By sundown, we’d built a nearly level platform and nailed up dead branches for railings. My brother and I stood there together. The sun was low over the marsh, our sweat drying under our clothes, and there was the feeling that something good had just happened, that we had created something from nothing, and that we’d be able to use it for a long time.  Over the next year, our mother and father separating, a man walking on the moon, my brother and I built many more. We took that rusty saw and cut a dozen long pine branches from various trees, and we made a tepee that we covered with more branches so when it rained we could sit inside our dry conical room. In the winter, not long after our father packed his car and drove down the hill to another town, we made an igloo. We stole two short spade shovels from our landlord’s garage, and we tunneled into the massive snowbank against the trees. Once we reached the center, we hollowed out the inside, pulling buckets of snow and ice back out through the tunnel’s opening. By the end of that week, we could crawl into our snow tunnel and stand inside our snow room. We carved a bench into one wall, and we built a fire on the ground once, the smoke rising through a hole we’d hacked into the ceiling.  At night we’d roll a snow boulder across the tunnel’s entrance, for these places had to be secret, like some parallel life we could escape to that was not unlike sleeping and going to your dreams, the good ones where there is no war and good men are not cut down, and mothers and fathers don’t fight, and houses are safe places where the world can’t find you.  Our mother was 29 years old, living alone with four kids in the woods. Somehow she bought a used car and got work as a nurse’s aide and started making plans to go back to school. There was talk of having to move to a place she could afford, that she was late with the rent again and the landlord wanted us out. It was spring, and Jeb and I took our stolen shovels out into the woods and spent three days digging a hole we could sit in. We covered the opening with branches we’d cut from trees, and we climbed down there and sat on the cool, damp ground.  Then we were teenagers living in northern Massachusetts in a mill town on a river dead from tanning dyes. For a while we lived in a house that used to be a doctor’s office, and now he was our new landlord, one who’d show up whenever our mother was late with the rent, which seemed to be often. One night he stood in the doorway in his coat and tie and asked our mother why we didn’t go live in the projects on Summer Street, a cluster of concrete buildings the cops were often called to for one crime or another. Our mother lied and said her income was too high to qualify for that. Across the street was a cemetery, and Jeb and I found a granite tomb with a steel door, its lock long broken, and we made a place there for ourselves on the damp concrete.  Soon we moved to another part of town. Our mother worked in Boston, and she was gone 14 hours a day, and our home became overrun with neighborhood kids using our rented house to hang out and drink and get high, sometimes playing cards at the dining room table, the Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin blasting on our stereo. But in our small backyard, Jeb and I built a hidden place high in the branches of a beech tree, a 6- by 8-foot room with a small doorway, a flat roof and no windows. We’d built most of this with two-by-fours and sheets of paneling we’d stolen from our new landlord’s basement. We ran extension cords from our house, and we had a coil heater up in our hut in the winter, a fan in the summer, an FM radio going all year long. There was no ladder, just a rope running through two pulleys screwed into a high branch, the end of the rope tied to a board you’d wedge between your legs before pulling yourself up.  On Sundays our father would cross the river from his town to ours, and he’d drive the four of us to Sacred Hearts church. Once he asked Jeb and me what we did with ourselves during the week. We didn’t tell him about the house parties, nor did we tell him about this new place where we spent so much of our time.  Once we were inside, and could hear stoned and drunken laughter coming from our house across the yard, my brother and I would pull that board all the way up and in. We’d sit in the near dark and listen to rock ’n’ roll from Boston, the announcers talking about Watergate, and later, the fall of Saigon. Then it was winter, our hut no longer a secret in the bare branches. It got cold and we’d sit close to the glowing coils of the heater, my brother’s face lit from the bottom like the statue of an angel. One afternoon, snow was falling outside, and Jeb and I leaned forward and held our hands over the heat in this shelter we had built. But the heater made us drowsy, and we lay down and slept, the wind rocking our hut as if it were a cradle.  Andre Dubus III is the author of the novel “House of Sand and Fog,” among other works. His memoir, “Townie,” will be published next month.  A version of this article appears in print on January 20, 2011, on Page D7 of the New York edition with the headline: Secret Spaces, Far From Strife. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Finding refuge from the outside world, and from parents, in a tree, under the earth, in a tomb.