The hill seemed large
The trails were long
Explorers were not daunted
The sounds were strange
The woods were thick
Perhaps the hill was haunted
They’d face their fears
They’d journey on
But still they had a hunch
They’d blaze new trails
They’d fight off threats
And still get home for lunch
The perfect spot
To build a fort
Was in a field of nettles
To get there they
Must drop scrap wood
To get the weeds to settle
From that strong fort
The brave lads could
Explore the mighty hill
To fight the demons
Or the spies
Who surely live there still
They’d play wild games
To test their skill
And find a daily winner
All afternoon
They’d romp and trek
And still get home for dinner
The summer of
The fort was grand
Exploring was a thrill
In sixth grade one
Can rule the world
Atop a wooded hill
I remember when I first discovered that I had a video game of sorts built into my cell phone. My son alerted me to this possibility after I witnessed him with his phone executing what appeared to be an extremely complicated call that clearly was not covered by our calling plan. Who knew you could use your cell phone for more than talking?
Had I been paying attention I should have known. Games were tame compared to text messaging, wireless internet access, mobile e-mail, and that whole picture-sending thing that phones can now do. I also witnessed my daughter during her high school years playing what appeared to be fairly complicated games on her graphing calculator. There was a time when I thought it was the height of tech to be able to punch 7734 into a calculator and turn it upside down to get a good laugh at that text message.
The interesting thing about my cell phone game was that it was very much like an arcade game I used to pay a quarter to play thirty years ago. Just after Pong made it big, there was another Atari game called Breakout, the object of which was to hit fake bricks with a pong-like ball to clear all the bricks from the screen. Somehow this game had migrated from the arcade to my cell phone.
I confess I played it a couple of times just for the novelty of playing a cell-phone game. The novelty fades about as fast as it did for its pay-per-play predecessor. In general, I’ve never been much of a computer game person. Even as a teen-ager mis-spending my youth in an arcade, I would gravitate toward the more kinesthetic entertainment like air hockey, foosball, or even pinball. I tend to favor real reality over the virtual kind.
As youngsters we had no real electronic games to speak of, unless you count the electric football game that vibrated plastic figures in random directions on a game board. In high school, computer gaming consisted of using a teletype terminal to connect by handset modem to a central computing center to play interactive typewritten games likeOregon Trail: “You see a rabbit . . . type ‘bang.’” Perhaps that was why I preferred real world fun – it was actually more fun.
Maybe it was a more simple time; maybe we were just more easily amused; or maybe it’s just that my friends and I were terribly simple-minded. Regardless, my recollection is that we were, for example, able to entertain ourselves for hours with a piece of wood or an old, unused radio. My neighborhood buddy and I dedicated a whole summer trying to convert a discarded lawn mower into a go-cart. We never did complete it to the point where we could actually drive it, or even make it move forward under some power other than our own. It could have been a problem with the wooden drive train, or perhaps the red wagon-inspired front suspension and steering mechanism. On reflection, I’m not sure we ever actually got the motor running, but regardless, we killed a whole summer trying.
Our greatest adventures involved building forts. Over the years, we gradually evolved from lean-to structures adjacent to one of our garages to more complex construction projects built in remote wooded locations. The most elaborate of these was the Lime Kiln Hill tree fort.
I grew up inCannonFalls, a small town nestled in a valley at the junction of two rivers named coincidentally the Cannon and the Little Cannon. It’s a beautiful town, nestled among rolling hills. Our neighborhood was two blocks from downtown and two blocks from the edge of town by way of Lime Kiln Hill. This aptly-named area apparently was the source of much of the limestone used in local construction. The original school building, where my father was among the first attendees and I was among the last, was made of local limestone. The basement of our house, constructed in the years after the Civil War, also was made of limestone. From atop the hill, one had a commanding view of the town and the Cannon Rive rvalley extending west toward Byllesby Dam and its accompanying lake. For a youngster free to roam as far as his legs would take him, it truly felt like the top of the world.
Even so, “hill” was something of a misnomer, because it really was just an uphill slope out of the river valley that ended in a broad plateau of rich farmland. This plateau framed much of the southern and eastern end of town, and with the exception of a couple of roads leading out of town, was largely wooded and criss-crossed with paths. It was the perfect place for childhood adventure. We would spend entire summer days on the hill, playing army or Star Trek or spy or escaped convict or any other of a range of extremely violent games. In this simpler time, we were free to roam at will, with no parental worries about potential threats to our safety.
Parenthetically on the issue of child safety, I’m not sure what’s changed, whether the world is a less safe place, or we, in this era of instant global communication, are finally fully aware of the range of risks that has always existed. It certainly appears that as a society, we are becoming more prone to violence, but in terms of the average risk encountered by a child roaming free in the woods or elsewhere, I’m not sure the number of lunatics per capita has increased. Rather, I think, our level of worry per child has increased, based on the number of stories to which we are exposed. Regardless of any real or imagined risk, we roamed free from dawn until dusk, knowing enough to be home for meals and dreading the need to do afternoon chores.
In the wintertime, the hill was perfect for sledding, and we had two prime locations. One, a bobsled-like path we called Deadman’s Curve, was the cause of many undiagnosed and untreated concussions. The other was a path that led out onto a main road, that, in turn, ran all the way downtown. On a particularly icy day, riding the now unsafe runner sled, a person could start at the top of the hill, dodge traffic, and end up downtown, five blocks away, right in front of the Corner Café.
The best thing to do on Lime Kiln Hill, however, was construct forts. While a fort was vital for our army or spy games, the primary entertainment was in the construction of the structure itself. One summer, in particular, was devoted to the construction of THE PERFECT FORT. From our vast experience, we knew the easiest fort to defend was a tree fort, and so we began early in the spring to scout locations, finding what we believed to be the perfect spot for the perfect fort. We found an enormous elm that had split from a unified base into three trunks, spread out to a distance of about five feet apart at a level maybe ten feet off the ground: The perfect stilts on which to build a platform.
Better yet, the tree was off any of the beaten paths or, rather, we had to beat our own path. Our construction zone was nestled in a low-lying area some distance off a rather obscure trail, right in the middle of a giant patch of stinging nettles. No one would ever get to this fort.
Of course, it never occurred to us that no one would want to try, or that our super-secret fort was, in reality, only about a hundred yards removed from two main roads and several houses. It also never occurred to us that secrecy might be difficult to achieve when we had to haul all our building materials from our houses, along several busy streets, to the trailhead. We were, nevertheless, proud of the seclusion and relative unassailability we had achieved.
Building the fort was a lengthy process. We were unfortunately unable to arrange for delivery of our construction materials. Instead, we had to carry everything several blocks to the path, then along a narrow trail with at least two fallen logs to get over or under, and finally through the nettle field. We must have been quite a sight: A bunch of 6th graders trudging along Highway 19 with wagon loads of scrap lumber, old doors, tar paper, and other miscellaneous discarded materials. We didn’t know at the time that we were recycling pioneers.
We were particularly impressed with the genius of locating a fort in the middle of a nettle patch. The stinging plants would be a substantial deterrent to our fictional foes. Never mind that it was a serious non-fictional pain to get our materials to the construction site. We finally devised a plan where we would flop down an old door in front of us, flatten the plants, lift the door (with gloves when we remembered them), flop it over lengthwise, and advance to where the nettles had been flattened. This was somewhat cumbersome when hauling wood, and the nettles had a remarkable ability to almost instantaneously recover their upright and stinging position.
Considering the number of trips necessary and the number of times we had to make return trips home to retrieve forgotten tools, the fort went up remarkably fast. Granted, it was not the most elegant structure. Made of mismatched scrap lumber, it was stable enough, but presented some safety issues, like holes in the floor and limited walls. We constructed it on two levels, with the second level close to twenty feet off the ground. It could accommodate four of us more or less comfortably, without us fearing it would collapse. Once constructed, I believe it served as our base of operations for much of our summer adventuring.
I say, “I believe,” because the only thing I can recall with clarity is the construction process, not the actual use of the fort. I think it’s somehow significant that I recall more vividly the process rather than the end result. Same with the go-cart.
Without passing judgment on the relative value of today’s diversions – having wasted a Summer on the ill-fated engine I claim no right –even the casual observer has to notice that things have changed a bit. Our kids’ lives seem more harried and the fun is often virtual. The characters on the screen are doing the building or adventuring with our kids just moving a mouse. Maybe it’s a misguided nostalgic impossibility, but my wish for this and future generations of young people is that they may still have the opportunity to lose themselves in a fort or go-cart Summer.
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