5. Fort, there!

The Language of Houses author Alison Lurie references Frank Lloyd Wright's claim that what we want in our home spaces is the right combination of opportunities for "perching and nesting." And she cites Gerry Griswold's Feeling Like a Kid in observing that the nesting part of our avian orientation is particularly clear in children's literature, where safe, enclosed spaces abound as havens for adult-beleaguered characters. Reading Lurie on this topic brought back in vivid memory my own time of being a kid (and feeling like one, too), in which the most important such spaces were undoubtedly the variety of forts we built (the 'we' being various friends and neighborhood kids, though probably my sister was involved on occasion as well). These ranged from structures erected indoors out of cardboard, blankets, and bed frames, to holes dug in the ground or branches and logs stacked against properly spaced trees in the woods. Sometimes natural features by themselves sufficed, like the huge divots in the ground left when a tree fell and its upended roots pulled with them a mass of earth.

In retrospect, two things are remarkable about all of this fortifying activity, particular the outdoor forms. One is just how much it reflected the militarization of our minds that occurred as we absorbed the then still ubiquitous narratives of the Western frontier, where forts played a central role, as well as stories about both older and more recent forms of fort-reinforced soldiering. These were often more aspirational than instructive in what we could take from them. Keeps and moats were an impossibility, of course, at least on anything like a satisfying scale – dams are one thing, but the amount of rock required for a decent wall, by which I mean one that wouldn’t teeter and crush a kid-sized constructor, was beyond our capacity to manage. I also always wanted to make a structure of sharpened logs erected into an imposing set of walls like the ones I saw in stories of the Wild West, but the materials and engineering were again beyond me. Still, smaller, rougher, more improvisational structures were easy and satisfying enough to make.

Unsurprisingly, forts often went with combat play, much of which involved toy guns whose realistic appearance would shock most parents today, at least those in the blue half of the country. These usually had some sort of noise-producing capacity, whether a plastic rattle designed to imitate automatic gunfire or, in the case of some inherited older ones, cap-generated bangs that also resulted in an acrid whiff of gun smoke. For our more intense adventures, we'd also all don our camo outfits, purchased at the Army and Navy store downriver in Ambridge, PA, whose shelves and racks were endlessly absorbing to the pre-adolescent male mind.

It's striking to me now how completely non-predicative this militaristic play was for our adult views about war. Just as the forts and other nesting spots were undoubtedly part of the psychological dynamic of learning how to negotiate the largeness of the world and the smallness one felt in it among the adults who ran it, playing at war was probably more about feeling like one could have an effect on that world, even if only in the role of destroyer. Real violence as an expression of real powerlessness is, after all, far from unknown in the adult world, and with an experience of powerlessness being one of the defining features of childhood, it makes sense that simulated violence would offer some escape. But it was only simulated. The reality of the violence of war lay completely beyond our comprehension. There was just some link we didn't make between what we were pretending at and whatever real pain and violence we experienced at the hands of others – and there was certainly pain and violence inflicted among kids, even in the 'nice' area we lived.

It’s hard to pinpoint when the shift occurred that made such play unappealing. Like many things one outgrows, there’s a clear change, but not a clear point one can say is the one where the change happened. Many kids don’t outgrow war play, of course, or, rather, what it was only playing at becomes real, and the prospect of battle becomes a genuine adult desire, or at least something one is willing to endure for the sake of something else. This may or may not coincide with the desire to inflict violence and destruction; more noble motivations are also possible. But for most of those I forted around with, this wasn't the outcome for us, indeed, it was just the opposite.

The other remarkable thing about forts is how much of the pleasure of them lay in their design and construction. Engineering a space that created the sense of both safety and possible advantage in a conflict and finding the materials or natural spots to make it work was work that required all of one's senses and ingenuity and often quite a bit of strength. And unlike the pleasure of imagined battle, this is a pleasure that foreshadowed far more universal pleasures of adulthood. For while only a few seek out the reality of war, what else can you find that crosses nearly every cultural divide but the love of building, renovating, and otherwise shaping the spaces we call home, the nests and perches we return to every day?