A Tree House
 
A tree house, a free house,
A secret you and me house,
A high up in the leafy branches
Cozy as can be house.
 
A street house, a neat house,
Be sure and wipe your feet house
Is not my kind of house at all~
Let's go live in a tree house.

Shel Silverstein

Tree houses are for getting away.

Kids get away from grownups so they can tell secrets and let their imaginations leap from the branches and soar.

Grownups get away from grownups, too, or at least grownup things.

“I come out here and lose all sense of time and purpose,” says Rachel Fowlkes (Educ ’84). “It’s a great way to relax and get unplugged.”

Her getaway is two-story tree house nestled in a copse of birches, hemlocks and oaks on her 120-acre farm south of Abingdon, where she works as executive director of the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center.

By crossing a narrow wooden bridge, she finds cozy respite among the “leafy branches,” as children’s book author Shel Silverstein puts it.

She had no tree house while growing up in Mississippi but developed a love of the outdoors. So something clicked when she saw a beautifully photographed book by tree-house designer Peter Nelson.

“I brought it home and started reading it, and I thought — ‘This is it!’” she says. She flew to Oregon for a tree-house workshop, and the wheels started turning.

Don Ault (Grad '67), a local resident who sold the farm property to Fowlkes, remembers when she first pitched the idea. “I said, ‘I’m an orphan. I’ve always wanted a tree house.’”

The endeavor weathered some tests of Fowlkes’ patience. Beeches initially selected for the dwelling turned out to be bad choices, and construction was delayed when Nelson went to Spain.

“It was a multi-year project, but it was worth the wait,” she says.

Completed in June, the 300-square-foot tree house took about $175,000 to build. Reclaimed and “found” wood—Douglas fir for walls, cedar for floors, locust for posts, cherry for elegance—accounted for most of the materials. Nelson drew the design, and Seattle builder Joel “Bubba” Smith did the bulk of the construction. Virginia craftsmen, from arborist Kevin Sigman of Abingdon to Woody Crenshaw of Crenshaw Lighting Corp. in Floyd, played key roles.

 

The cumulative effect combines outdoorsy ruggedness with refined craftsmanship and homey amenities—hot water, bathroom, kitchen and propane fireplace.

“You have the convenience of home but not all of the things that make us so compulsive about working all the time,” Fowlkes says. “You really have to be unplugged when you’re out here.”

The tree house, which she has been sharing with family and friends, overlooks the Virginia Creeper Trail and, just beyond, the South Fork of the Holston River.

The same persistence and patience that paid off in her tree house also characterized her efforts to establish the Southwest Virginia Higher Education Center as a state agency in 1992. She persuaded the General Assembly to provide funding and helped develop cooperative relationships with 10 institutions, including U.Va. The center now holds hundreds of classes and roughly 1,500 conferences a year.

Fowlkes also plans to grow her tree-house ideas. When the first was built, sufficient wiring and plumbing were included for a second nearby. And she’d eventually like to have a tree-house café serving hikers, bikers and anglers where the trail crosses the confluence of the South and North forks of the Holston.

She won’t, however, let the café jeopardize what draws people to a tree house in the first place.

As Ault puts it: “You can hear the quiet.”

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