When you’re seven and following your older brothers, there’s a shortcut for everything: through a neighbor’s yard, over a fence or, in this case, behind an apartment building and down an alleyway. It was in this alleyway that we found a trove of discarded building materials from the construction of an apartment building on Connecticut Avenue. With the help of neighborhood friends, Kevin, Brian, and I built a fort in our side yard. My parents stood by, neither encouraging nor obstructing. Just curious.
We designated ourselves the U.S. Junior Marine Corps. Kevin as oldest was a lieutenant; Tommy Gormley was a sergeant; and Brian, a private. Brian remembers me being a nurse, but I recall that I was made guard and carried no rank whatsoever. (How like the military of the sixties!) I just wanted a little real estate in the fort, but that was not to be. We had no uniforms or arsenal, but Kevin and Brian had been given some rank insignias by a close family friend’s husband who was a Marine.
The structure began with four 2x4s pounded into the ground and grew from there. The first floor had a hinged plywood door that opened to Kevin’s office where there was a built-in bench and a small table. A map of the world hung on the side wall, and there was a globe on the table. I don’t remember now if we were plotting world domination or freedom from imperialism.
The second story, the dominion of Tommy and Brian, was not quite as spacious as the first. It had a tarp for a door and, inside, an old bench seat from a car. No room for a desk. Kevin claims the first floor office was not as great as it looked; he says the second floor was much warmer. I suggested he try guard duty. When I complained, they told me I could use the lower level office — a muddy crawl space beneath the fort.
As I look at the photograph, the two things that strike me are that there is a brick walkway to the front entrance and that there are real shingles on the roof. This was no slap-dash structure.
Looking back, it’s astounding how much freedom we had. I was too young to be roaming the neighborhood alone (i.e. Lost post), but Brian and Kevin were under strict orders to protect me. And I was happy to be included in the discovery of worlds beyond the four walls of our house. The most magical of these was Bambooland. Somehow, in the urban planning of Washington, D.C., an area the size of four city blocks was left uninterrupted behind the houses of Jocelyn and 39th Streets, and Reno and Military Roads. In the middle of this sylvan glen there was a stand of bamboo and a stone fountain with several large koi.
All afternoon long we played kick the can and hide ’n’ seek. When snow was heavy on the bamboo, their tops bent all the way to the ground, creating a natural tunnel for us to crawl through. And when ice was thick enough on the fountain, we walked across it. We thought the koi underneath the ice were frozen. Now I understand they weren’t quite frozen, just waiting quietly for spring. Kevin and Monk Topping set a trap for possum and raccoon but never caught anything but squirrel.
One late summer evening we emerged from Bambooland and stood talking and kicking stones across Monk’s driveway. Brian turned toward the park and yelled, A ghost! We all ran. It was only Kenny Markanich whose white blonde hair was all we could see in the fading evening light.
A couple of years after we built the fort, my sister Missy was planning her wedding with a reception under a tent in the backyard. Our parents sat Kevin, Brian and me down to explain that the fort would have to come down. I later found out that my parents were sadder than we were about the destruction of the fort, which we had begun to outgrow.
The fort lived on, though, in the nationally-syndicated comic strip “Freddy” by Rupe Baldwin. Mark Baldwin pointed our multi-storied masterpiece out to his father as they walked down Jocelyn Street one day, and before long Freddy had a fort of his own. Baldwin worked in a converted VW bus in the driveway next to his house on the edge of Bambooland.
Life of Reillys 