Engineering

Every little boy has built a fort at one point or another. For some of us, it was an obsession that went well beyond draping a blanket over the backs of a few chairs or using all of the couch cushions to fortify the area underneath the dining room table. My imagination always took over and I envisioned that I was building something fabulous with turrets and walls and dungeons and gun emplacements. Even as I got older -well beyond the acceptable “fort building” age, my imagination would still get the best of me. When my parents asked me to help make a chicken coop or a dog house, the projects would take on a life of their own and the chickens would end up with a skylight and the dog had a porch to relax on before going to bed.


I remember even at the oh-so-cool age of 15, John Quinn and I built a tree fort deep in the woods at my parent’s place in Ligonier. Granted, our imaginations were a bit “enhanced” at the time, but we undertook a massive project that was designed (in our heads) as a three level cabin 25 feet up in a grove of trees with connected walkways and ropeswings. We hauled tractor load after tractor load of building materials back into the woods. The chainsaw needed refilled three times and we pounded so many nails into those trees that you could probably set off a metal detector from 100 paces. What we ended up with was a simple 8x12 platform with an irregular hole for a ladder about 10 feet off the ground. The results just never seemed to work out like it did for those kids in a Disney movie. Our "cabin" got used maybe two times before it finally fell, broken and rotted to the forest floor. The debris were removed by my parents 15 years later.


Well last weekend I took a nice long bike ride up through Spaarnwoude and instead of my usual route along the climbing wall and indoor ski hill, I took a little used side trail between two canals in the heart of this massive park. Lucky for me it was early spring and the leaves weren’t on the trees yet, because otherwise the brief flash of blue would have never caught my eye. I couldn’t tell what it was, but curiosity got the best of me. I thought that I might have just found my first hobo camp in The Netherlands - somthing definitely worth checking out. So I pulled over, parked my bike, and walked/slipped down a steep muddy embankment through a thick tangle of trees.


And this is what I found:





Whoa! Now THAT is a fort! You have to look beyond the ratty pile of tarps and corrugated metal. The overturned kayak. The rickety, rotting pylons. This thing is a masterpiece of childhood engineering! It is as good as it gets! Not only because it is built up onto makeshift stilts and is hanging over dark, murky water - something that you know your mother would hate, but because it has walls, a roof, and a lantern hanging inside. Really sophisticated stuff!


There are very, very, very, (ad infinitum), few times that I envy our friends who have kids. But when I see something like this, I wish that I could borrow one for a while so that I would have an excuse to pitch-in and build one more fort before I die.