Forts

What red-blooded American boy has never built a fort?  Regardless of whether you live in the country or city, whether Rebel or Yankee, rich or poor, black or white, it is just part of a boys DNA.

The first fort I remember building was made out of burlap sacks.  Now burlap is the highfalutin' name for a gunny sack or we just called'em "toe sacks".  My brother Ralph and I nailed boards as cross-pieces between four small Black Jack trees (roughly in a square), put cardboard on the roof and tacked toe sacks from the cow feed on the sides.  It was great!...until the rains came and "beat upon that house" which made the roof collapse...."and great was the fall of it"!

Another fort we built...or actually moved into...was an old hog farrowing house.  Mr. Wages, my best friend Eric's Dad, had got out of the swine business but one of the farrowing houses remained.  The sow moved out...we moved in!  It was rain, snow and sleet proof...but a smell lingered...and my friends, it wasn't a bacon smell.  We even cut a small hole in the back wall and built a fireplace!  On one of the only big birthday parties that I remember having (my birthday is December 19th...), I had some boys in my class over and we had about ten hyper nine-year-olds in our "fort"!  Believe me, being such "close" friends is highly overrated!!

In the summer of 1974, Eric and I began the construction of "Fort Thompson".  I really don't think we called it anything but "The Fort" but it was built on Mary Thompson's land, out of a pile of old fence posts.  We had a fire place in this fort also...seriously...it is a thousand wonders that the whole countryside didn't go up in flames!  The farther we got into the summer the less charm our little post fort had.  So...we hauled in some scrap lumber and added onto the top!  This satisfied us for a few days until we found more scrap lumber...   Hey! why stop at at a two-story fort?  A three-story fort would be quite charming (charming? Did I really just use that word again?) Quite Macho!...Macho was the word I was looking for!  We spent many a happy hour in that fort but boys will be boys and by the fall we had gone on to other haunts.

However...I guess my Dad was pretty impressed with our fort because when I was looking through our old slides the other day I found the pictures below....

Our "Fort" with my brother Ralph carving on the tree at the right, Eric looking out the "picture window" and meself in the "basement"

Our old dog "Sandy" keeping guard!