So last night, my friend Kirstyn came over to my dorm. We weren't having a party or sending out invitations for a hangout session, but we did have grapes. But Kirstyn heard that we had grapes and made her way over here. And thats where this story starts.
Actually its less of a story and more of a memoir. We got into all kinds of conversations because of these grapes. We started talking about what we remember from out childhood. We touched on old sports that we sucked at, a n embarrassing collection of diaries which Kirstyns dad found under her mattress which confessed her undying love for just about every boy in the school, we talked about how we were both the problem child and how we could get out little siblings to do just about anything. Then we hit the subject of forts.
I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, i LIVED for forts. Hell, I still do! When we were little, our babysitter let us rip up the basement and make what I thought was a whole kingdom of castles and cottages. A few years later, me and my friends decided to turn the whole basement into one interconnected fort. It was HUGE. All kinds of tunnels and secret passegways, of course it was delicate as anything because we ran out of couches and chairs to use as walls so eventually got creative and used hockey sticks and foamies. We made up names for each of the rooms, for example. There was one hallway that was covered by a red blanked (actually it was a kimono, dont ask why we had a kimono.) and the light shone through and made everything slightly red-pink, so (and this is where we got REALLY creative), it was called the Red Room. Then there was the Pillow Room (self explanitory), the Dungeon, and the Bakery (?) and all kinds of other rooms that I cant remember.
Next, we moved out of the basement and into the school yard. Every winter, we made snow forts. Like any small town school that was too broke to afford the new, cutting edge play equipment, my school had things like rusty swings, a simple may-pole and tractor tires lined up vertically and half burried to create tunnels. Hick, I know. Anyway, we made several forts in the winter, all with different purposes. We had the Safe Fort, which involved blocking off one end of the tire-tunnel with snow to create tube of wind block. We would invite the younger kids into it on days that were too cold to stay outside. There was a hole in the green tire so someone could always keep a lookout if the bell rang and it was time to go in. Then there was the Maze Forts. These weren't really forts, but more trails in the deep snow. We ran tracks in the snow and cleared out "nests" in the snow as rooms. These were for warm days when it was nice enough to be on your hands and knees in the snow through the entire period of recess.
Finally, there was the Battle Fort. There was always older kids who thouroughly enjoyed destroying our hard work and throwing snowballs, so to protect our selves, we made an abundance of snow protection gear: snowballs, snow sheilds and snow swords aka the really long, dirty icicles that would get up to three feet long and run off the broken gutter of the jr high roof. The battle fort was epic. From the outside, it looked like a topless igloo, we built up snow blocks as high as we could reach, and when the younger teachers were on supervision, they would help us get the extra high ones. We never actually used our snow gear but we liked to think that it had a purpose.
My absolute favorite winter fort was the Ice Castle. It literally looked like this picture
Well I thought it did anyway. Our school was right beside the hockey rink, so the zamboni would pile up the snow in the school grounds. He would dump every pile in a different spot, so it looked kindof like mogels on flat land. One day, a bobcat came in out of nowhere and combined all the little piles into one massive, peaked snowpile. Me and my fifth grade friends immediatly took over the hill as ours and stared carving out little rooms and creating inventory. We had all the resources in the grounds and we traded them with other forts for cool stuff like sticks with all the bark peeled off or big icicles. The hill looked pretty sweet, but it had one unique attraction that made it my all time fav. The slide. We saved our milk cartons after lunches and filled them with water, then took them out to the hill and poured it all over the roughly carved path from the very peak to three meters in front of the hill so it was glare ice. The slide had two bumps in it that would give you a bit of air, and hurt your butt if you landed too hard. The extra three feet of ice was for competitions to see who could slide the furthest and for a quick getaway when the bell rang and it was time to get back to class.
After the snow melted, we would head to the forest in the park where we would build my summer home away from home. We cleared out a patch in the woods and all carved our names into the "Mother Tree" that grew through the center of the space. A broken jar hung from a branch and held all our treasures: bottle caps, glittery rocks and snake skins. I took it upon myself to create the resting place of the fort. It was pretty sweet. I took willow branches and bent them around eachother to create a dome-like room, then covered the frame with leafy branches for privacy. We had a pillow room too, which was 50 or so shopping bags filled with leaves and tied to create a solid mushy room. We had a kitchen in the thick of the thorn patch for whatever reason, no one went back there, and a bathroom behind a sheet of old plywood that we found in the Lost Camp (which looked like an abandoned campsite, it was really eery to us until we found out it was part of someones backyard haha). We had a lookout tree so we could see if the grinchy old woman who planted flowers in the park was coming or not, she hated us. Or so we thought. We perfected our fort year after year and eagerly showed any new improvements to our parents, who willingly packed us picnic lunches which we insisted on wrapping in a handkerchief and tying around the end of a stick so we could throw it over our shoulders like they did in the movies.
We made up our own code language and had marked territory throughout the forest. We had our fort, which lead onto Bird Trail, which eventually lead to some crazy guy's cages which sometimes had peacocks in them, then you hit Trampoline Trail, because there was the springs of an old mattress in part of it, then into the Lost Camp and to Slug Hill and Pee Hill. Each self-explanatory. Then finally we had Lookout Point which was a tree that leaned out into the open but was still mostly covered by leaves.
I was so disapointed the year that our fort got flooded out. We couldn't go in it for two weeks, and when we got back in, we found new innitials on the tree and the place completely destroyed. As we were looking at the damage we found bits of a ripped up magazine. We picked them up, they looked messy. But when we looked at them closer, we were disgusted! Someone not only had destroyed our baby, but also torn up a XXX magazine and left us the pieces. That was the last year I worked on the fort.
Anyway, thats my little playback of something that was incredibly important to me ten years ago. I didn't go into that much depth when I was talking with Kirstyn but it was mentioned. Over grapes.
