Fall of Fort Onstad, 2010-2024

In 2010, back when I was still married and we all lived at the old house together, my wife and kid went on a trip to see her family in California. While they were gone, I thought it would be an act of classical fatherhood to build a playhouse for my child, and surprise them when they returned. 

I wasn't in particularly good shape—along any axis you might name—at the time, and did not know much about framing (or even that it was called that), but YouTube was well enough on its way, and I had a new friend (the elsementioned Jaybee) who showed me about using lag bolts for securing the rim joists to the posts, so with a whole lot of sweating and breaks and changes of very large t-shirts and probably quite a few beers I got the thing up and stabilized. 

Upon returning home, my wife's sole reaction to my hand-hewn testament of fatherly affection was that it looked "unsafe." I have carried the injury of that deflation ever since. It is quite likely I went inside and took a retaliatory gulp of vodka. 

It stood for fourteen years. Many generations of wee friends summited the ladder-stair-thing, under a few different permutations of family. Buckets on pulleys were sent down ropes to the house, hopeful of snacks. First little "I want privacy" phone calls were made up there. Camping even happened once or twice, though it had to be chaperoned due to scary neighborhood animals. 

But all structures have what's called a "usable life." Especially this one.  

Last week, one of my final tasks in preparing the house for sale was to demolish, raze, deconstruct, erase this collapsing monument of love from the darkest point in all my life. This was ok, because it had become an unusable eyesore, and, finally, unsafe. The blackberries—and a climbing rose with so many thorns it could never be plucked—had long blown through the floorboards. Raccoons had been crapping under the awning, where the kids had once made breakfasts of toy foods on a play stove. And, I would imagine, the neighbors were tired of seeing its splintering, overgrown spire. So on Wednesday of this week I went out with the same socket wrench that put it together, and took it apart.    

I had to look through thousands of photos to find older shots of the fort, and ended up going back to 2005, the year Hayden was born. I don't have an exact word for the feeling of seeing so many regretted, squandered, underused years at once, but there is a respectfully acknowledged heaviness from all those ghosts. Any aberrance in my dreams tonight will have an obvious origin, but I doubt the back-of-house processing will be so brief or so tidy.  

Last night Hayden and I loaded some of the better lumber from the fort into his hearse, and he drove it out to the farm where he lives (which, incidentally, is owned by Jaybee). My parents are coming into town this week, and we're all going to drive out and build a pergola for his trailer together, using the same old beams. Lauren, who has personally built many types of actual, legal homes from scratch, will be there to make sure it safely passes inspection. 

I'll share a photo of us all beneath it. 

May you outlive even the things you have built in love, but never the love that lifted them.