Closer to God

Bill Allen likes to contemplate life from inside his tree house overlooking Lake Champlain. “A tree house is the essence of childhood, distilled,” says Allen, a 43-year-old Burlington, Vt., financial planner who built his in 1997 as a retreat.

“Who could not be happy in a tree house?”

But as he thought about it, an answer occurred to him—disabled kids. They can’t be happy in a tree house because they can’t get into one. As a former member of the board of the Vermont Make-A-Wish Foundation, Allen knows childhood can be dishearteningly different for kids suffering from medical problems. For him, the solution was obvious: build a handicapped-accessible tree house. That no one he knew had ever built such a structure seemed a “minor detail.”

Possessed of a contagious enthusiasm, Allen soon enlisted the aid of several architects and builders, a structural engineer, a tree specialist, a roofer, and at least 50 volunteer laborers.

“Bill may not know much about the details of building, but his strength is that he’s a lightning rod for ideas and a magnet that pulls people together,” says John Connell, a Warren, Vt., architect who was instrumental in the design.

Allen chose as a site Camp Ta-Kum-Ta, a non-profit, week-long overnight camp held each August for children with cancer at an existing summer camp in Colchester, Vt. Some of Ta-Kum-Ta’s campers are physically challenged due to the their illness. Camp founder Ted Kessler was enthusiastic. “Our whole purpose is for kids to have fun,” he said. “Everything about a tree house is fun.”

In the summer of 2001, just in time for camp, Allen and his crew put the finishing touches on the $50,000, 600-square-foot tree house and its 191-foot wheelchair ramp. Built of rough-cut lumber, the structure sits 11 feet off the ground on a small cliff overlooking Lake Champlain, and encompasses 21 living trees. Each of the campers—10 to 12 at a time—spent a night inside, making like the Swiss Family Robinson in the aerial perch. One camper, Allen recalls, said it made him feel “closer to God.”

“It was cool,” said Nick Ferris, 14, of Montpelier, Vt., who has attended Ta-Kum-Ta since his diagnosis of leukemia seven years ago. “The little kids were really excited.” Nick—who used a wheel chair for a time, but now navigates under his own power—says he and his bunkmates barricaded themselves in the tree house, “in case we got raided by the girls.” (It didn’t happen.)

“Camp is a place to escape reality, and a tree house is another reality altogether,” says Ben Chater, a college freshman who suffers from cerebral palsy and who helped work on the structure with classmates from his Montpelier high school. Wheelchair-bound and unable to use his arms, Chater painted boards using a brush duct-taped to a baseball cap. “I thought it was an amazing project,” Chater says. “I wanted to help.”

Sherry Beede of Washington, Vt., says the beauty of the tree house—and of Camp Ta-Kum-Ta as a whole—is that “it’s part of a way of treating the whole child.” Beede’s daughter, Katelyn, age 9, suffers from a rare brain cancer, but her mother says the girl’s progress has astounded her doctors. “A positive attitude is half the battle,” Beede says. Kessler recalls that when counselors thought it prudent not to allow the youngest campers to sleep in the tree house, Katelyn was among those who staged a successful protest demanding a turn.

“Katie loved it,” says her mom.

For the last two years, Allen has been busy running the Forever Young Tree House and fielding calls from as far away as Brazil from folks wanting to build similar structures.

“Until we did this, the idea of a kid in a wheelchair in a tree house seemed like the Man in the Moon,” Allen says. “We turned the idea on its head.

“I’d like to build an entire camp that’s nothing but accessible tree houses,” he says. A few “minor details” would need taking care of—finding land, raising money, and designing a multi-tree-house facility among them—but Allen is forging ahead. “After all,” he asks, “who doesn’t love a tree house?”

Marialisa Calta writes from her home in Calais, Vt.

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