THE FORT

“Hey man, is your fort still standing? We should check it out,” said my friend Owen. We’d just graduated high school the week before, class of ’85, and were sitting on my back porch relaxing in the warm sunshine. I hadn’t visited the fort in a few years and wondered how it was holding up. Owen and I spent a lot of time there when we were younger and he’d been the one to help me fix it up.

Five years ago…

The fort was passed down to me by my uncle Jim. It sat at the back of our property along the Minnesota River valley where Jim and I had grown up in the same house, a generation apart. He was my father’s little brother. Jim was graduating college and preparing to move to Madison for a new job.

We walked the wooded path down to the river and he showed me where he and his buddies had long ago constructed the crude shelter against the limestone embankment. Hidden by thick brush and unknown to my parents or grandparents, it was Jim’s secret hide out. He never shared it with his older brother, my dad, because he said, “Your dad was a real bore back then, never had any fun and usually spoiled mine.”

It was a sorry looking structure. Jim admitted it hadn’t gotten much care in the last ten years. The translucent fiberglass roof was sagging and starting to crack. The door, which was no more than four feet tall, had fallen off its hinges and moss was growing on the rotting wall boards. The one tiny window framed a spectacular spider web.

I peered inside and found it was actually much larger than it appeared. Built against the side of the cliff, the back wall opened up into a cleft in the rock, not quite big enough to be called a cave, it nonetheless doubled the square footage of the place. Dim light filtered through the roof and I realized that it was my place now. There was no better gift that a twelve year old boy could have gotten. I saw my friends and me fixing it up in no time. It was June, and we had all summer. Inside there was a small Formica table with two broken chairs, a park bench and a large wooden chest that served as another table. The floor, which first appeared to be dirt, was really plywood. Jim and his friends had put a lot of effort into building their fort and although it was filthy, it was structurally sound.

We righted the roof, re-hung the door and swept out the layers of dirt and leaves. I even managed to get a couple new chairs. It was Owen who first opened the old steamer trunk that Uncle Jim used as a table. What we found inside made the fort even better. There were stacks and stacks of dirty magazines. There were the usual Playboys and Penthouses, but lots of others I’d never heard of. I picked one off the top and opened it to the centerfold. This mag was not nearly as tame as a Playboy. It was called Digressions and the centerfold was a picture of a woman on her knees taking it from behind while sucking the huge cock of another guy. I’d