When I imagine a life of pure freedom, I tend to picture a tree house. This is an image pulled directly from my childhood in the suburbs of Chicago. But the tree house I envision is not the slapped-together pile of plywood and two-by-fours one usually thinks of when one thinks of a “tree house.” It is a spacious, elegant, gently decaying structure in a far-off jungle. I first saw this tree house in an issue of National Geographic when I was about twelve years old.