How shocked our parents would have been had they only crossed over the first set of dunes into the valley before the second, and seen us seven boys. How wild we must have looked, with our tan legs and red noses, cut off jeans with strings unraveling to our knees, huddled over our flat pieces of cold gray slate taken from the underside of the largest dunes. There we squatted and scratched our pine poles on the slate, rubbing off the flat dull sheath covering the fine white point that we knew had to be there. We cut blood grooves into our spears so that our enemy’s wounds would not close and their blood would flow freely to be sucked down into the sand. We bent poles into parentheses and tied fishing line to both ends, making bows to loose our unfeathered arrows so that our foe would be wary of coming too close to our territory.
I began building forts when I was very young. I do not remember how young because fort building begins at an earlier than what we as adults can recall. We begin as toddlers throwing a stack of pillows together in the shape of walls to delineate an interior space. Then we add a blanket or sheet of some kind to act as a ceiling and door to eliminate being seen within our private space by those we should not allow entry. These forts, I feel, are the earliest forms of independence, government, and isolation that we as a people create.
So the questions are these:
What was the best fort you ever built, when did you build it and why was there a need for it?
On our farm we used to store bales of hay in the hay loft. Hundreds of them. Hay bales are great for making a fort. We’d move the bales from the full end of the loft to the empty, stacking them in patterns to make rooms, tunnels, secret entrances, you name it. Our most elaborate forts were multi-level - you could crawl through a tunnel, then you’d have to crawl up through holes in the ceiling to another level, and around two more corners would be a room big enough for 3 or 4 boys to hang out in.
Looking back on it, it was probably dangerous as hell. We were sitting under thousands of pounds of hay bales, supported by the engineering skills of 10 year old boys.
The only problem with it from our perspective was the chaff. It could get mighty itchy in there.
Where the esoteric hoo-ha were you, to have those building materials?
We built some really great snow forts when I was a kid. I have pictures of me at probably age 2 or 3 all bundled up coming out of a snow fort my sisters had built. Snow forts are also special to me because it is how my best friend and I became best friends. My friend’s older sister was my Discovery 4-H leader and one day I accidentally got off the school bus at their house because I thought our meeting was that day. My friend and I spent the afternoon building an awesome snow fort and afterward we warmed our feet by the heat vent and her mom gave us cookies and hot chocolate. It’s one of my favorite memories from childhood.
I used to build living room forts, too, usually when I had friends staying overnight. We brought in chairs from the dining room and draped blankets over the tops to make a tent-like structure.
I never grew out of making the Ultimate Fort . My treehouse threads speak for themselves. You only live once right?
An island off the coast of North Carolina. Dunes to hide behind, trees for walls and slate from the building of the original lighthouse.
Grandmom would take us to a cabinet manufacturing place and we’d ask them for all their scrap wood. My cousins and I would bring it home and constructed a fort built over several years that extended from halfway up a tree to the ground and then into tunnels dug below. Freakin’ death trap, it was. A tetnus and live burial nightmare for the grandparents.
When I was at college I built an enormous snow fort. It was at least 20 ft in diameter, and enclosed by a chest-high outer wall. The inside had several pile-of-hollowed-out-snow rooms connected by tunnels. Three very tall (over six feet) adults could sit comfortably together in the largest room. It was damn cool.
I’m planning on doing something similar this winter if I’ve got time and enough snow.
My parents would turn the thermostat down at night, just enough to keep the pilot light going. On Saturday morning, we kids would wake up hours before them to watch cartoons. But the house was so cold that we’s pull our blankets off our beds and inflate them over a hot-air vent, leaving a hole just large enough to peek out at the TV (this was years before sports stadia such as the Humphrey Dome in Minneapolis used the same princible for their roofs). When my mom finally came downstairs she’d be angry because by trapping the hot air, we’d tricked the thermostat into thinking the house was still cold and kicking in more often.
Unfortunately, there were four of us, and not all the air vents had equal sight lines to the tv. This is where the eternal question of offense VS defense came into play: a sofa cushion could be sqaundered into making the floor more comfortable, or it could be used to deflate the air-fort of a rival stateholder, or it could be used to construct a defense shield, so as to prevent the devastation of a sofa cushion air strike as one sat blindly in a bubble of hot air eating cold cereal.
I remember when I was about 10 years old we got new living room furniture and I was allowed to use the old furnature as a fort in the garden with a few old boxes and planks. This lasted a wek or so until the first rain when the whole lot got carted off to the local dump.
One winter, on our modest, little front lawn. I built the Ultimate Ice Fortress of Doo-oo-oo-oom! I used snow then buckets of water, then I’d add wood to bother reinforce it as well as make it multi-level. More buckets of water and heavy packing – had to change my mittens every 20 minutes because they got soaked.
It got so elaborate that my father came out to marel and he got into building it too. I built turrets! I had a flag. The ice was so polished that no invading army could scale its walls without sliding to their doom!
“Ha!” Said I. “This fortress is impregnable! We’ll never be conquered by the usurpers!”
Well, okay, I was nine years old, so actually I said:
“Ha! No one will bust into our fort! We’d win any snowball fight!”
Whereupon my father burst my bubble with:
“Hmm, yeah. Too bad you can’t actually have a snowball fight, what with building it in front of the big window.”
:smack:
we used to build forts and have battles between the largest dunes. In a place barren of scrub trees behind which to hide. There was no shelter, only them and us. we imagined we were stranded pirates, frothing in a Berserker mania at the thought of the battle. Some carried bows, some spears, and some, such as myself, had both. Everyone had a trashcan lid or brushy stick, with which to deflect stray blows aimed too high. We all knew without saying that the spears and arrows would be propelled below the waist; The battle raged with near misses; to us these were the hits. Our goal was to scare our opponents, their fear substituting for blood. I was out of arrows, I had spent my spear, and the fishing line had broken off of my bow. Screaming the most marvelous cry of fecal curse words, I hurled my bow at the enemy ranks. My targets curse was equally impressive as the blunt end of my missile struck home two inches above his left eyebrow. The boy’s blood, needless to say, ended the battle. He got four stitches and we all got in trouble when his parents called our parents. I was forced to apologize to the little weasel, forced because apparently my mother didn’t understand that people get hurt in battle, and received two weeks in my room without television. I endured my imprisonment with the knowledge that there would be other battles, other heroic acts. Besides, I built the most wonderful fort in my closet, the cool clean clothes concealing my space from usurpers.
In the neighborhood where I grew up, my backyard had the tallest tree. Therefore, my tree had to be where we built The Treehouse.
Damn, that thing was ugly- but it was big: SEVEN stories.
Granted, most of those were merely big enough for us to crawl through, but dammit, SEVEN STORIES.
I loved that thing.
The greatest fort I ever had was one time when my father was picking up some old furniture from my aunt’s house. He loaded up the back of his truck (it was enclosed) and my brother and I rode in with the furniture. During the six hour ride, we built elaborate forts using the furniture and pillows and upon arriving home both agreed the experience had been “cool”.
I used to make forts of all sizes, a couple for myself and one for each “race” of my action figures. My absolute by far and away favorite though was the one I built for my “Ft. Apache men” (the little unicolored wax/plastic action figures that are just over an inch or so tall) on a natural mini-mesa in our pasture. The mesa was about the size of an overturned bathtub and I worked on it everyday in summer until it was loaded with secret tunnels, granaries, a sunken grazing area for horses [with a ramp leading up and down] and even a couple of murder holes. The fortifications at the top were dried mud with an inner wall of sticks and several trenches. I’ve never been to Masada, but I doubt they improved much on my design.
Later I “switched sides” and started working with the besieging force to dig a tunnel under and up the mesa but I never made it (it would have been fine except the tunnel had to be large enough to accomodate my hand [making it way out of perspective for the plastic soldiers and impossible to do much with after going more than forearm deep].) That’s when I instead started building little villages that had been deserted by the villagers who took refuge on the mesa fort; the houses were built out of cardboard and sticks and dried grass and man oh man ohn man did they ever burn nicely (and the great thing about such abundant bio materials is that you could rebuild and reburn the village constantly).
I also used to love to convert styrofoam shipping squares into fortifications. Later when I went through a religious phase I loved to set fire to styrofoam and “rain down fire and brimstone” on said villagers (burning styrofoam being not unlike napalm or Greek fire in its properties).
My sweetest fort was built with my frient and my brother whe I was about 11 or 12. We found the perfect spot: a rock about ten feet high and about ten feet across, with smaller rocks each about five feet across leading upt to it like steps, and trees and bushes covering it from outside view. We took drift wood and leaned it up against some of the smaller rocks to make “guard posts.” We then used additional drift wood to make a small shack about 4 feet high, using a boulder for a corner. It was sweet. We could have lived, if we had some kind of food supply. It also had an ocean view. The only downside was that you had to walk through a somewhat prickly bush to get there.
Here’s to childhood memories at the beach.