In the summer of 2006, I made my way to a steep embankment on the Pecos River just east of Santa Fe, New Mexico, to meet Val Kilmer.

The actor, who died Tuesday at age 65, was movie-star handsome at 46. He wasn’t promoting a new film but wanted to show off something else. Something childlike. Something surreal. Something that, as he put it, could help him “figure out what I’m all about.”

It was a treehouse. Not some simple planks and nails contraption affixed to a low branch, mind you. This was, befitting an iconic actor who’d made his name in “Top Gun,” “The Doors” and many other films, an elaborate treehouse built high in a stand of old oak trees with material sourced from an old barn on his 6,000-acre spread.

“I’ll fib and say it’s for my kids, but it’s really for me,” he said. “I had a treehouse as a child. So being an adult … well, it’s strangely, weirdly satisfying to sit in a tree.”

One could well picture Kilmer sitting silently, shamanistically, in that 300-square-foot treehouse. He possessed the same intensity as singer and poet Jim Morrison, who he’d embodied so thoroughly in “The Doors” that he insisted on singing Morrison’s songs himself, to eerie effect.

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But I sensed he truly was hoping that this treehouse, which he’d dreamed up with Roderick Romero, a New York-based treehouse designer to the rich and famous, would lure his children to his Western outpost.

In truth, our meeting was suffused with a layer of sadness owing to the very absence of the two kids he shared with his ex-wife, actress Joanne Whalley: Mercedes, then 14, and Jack, 11.

They lived mostly with their mother in Los Angeles, but Kilmer clearly pined for them. Not far from the treehouse was a beat-up old Land Rover. On its dash was some graffiti, including “Jack Rocks” and “Mercedes Rules.”

“They haven’t seen this place yet, but I can’t wait,” Kilmer said wistfully, lying on the treehouse deck in shorts and a sweat-soaked khaki shirt. “My son’s a monkey. He’ll be up on that tin roof in no time.”

For now, though, the house was his, a remote outpost of a remote outpost. High up in that treehouse, so far away from anything but the snakes, hawks, coyotes and other creatures who called this land home, Kilmer could take flight and escape the Hollywood noise that had turned the gifted artist into, by all accounts, a difficult presence at times.

Kilmer spoke to me in short bursts of reflection. While he was cordial, he wasn’t effusive. He seemed more like a friendly ghost, drifting down to the river to share some thoughts before just as quickly drifting away.

I remember wanting to ask so many questions about his acting method and prowess. Of how he flew into stardom as Iceman opposite Tom Cruise and became Morrison for director Oliver Stone. Of what Hollywood fame can do to actors that causes some to disappear into the high desert.

But Kilmer wasn’t open for that sort of emotional mining. He was willing to share some of his heart, but only a bit. Not with a stranger.

So for the rest of us − for the movie loving world − what we are left with is what Kilmer brought to the big screen. Performances suffused with power, emotion and release. Performances that brought us in close.

Which is likely why Val Kilmer needed that lofty treehouse overlooking an ancient river in a beautifully arid land suffused with mystery. A place to figure out what he was truly all about.