Category Archives: Forts and Tree Houses
Forts, Tree Houses and Childhood Dreams
My brother Dan and I spent plenty of hours building forts in the woods in front of our house. We built some really good ones using scrap materials that we recovered from the neighborhood. Some of our forts even had real doors! At the time, they were incredible feats of engineering, the envy of any aspiring architect. Looking back with the clarity that thirty years provides, they were actually very rudimentary, somewhat dangerous shacks with protruding nails, splintered wood and leaky roofs.
But they were our creation. We built them with our own sweat and blood, literally. In our mind, they were our dreams transformed into reality. A place of our own. A secret hideout. A clubhouse.
Recently, the Wall Street Journal featured an article about upscale treehouses. This is what we were dreaming about when we were boys. It’s wonderful to see grown ups thinking the same way today — using their imagination as adults in the same way that we used ours when we were young, adventurous boys in the woods. Sure, their work might be a lot more beautiful (and safer) than ours was. But the dream is the same.
A hideout is never a bad idea, no matter of how old you are.
