How much wood could a Woodchuck chuck?
The highlight of my fifth-grade architectural career was the design for the brick fort, which I drew up during the Woodchuck’s fort building days. The Woodchucks were a suburban gang we named after a Boy-Scout-like group that Donald Duck’s nephews belonged to. (Remember them? Huey, Dewey, and Louie?) Woodchucks, the name strikes fear in your heart, eh?
We Woodchucks lived in prefab cracker boxes that somebody in the post WWII building boom had snuck onto a street that ran down the previously undeveloped side of a country club golf course. I could cross my back fence and be on the approaches to the first green.
The houses on the other three sides of the club were two-story, and always made me think of the places that Spencer Tracy’s and Katherines Hepburn’s movie characters would have inhabited in the 30s.
Building in the woods
We kids, whether our parents were club members or not (mine weren’t) spent those pre-video-game summers ranging through the thick woods and deep ravines that bounded the club. Kids of all ages in those days had access to axes and saws with which we “harvested” trees and built forts and bridges.
Some of these were actually pretty elaborate. One bridge spanned 20 feet across a 10-foot-deep gully and had a nearly solid base of two-foot-long logs nailed to the long members.
Hoods in the hood
But there were also hoods in our hood. Some of them country club caddies. All of them were monsters who shaved, cussed, and hung out in the caddy shack playing poker and smoking.
The hoods would venture into the woods from time to time, mainly, it seemed, to destroy what we wrought. We would build a fort. They would tear it down. We’d built another, they’d torch it. They tossed our dream bridge into the gulley it spanned.
Our reward for attempted defense was to be hauled off and pounded or hit on the head with a cow-turd-sized Indiana clay clump.
The brick fort
So, I hatched a design for a brick fort. Never mind that we had no access to bricks or mortar. The planning was, for me, an end in itself. The plans are long ago lost, but I recall a domed structure, kind of a brick igloo. Other than being less destructible, it would have been a hard fort to defend as I don’t remember ever designing any windows or any other opening besides the door.
At one point we also built a tower that I’m guessing now must have been close to 15 feet tall in the way back of the Kennedy’s long, narrow lot. From this tower, we mounted a spirited defense in the rotten tomato skirmish with our rival suburban white kid gang, the Wildcats.
I’ve carried away two lessons from those days. One, had I spent my life as a military planner I would have leaned heavily towards mobile forces, attacking from here, then falling back and attacking over there and then defending here, etc.
You feel all superior and safe in your tower until you are being pelted by an unlimited supply of tomatoes from those standing in the garden below and you are quickly running out of ammunition and the only way to get more is expose yourself as you descend the ladder and fight on the ground anyway.
And, two, those Woodchuck days instilled in me that sense of wonder you get when you step back and admire a complete structure you have wrought from raw materials. I used to be more of a nature boy, and I do think that cutting down trees and building things just for the sake of cutting down trees and building things was quite wasteful. But I have a certain fondness these days for the built-environment.