Remember making forts when you were young?
On rainy days, every pillow and blanket that could be found in the house was utilized... especially the giant couch pillows. They made great walls. And even more fun than building them, was trying to climb inside them without creating an implosion. The most extreme care was taken not to disturb those fragile pillow walls, but, like a sandcastle destined for high tide, usually disaster struck at some point. All the more reason to build another, more solidly constructed one.
These driftwood forts seem to pop up overnight on my favourite beaches. I hardly ever see the same one twice, and when I find a new one, I can't help but want to climb inside, or at the very least, peek inside the windows. I think these are big-kid-constructed forts. Adults build them to try and reclaim their inner Tom Sawyer. Some of them are so incredibly elaborate. So creative. So deliciously playful. They make great shelters on windy days. They make great secret hideaways for romantics.
But as fast as they go up, they mysteriously disappear. Do some people find the same joy in destroying them as others do when they build them? Is it like squashing the sandcastle before the ocean claims it? And why do I never see a fort in the making (or destroying) in progress? Maybe the crows are building them in the middle of the night?
Love that, I've never seen a driftwood fort. I'd want to climb inside and check it out.
ReplyDeleteall i know is that i want that driftwood....all of it :)
ReplyDeleteA very fun mystery I think! :)
ReplyDeleteBeautiful.
xo Catherine
We used to build forts as kids....in a vacant field near our house..... and also... up the hills behind our block. We walked for miles in those days...up Rose Hill in Kamloops, .... parents never even know how far we went..or how dangerously we played. We even had axes and knives to use to make our forts...our two bigger boy neighbours...were scouts and had all the tools of the trade. ... how I wish I had a few photos of things we constructed....... we were wild and crazy kids.... and some of those things could have got us through a pioneer winter... we even stuffed clay mud and plants in the bigger cracks and crevices to keep the wind out... about 6 or 8 kids at any one time ...all working together to get it accomplished... our gang.... the kids on our block.....
ReplyDeleteOh, your mind wanders in the same way as mine. I can get lost imagining many scenes the may have taken place for the building and then the dismantling. Sometimes they are based on my outlook on human nature or what might be happening in the world that has made me happy or made me shocked.
ReplyDeleteWhat amazing and mysterious structures. I - too - would be wondering about who comes and builds them..and then destroys them - in the night. Love the soft colors of these beach scenes.
ReplyDeletei love that they just appear. magic for sure. this is gorgeous stuff, both words and images, and i want to climb inside that first image.
ReplyDeletejust beautiful.
i spent so many days as a kid at the beach, building forts. and i too love to peek inside ones that i find, even now. i'm not sure if people destroy them, but the constant shift and bump of the driftwood logs with the tides and waves also does the same work, eventually.
ReplyDeleteI'd say that beats a sandcastle any day! Your images have set me dreaming. I wonder what Sloane, my little writer, will come up with when I show her these as a prompt? I'll tell you soon.
ReplyDeleteI've never seen such things on Baltic beaches. Us, in Poland, we're used just to sand castles. But that was a long time since I've been on seacoast, so maybe it has changed?
ReplyDeleteThank you for your blog, that's a great "fort" in the Internet Sea.