Forts

[Lightning Rod]

Don Purdy was my hero in fort building. His back yard was a miniature village. It looked like something from The Little Rascals. It had six or seven buildings complete with footpaths and running water and tin-can telephones.

It became a competitive sport in our neighborhood to build forts. You were nobody in the hood if you didn't have a fort and the cools guys had cools forts. There were tree houses, lean-tos, tents, dugouts and every manner of adolescent architecture.

My best fort was three stories high with a secret hidden basement under the false floor. It was a skyscraper as forts go. I would sleep there some nights and at dawn stand on the top and play my bugle. It had a flagpole.

We lived in the perfect place for fort building. It was a neighborhood at the edge of town and there were still houses being built. That's where we customarily stole the materials for our forts, from the construction sites. We stole lumber, nails, roofing materials etc. This was before Home Depot was invented and thirteen year-olds didn't have credit cards then.

Forts are magic places, alters for rites of passage. A kid needs territory. Especially boys. Our forts were where we could do anything we wanted without adult interference. We smoked and told dirty jokes and perused forbidden literature. It was personal space that we had claimed for ourselves. No girls allowed, only pictures of them.

Did you ever have a fort, a hideout, a clubhouse?