My Uncle Mike was a deranged hillbilly genius, and I say this as a compliment.
Mike was smart enough to be an engineer, but he dropped out of high school to become a pot farmer. In my teenage years I spent a lot of time on his property, which adjoined the property owned by my parents. I knew never to go into his pot fields, but otherwise my friends and I were free to explore two hundred acres of forest. Eventually we decided that we wanted to build a treehouse so we had a place of our own to hang out. Uncle Mike donated a load of plywood, and offered to help us build “the skeleton” for the tree house. He explained how a structure needed a skeleton to give it strength over time, and he was going to use rebar rods and wire ties to make that happen for us. We came back two days later with a load of plywood, and the tools we needed, and we found that Uncle Mike had driven rebar rods through the trunk of the tree itself. There were short pieces of rebar connecting the ends of the support rods, all bound with double loop wire ties, and wrapped in forming wire. We laid down boards on top of the rebar rods, and then put the plywood on top of that. The result was the strongest possible base for a tree fort, because nothing would be able to bend those rebar rods or pop that forming wire. That tree house is still there to this very day.