Like many child hood toys, one of the purposes of our fort was to
show it to other kids and make them jealous. True to the maxim that
you always want what you cannot have, the Attaway cousins liked
coming over to our house because we had a huge yard that we could dig
in and build on and throw fruit at each other on and run around and
hide in. One of my cousin Blake's favorite activities when he came
over to play was buildign on and hanging out in the fort. We would go
back there and build for hours and hours and then we would go beg to
sleep out in the fort. Now the fort was not exactly built to code, it
was more of a Frank Loyd Wright type structure that was long on
concept and short on execution. We generally had a vague plan in our
heads and then built out sticks as far as that plan required using
the minimum amount of material. We would then put on decking material
like a piece of plywood and then walk out on it and see where it
needed supports. We did this in a safe way by holding a branch
overhead while we would walk out on and see if our minimalist design
would hold our weight. Where the design was squishy we would pop in a
cross member or a diagonal support and repeat the process until the
fort was firm. Then we would put up four corner pieces and cap them
with boards tying it all together. That box frame would then get a
large sheet of the lightest paneling we could find and that would be
nailed on with the absolute minimum number of nails it took to keep
it from falling off. You did not lean against the walls as they had
more of the structural strength of the paper screens in Japanese
houses, you would have shot right through and fell to the ground. The
reason for all of this under building was simple, we bought our own
nails and wood and on our budget less was definitely more. One day
when Blake was over we build an entire 8' x 8' loft with walls ten
feet off of the ground using our 'build it-check it-firm it up'
methodology. We were so excited about finishing such a large project
in one day that we decided to sleep out in the new room. We rounded
up all of our gear and got out there to stay up late and tell jokes
and stories. About midnight the wind started blowing like it wanted
us out of the tree, and it just about got it newly anthropomorphized
wish. The panel walls started falling off as the tree churned in the
wind. First the East wall came down and even though we were well
aware that it offered absolutely no protection from falls there was a
psychological element to not having an opaque but useless barrier to
falling right off the edge. We rotated our bags so that the toes
faced the newly most dangerous edge and we tried to ride it our but
then the south wall fell off and the platform was pitching quite a
bit in the storm. At that point we decided to discretion ourselves
into a chance to build again another day and retired to the
marginally better built mobile home that was at least on good old
terra firma and less likely to collapse violently and kill us
both. It was still fun and we put the walls back up the nest morning
because if there is one thing we didn't do is let a little
demonstration of the utterly tragic potential of our undershot
building methods stop us from sticking to it.
