PRAIRIE GROVE, Ark. — Obsession, like inspiration, comes unbidden and has a habit of latching on. For Ezra Idlet, it struck in Kansas City, between the sound check and the show.

Idlet, half of a quirky folk-rock duo called Trout Fishing in America, was killing time in a bookstore eight years ago when he picked up the coffee-table book Treehouses: The Art and Craft of Living Out on a Limb, by Peter Nelson.

The book, with its gorgeous photos of houses produced by wild flights of imagination, resonated with him. He had never built anything bigger than the woodshed behind his house, but thanks to the diagrams and drawings in the book, "It just looked like it was possible," he said. "I thought, well, yeah!"

What Idlet, 52, had in mind was not a limb-spanning lean-to for his kids, but a real house nestled in the trees on his land in northwestern Arkansas.

He bought the land in 1992. At the time, he and Keith Grimwood, his musical partner since 1979, had decided to decamp from Houston with their families for wider open spaces.

When Idlet returned home from the Kansas trip, he told his wife, Karen, about his treehouse vision. She, in turn, explained her position: No. "She said, ‘We have a lot of things we really need to do before we get to that,’" he recalled.

And so, instead of building the treehouse, he wrote a song. (When something is on Idlet’s mind, he said, "it often comes out in a song," and the idea "was really, really working on me.") The song, Dreaming, became one of the group’s best loved.

In the two years that followed, he continued to doodle designs for the treehouse, and would introduce the song at shows by announcing that it symbolized something he really wanted to do, although it was "kind of impractical for the moment."

One day he was talking to a neighbour, Clancy McMahon, who is a professional home builder. McMahon wanted to buy a couple of horses for his children. Idlet, who had horses, offered a swap: animals for expertise.

On a recent day, Ezra Idlet and Grimwood sat with a visitor over sandwiches and spicy pickled okra after a grinding, white-knuckle climb in Idlet’s four-wheel drive pickup truck up the hogback hill leading to the treehouse. About the size of a studio apartment, the house is a one-room cabin in the air.

It is an agreeable space full of light and calm, with a few simple decorative touches (a stained-glass panel over the front door, a small, beguiling mosaic in front of the wood stove). It sits among the trunks of three red oak trees, which come up through the deck; six steel poles provide additional support. It moves and shakes slightly, which takes a little getting used to but eventually feels as natural as the gentle swaying of the trees themselves.

The loft railing, still under construction, will incorporate raw cedar branches. There is no electricity: the stove and refrigerator will run on propane, and the chandelier (bartered for a music workshop) has oil lamps. There is also a wind-up Brunswick phonograph that plays Ezra Idlet’s enormous collection of 78-rpm records. "You won’t need a lick of electricity up here," he said.

The outside deck has railings that angle outward, with a built-in bench; the effect is of a recliner that creates the illusion of being suspended in air. When a visitor kicked his feet back to stand up and half of his foot pushed against empty space, Idlet viewed the scene with alarm.

"That is a design defect that needs to be addressed," he said. His tone, however, conveyed something approaching pleasure: another problem to solve.

When the treehouse is complete, he said, he hopes to use it as a study in the woods — a place where he can play music and write new songs. "It’ll always be a work in progress," Grimwood countered. "It’s just never going to be over with."

In fact, Ezra Idlet does seem to be constantly planning additions, including a smaller house, or at least a platform, on a nearby white oak, connected to the main house by a rope bridge. But for now, he has a more pressing concern: the local red oak borers that might someday kill the trees.

The insect threat, which he learned about only after the project was well under way, has led him to take preventive measures, he said, like watering and fertilizing these trees to strengthen them. If he had known that the borers were coming, he said, he might have been talked out of building.

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