I followed a complete stranger, a boy a little older than my 13 years, into the woods. I didn’t even know his name. I like to think I wouldn’t have gone along unless my big brother were there. I don’t like to think about how the day would have turned out if my brother hadn’t been there.
This kid who neither of us knew from Adam had bumped into us on a hazy summer day in the neighborhood and invited us to his “fort.” My brother and I were immediately curious and didn’t even ask his name before agreeing to follow him to the place.
I can’t believe how lucky we were to grow up in a place surrounded by woods, short-lived though it was. A five-minute walk from our street, through a knot of slightly newer homes, around a bevy of construction sites where still newer homes were rising, and finally to a dense wood brought us to this mysterious fort. The wood was small, tamed, and safe; but to us it was as good as Narnia, an untouched wilderness begging to be explored.
Let’s just call the kid Kevin. He stopped us before a low, scrubby bush growing against the diagonal trunk of a fallen maple. What at first looked like a solid mass of brambles and leaves was revealed to be hollow as Kevin pulled aside some branches. Inside this den were camp chairs, a rough blanket, and a deflated soccer ball. Pure magic.
Kevin, my brother, and I spent an enjoyable afternoon hanging out in his fort. I have absolutely no memory of the details; all I remember is the fort and the fact that after that day, we never saw Kevin again.
My brother and I returned to the spot some time later and found to our horror that the fort was gone. Everything was gone. Trees had been torn down and dragged away, underbrush had been cleared, and the raw Texas dirt was already dotted with rectangles of leveled ground in a pattern vaguely resembling the established suburban neighborhood it is now.
I was too young to understand things like housing and urban sprawl and growing families needing places to live; I certainly never made the connection that my own home might sit on the grave of some other kid’s beloved fort. I was just sad.
In the coming weeks, as construction blossomed and skeletal frames of new homes sprang up, my brother and I struck back the only way we knew how: senseless mischief. Armed with two hefty walking sticks from his Boy Scout days, we invaded the construction zone in broad daylight and stripped the neon ribbons off every construction stake we found. Soon our walking sticks were festooned with green, pink, yellow, and orange ribbons in such abundance that we were probably visible for a mile as we trolled around looking for more.
After a few days, the fun had to end when a contractor chased us away from one construction site in his work truck. Though we hid in some surviving trees and managed to escape after five heart-pounding minutes of trying not to breathe while the infuriated man berated us and demanded that we come out and face justice, we were sufficiently shaken to cease and desist.
I don’t know if our parents ever knew where we got the ribbons that remained tied to the walking sticks for several years, but they certainly never knew the full extent of our nonsense, because I don’t remember getting grounded or punished in any way.
It’s stupid, but I hope the kid who grew up in the house that grew over Kevin’s fort found her own sacred spot and learned to appreciate her childhood the same way we did, with that wonderfully naive assumption that the way things were when you were 13 is exactly the way they should stay, and God help the people who come along to fuck it up.