of mountaineering. First: “Climbing is safer than staying home.” Second: “Never step on anything you can step over, and never step over anything you can step around.” When I left the mountains of California to become a boat builder in British Columbia, I recast this wisdom, in honor of one of the legendary scavengers of the Vancouver waterfront, as Jim Land’s Law: “Never buy anything you can make, and never make anything you can find.”
In 1972, at age 19 and facing my third winter in
Canada, I built a small treehouse 95 feet up in a
Douglas fir, and lived there for three years. This
adventure began by accident, when the boat I was
deckhanding on hit a large cedar log in Georgia Strait. We towed the log back with us to our anchorage within Vancouver’s inner harbor, at the mouth of Indian Arm. As I began to split the log into shakes, I started to think of building a small cabin for the winter — like Malcolm Lowry, who had written his masterpiece Under the Volcano while squatting in a shack on the other side of the inlet, now Cates Park.
In the 1970s, the line between legitimate and illegitimate tenancy remained indistinct. Many coastal residents lived in houses built on floats, and when someone slid a house onto the shoreline (almost entirely “Crown land”) no one paid much notice — or any tax. The Queen of England (also the Queen of Canada) rarely came by to check. One more cabin in the woods would probably not attract attention, but the rainforest was dark and damp. How about going up?
There happened to be one large, landmark Douglas fir right at the water’s edge. The first set of branches were 30 feet up, and that would have been the logical place to build a house. But I kept climbing, and the view just got better and better, until, from near the top of the tree I had a panoramic view from Second Narrows to the 6,565-foot summit of Mount Meslillooet, directly north. There was a clear path through the branches from there to the ground, so I installed a pulley, found a 200-foot length of nylon
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