as large as baseballs - were ammunition that might be used against the enemy. Whoever that was.

A bunch of us - Louten, Bob, Obbie, Steve and Norman - had worked on the tree house, bringing scraps of lumber from around the neighborhood. The obligatory steps were nailed to the tree trunk, leading to a platform with wooden sides and a tarpaulin roof for shade.

A long rope, attached to a limb at one end and to a bucket handle at the other, served as an elevator for whatever supplies were necessary.

One thing I learned about the masculine way in that male bastion was the propensity of the sex to argue.

Many of the arguments were about my dog, Spike, who whined and barked and wanted to be taken along once we were in the tree house. Some didn't want the dog up there.

``Kreemeneentles, we can't hardly walk around up there now, it's so crowded,'' Bob said.

Then Norman, whose house backed up the walnut tree, wanted to run an electrical cord up the trunk to the platform so we could have an electric fan. Or listen to the radio. Many felt this was improper, because Tarzan had not used such things and because it spoiled the ``nacheral effect'' of the tree house.

My worst moment in the tree house was caused by a visit from my cousin Anne, age 6, and her parents. My mother insisted we let Anne inspect the tree house.

``She hasn't any young friends in town,'' Mother said. ``Now you let her up there for a look.''

It just ruined everything. Some of the guys saw me up there with Anne and noted that I had even helped my cousin use the elevator bucket to fetch her nurse doll. Hoo-boy.

``I'm pulling out of the tree house club if we gonna have women,'' Louten said. He lawyered that one of the first votes we had taken was to forbid girls. Indignant, all the other guys pulled out with him.

It was a rough summer for me. But they all came back to the tree house, eventually. And we argued and quarreled about one thing or another in manly fashion until school opened in September. ILLUSTRATION: Color illustration by Janet Shaughnessy/The

Virginian-Pilot

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