If you find yourself in a hole, (don't) stop digging

 

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This evening, for some reason, I was reminiscing about building forts when I was a kid.  The above fort is just a photo that I found on the internet, but it is something similar to one of the designs we built.  In 1976 I was 10 years old.  We moved about 5 miles out of town into the country.  Previously we had lived in the middle of town, right behind the elementary school.  I could walk to school in the morning.  

When we moved to the country, it opened a whole new world for me.  I'm not saying that we didn't build forts and play outside in town - we did.  We had a tree house in a sweet gum tree and had a neighborhood gang like the "Little Rascals" TV show that we ran around with.  But the new house in the country that sat on 5 acres of piney woods, kicked our fort building opportunities up several notches.  It was like Davey Crockett and the wild frontier - minus the bears.  There were box turtles, snakes, and black widow spiders that inhabited the woods, but we lived together in harmony.  We stayed outside from daylight to dark enjoying real and imagined adventures.  It was a good time to be a kid.

There was fort building to do at the new house in the country.  Our best fort was about 50 yards east of the house.  We called it the "hole camp" because, well, it was a hole.  Not just any hole though.  We dug and dug and dug into the red clay just east of a big long leaf pine tree.  We used the dirt from the hole to build up a huge levee all around the hole, and that made it appear even deeper than it was.  I would estimate it was 4 or 5 feet deep and maybe 10 feet in diameter.  Fresh off of reading Treasure Island, I imagined digging up pirate's treasure in the hole.

We carved out steps in the red clay that led down to the bottom, and we had holes in the wall surrounding it to stick our gun barrels out of it to shoot marauding pirates wishing to steal our gold.  In the north side of the hole we fashioned an amenity in the hole camp - a fireplace with a working chimney.  Extending upward from the chimney's firebox, we fashioned vertical sticks that we coated with mud.  When we lit a fire in the fireplace, the pine straw smoke and then black smoke from burning pine knots wafted through the woods.  We always smelled smoky like true outdoorsmen in need of a bath.

The best part of the hole camp, however, was a 'cave.'  In the bottom of the hole camp, about a foot off the bottom, we dug a tunnel, approximately 2 1/2 feet wide by 2 1/2 feet tall.  The tunnel was dug due west.  It was about 5 feet deep at it's deepest point.  It was hard work.  We'd dig, and remove the dirt by buckets.  It got mighty dark in the cave.  Sometimes, we'd hit tap roots of the pine trees that we would have to either dig around or, if small enough, chop through with a hatchet.

The ones we chopped through would seep pine sap, a sticky mess that we soon learned was flammable.  We would light it and it would be light torches on the wall of a cave of a Mark Twain book.  The black smoke would stain the red clay walls of the cave black with suet or pitch.  Our imaginations ran wild with adventures.  We never wanted to grow up.

But alas, we did.  The hole camp fell into disrepair and was eventually filled in.  I think sometimes, that our parents didn't fully know what we were doing because that 'cave' could have easily fallen in on us and suffocated us.  But it didn't.  We survived.  There is, however, an outside chance that one day we'll contract Black Lung disease from breathing in all that pine sap smoke in the hole camp's cave.  There were no OSHA guidelines in our cave.  We only had a few recordable accidents.

My boys kept up the fort building legacy and built a pretty nice fort in the woods behind the barn at our house when they were younger.  The boys have grown up and moved out, but the ruins of their fort in the woods remind me of the hole camp from my childhood and fond memories of being a boy in the country with an over-active imagination and a love for the outdoors.  Maybe one day we'll get grandchildren and I'll tell them about the hole camp and we'll be able to see what kind of fort building genetics they have in their DNA.