On Old Forts and Old Vans

There’s a lot going on in the following picture. This is me in 1984, shooting a bow and arrow in our backyard while my sister, carrying an Easter basket full of eggs, looks on. I’m wearing a pink sleeveless sweatshirt with the words “Break” and “Dance” written on it. I don’t remember ever owning black jeans and so those are most likely the bottom half of my karate gi. Man, I miss the 1980s.

Ironically, none of those things are what I am writing about today. Instead, I am writing about the fort that you can see in the upper left-hand corner of the photo.

I don’t remember when my dad built that fort — 1982 or 1983, I think, making me nine or ten years old. The original fort was the part you can see on the left. My dad buried some posts in the ground and built essentially a box out of particle board. That made the dimensions of the fort 8’ by 8’, and 4’ tall. To make windows, my dad drew squares and then drilled holes in each square’s corner. Then he cut the windows out with a jigsaw. We kept the pieces of wood so we could reinsert them back into the holes if we wanted to close them. The holes in each corner allowed us to insert our fingers and pull the squares back inside.

Inside the fort was pretty bare. My dad worked at a printing company and they always had old “blankets” (large sheets of rubber) that we used to make a floor. For a long time the only thing inside the fort was an old Army cot my mom found at a garage sale.

I made two notable modifications to the fort. The first was the addition you see on the right side — the part between the old wood and the fence.

The bottom half of the front wall consisted of a bunch of bricks. I don’t remember where the bricks came from but they were surely not purchased for the fort. I remember stacking the bricks up, staggering them so they would remain standing. There was no mortar, no glue, no anything holding the bricks together. On at least one occasion I did an impression of the Kool-Aid Man and smashed through the bricks. Turns out, bricks break pretty easily and restacking them takes a long time, so I didn’t do that too often.

In the original picture you can see white wood sitting on top of the brick. That wood came from Kerr-McGee — it said so, right on the wood. I have no idea where that came from or who originally stole it. I remember it being part of a pretty awesome bicycle ramp before ending up as a wall.

On the backside of the fort were two more Kerr-McGee pieces of wood. One was mounted vertically, standing up. The other wasn’t mounted to anything — we tied a rope to it and would drop it open like a drawbridge to let people in. When we were done playing we would just prop the wood up to cover the hole. It was like a secret door that wasn’t very secret.

The other major modification I made was a pee tunnel. Somewhere we found an 8’ long piece of PVC pipe, which sat at “waist” height on the fort and drained down toward the creek behind our house. I thought it was a genius addition and it lasted until my mom discovered it.

In just a few years the fort served many purposes. Around 1984 during the height of my ninja phase, the fort acted as a homebase for my nighttime missions (which mostly involved climbing trees and hiding behind things from no one in particular). At one point my friends Jeremy and Jason formed a club called the Scorpions, because that was the scariest thing we could come up with. Our plan was to collect dues from each member and bury the money in the fort’s dirt floor, but the plan quickly fell apart ment (a) nobody paid any dues and (b) someone pointed out that keeping the money in our bedrooms would be a lot more safe. After discovering Encyclopedia Brown books I turned the fort into a detective agency (nobody hired me) and after reading the Mad Scientists’ Club books I declared the fort to be the base of my own Mad Scientists’ Club, of which I was the only member.

I don’t recall ever sleeping in the fort, but I do remember laying on that Army cot around the time the sun went down. Even with a few windows popped out, the cot was low enough that nobody could see me. Every single thing in my life went away at that moment. Nothing else mattered because nothing else existed. There was no worrying about what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. It was just this tiny little place where I could lay on a cot with wind blowing through the windows and think about absolutely nothing.

Fast forward a zillion years. In 2020 though YouTube I discovered “vanlife.” People have been traveling, camping, and even living in vans for many years, but right around the time the term #vanlife — with the hashtag — was coined. It’s vanlife, but shared online. In 2022 I bought a raggedy ol’ cargo van and began converting it. I put carpet on the floor, and covered the walls with wood and insulation. I built a bed and a desk and added solar panels to the roof.

I started a website, an Instagram page, and even a YouTube channel:

YouTube.com/@BigRobsVan

There are people who live in vans full-time and people who live in vans part-time and I don’t even qualify for the latter. I camp in my van a couple of times a month. I used it on some longer road trips, but on several occasions I’ve slept in my van in parking lots not 10 miles from my home. People may not agree with the lifestyle, but at least people understand living in a vehicle as an alternative to being houseless, or traveling across country and sleeping in a van as a way to save money. Nobody understands sleeping in a van because a person actually likes it.

All I can say it, it’s the closest I’ve ever felt to laying on that Army cot inside my fort.