Miggsy and the Tree Fort:
The sound of Miggsy screaming and branches breaking was probably a clue something was going wrong. I was too busy trying to nail the roof back on. Of course, that may have been a sign as well.
We wanted a tree fort. In this day of pre-fab cedar playground sets, the tree fort is a rapidly fading part of Americana. “But in my day” as an Old Fart usually begins these stories, “weren’t such thing yet “. Kids used scrap lumber, sticks, logs, buckets of nails from the back corners of garages, and various other items. The Honeycomb Hideout was the Beverly Hills model in the spectrum. You started with four planks of (hopefully) similar sizes. You then took a handful of nails, and either a hammer, or a rock, and pounded the boards together into a quadrilateral frame. Note- this was never actually square, or for that matter, rectangular. Think parallelogram, or tesseract. Next, you realized that what you really needed was altitude. Therefore, you’d find a suitable tree, haul the frame up into the branches and proceeded to begin to build your little castle in the sky. Nailing up boards as they came to hand was an art-not a science. Oh sure, you occasionally ran across the kid with the full set of (stolen from Dad) tools, but truth be told, all you really needed was a hammer- claw for preference, or ball peen, and a saw. And of the two, it was the saw that was optional. Walls were largely made of nails held together by boards. The heads of the nails added to the outer defenses - this was proven when Billy Cooper was playing with his older brother’s .410 “squirrel gun” shotgun and sent a cloud of lead into the side of the Wallman brothers’ fort. They were inside it at the time, and well, all they reported hearing was pings, and their picture of Miss October got shredded. The wood around the nails smelled like gunpowder after that. They thought that someone lit a firecracker. When a pale Mr. Cooper showed up, their response to “Are you boys okay?” was “Yeah! Try again!”
Billy Cooper went to private school that fall.
Anyway, we wanted a tree fort. So the great scrounge for wood began (nails, never a problem, were already to hand) and we assembled an attractive pile of 2x4 scraps, railroad ties (some not quite scrap yet, but that rail line was abandoned, or so we thought, at the time, but that’s another story). Plus, we had the mother load of all wooden shipping crates (which, to avoid sunburn, we brought from the back of the Municipal Yard at midnight). We had loads and loads of nails, and we got the frame into the elm tree by the driveway with no trouble whatsoever. The nails were prime stock; a three gallon bucket filled to the brim with four-inch nails. Sure, the planks and boards were only two inches thick, but, hey, you had a margin. When the nails came through the boards, you could also improve holding ability by bending the surplus at an angle to the boards. It was a good theory. Anyway, when you were done, you had a sort of sky-box, the gaps in the boards for windows, or rather peep holes, and you could always put a tarp over the roof when you were expecting rain. The unfortunate side effect of wet canvas is that it becomes nearly air-tight, sealing the structure not only against the elements, but also against intrusive atmospheric gasses.
We think that’s why the Wallman brothers were like the way they were. It had been a rainy summer.
Miggsy and I finished our fort. We had to test the strength of our build. So Miggsy got in, and jumped on the floor-or rather frog-hopped, as if he’d have attempted to stand, he probably would have banged his head, or got nails in his scalp. The interior was a bit like someone had turned a porcupine inside out. So Miggsy hopped, and I climbed on the roof to see what wasn’t holding, and quickly nail it back into place. The roof was letting in more daylight than it had, so I was walloping away with the hammer, when…well, the creak, then the scream and branches.
If you’ve ever heard the poem that begins,
“The boy stood on the burning deckWhence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead."
The tree fort version would go
“The boy stood on the tilting roof,
Whence all the rest had sudden gone “Poof!”,
The tree branch that over him waved,
could not stop Gravity’s crave..”
Bark, as a substance, often goes unremarked. I am here to tell you, it was not so that day. Miggsy left a tooth in that bark, and I, several feet of skin and denim.
Odd that so many nails missed me. You’d see a board coming straight for you, points a-tilt and gleaming, and ten it’d rebound off another board, or Miggsy, and then, when all was done and you were at the bottom of the tree, boards and leaves falling gently around you, you realized why you did stuff like this. For the peace of mind it gave you.
We wanted a tree fort. In this day of pre-fab cedar playground sets, the tree fort is a rapidly fading part of Americana. “But in my day” as an Old Fart usually begins these stories, “weren’t such thing yet “. Kids used scrap lumber, sticks, logs, buckets of nails from the back corners of garages, and various other items. The Honeycomb Hideout was the Beverly Hills model in the spectrum. You started with four planks of (hopefully) similar sizes. You then took a handful of nails, and either a hammer, or a rock, and pounded the boards together into a quadrilateral frame. Note- this was never actually square, or for that matter, rectangular. Think parallelogram, or tesseract. Next, you realized that what you really needed was altitude. Therefore, you’d find a suitable tree, haul the frame up into the branches and proceeded to begin to build your little castle in the sky. Nailing up boards as they came to hand was an art-not a science. Oh sure, you occasionally ran across the kid with the full set of (stolen from Dad) tools, but truth be told, all you really needed was a hammer- claw for preference, or ball peen, and a saw. And of the two, it was the saw that was optional. Walls were largely made of nails held together by boards. The heads of the nails added to the outer defenses - this was proven when Billy Cooper was playing with his older brother’s .410 “squirrel gun” shotgun and sent a cloud of lead into the side of the Wallman brothers’ fort. They were inside it at the time, and well, all they reported hearing was pings, and their picture of Miss October got shredded. The wood around the nails smelled like gunpowder after that. They thought that someone lit a firecracker. When a pale Mr. Cooper showed up, their response to “Are you boys okay?” was “Yeah! Try again!”
Billy Cooper went to private school that fall.
Anyway, we wanted a tree fort. So the great scrounge for wood began (nails, never a problem, were already to hand) and we assembled an attractive pile of 2x4 scraps, railroad ties (some not quite scrap yet, but that rail line was abandoned, or so we thought, at the time, but that’s another story). Plus, we had the mother load of all wooden shipping crates (which, to avoid sunburn, we brought from the back of the Municipal Yard at midnight). We had loads and loads of nails, and we got the frame into the elm tree by the driveway with no trouble whatsoever. The nails were prime stock; a three gallon bucket filled to the brim with four-inch nails. Sure, the planks and boards were only two inches thick, but, hey, you had a margin. When the nails came through the boards, you could also improve holding ability by bending the surplus at an angle to the boards. It was a good theory. Anyway, when you were done, you had a sort of sky-box, the gaps in the boards for windows, or rather peep holes, and you could always put a tarp over the roof when you were expecting rain. The unfortunate side effect of wet canvas is that it becomes nearly air-tight, sealing the structure not only against the elements, but also against intrusive atmospheric gasses.
We think that’s why the Wallman brothers were like the way they were. It had been a rainy summer.
Miggsy and I finished our fort. We had to test the strength of our build. So Miggsy got in, and jumped on the floor-or rather frog-hopped, as if he’d have attempted to stand, he probably would have banged his head, or got nails in his scalp. The interior was a bit like someone had turned a porcupine inside out. So Miggsy hopped, and I climbed on the roof to see what wasn’t holding, and quickly nail it back into place. The roof was letting in more daylight than it had, so I was walloping away with the hammer, when…well, the creak, then the scream and branches.
If you’ve ever heard the poem that begins,
“The boy stood on the burning deckWhence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead."
The tree fort version would go
“The boy stood on the tilting roof,
Whence all the rest had sudden gone “Poof!”,
The tree branch that over him waved,
could not stop Gravity’s crave..”
Bark, as a substance, often goes unremarked. I am here to tell you, it was not so that day. Miggsy left a tooth in that bark, and I, several feet of skin and denim.
Odd that so many nails missed me. You’d see a board coming straight for you, points a-tilt and gleaming, and ten it’d rebound off another board, or Miggsy, and then, when all was done and you were at the bottom of the tree, boards and leaves falling gently around you, you realized why you did stuff like this. For the peace of mind it gave you.
posted by Buccaneer | 20:24
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