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Chelsea O'Byrne/The Globe and Mail

First Person is a daily personal piece submitted by readers. Have a story to tell? See our guidelines at tgam.ca/essayguide.

“Can we build the tree fort this summer?” asked Emil. I had made some such promise when we moved into our townhouse at the base of Burnaby Mountain. Indeed, a selling feature of the property was the forest that surrounded it and my and my wife’s imaginings of the life our children would enjoy in its streams, berry bushes and trees. But then came a succession of new babies and new jobs, and here it was the fourth summer since the move and still no fort.

Our kids and all the neighbourhood kids, to whom word of the project had been leaked, were growing impatient. Once school ended, and I spied a pile of old cedar planks destined for the dump, I promised that construction could begin.

It was time to assemble a fort-raising party. Francesca, my eldest daughter, jumped on her scooter and circled the complex, knocking on doors. Within minutes, a dozen neighbourhood kids descended onto our driveway. Meanwhile, my sons produced enough hammers and handsaws from my shed.

Step one, I explained, was the removal of all nails from the wood.

The kids set to work. Few, however, had handled tools of the non-toy variety. My son Julian volunteered to demonstrate how to use a hammer; he having recently helped me rebuild our stairs. The five-year-old approached the nail with bravado. He looked at the others before hooking the claw around the nail. Then he pulled upward with all his might. The nail didn’t budge. He redoubled his strength. Still the nail didn’t budge. His little red-haired friend, Alyssa, giggled. The nail was out in an instant. The tomato cans that I placed around the construction site soon began to ring with the sound of spent nails.

The next day the kids and I would search the woods for a suitable spot. We had chosen to live on Burnaby Mountain partly because this was as close to nature as we could afford while remaining in the Lower Mainland. Spawning salmon and circling eagles were part of the mountain’s appeal, as were the darkness of night outside our back windows and the odd howl of a coyote. But bears were a very real danger, one which I’d encountered myself twice while emptying the trash.

Eventually, we came across the large fallen log on which the kids sometimes played, and as they balanced on it the idea dawned on me to build the tree fort on top of this very log. It was near enough for us to hear the kids scream if they saw a bear.

I began to think it over. It had been over 30 years since I’d built a tree fort. During those distant summers my brother and I regularly spent our days in the woods, which then still covered large tracts of Surrey. There we’d fight battles with cap guns and pine cones. The fort was the locus of such games, and we built them out of everything from moss to scrap lumber salvaged from construction sites that even then were encroaching on our paradise.

“Why don’t we start building?” Emil asked the next morning.

“Yeah, why don’t we start, Daddy?” echoed Marcel, his youngest brother. Marcel’s tool belt was cinched above his belly button. I patted him on the head. “Be patient, boys. I have to figure out how to put a level foundation on a round log.” We stood there, the three of us, sizing it all up.

“Why don’t we cut off the top?” said Emil. It was a sensible enough idea, and I began to saw horizontally across the length of the log. Then the boys took turns. Eventually we gave up. The men who once worked on logs like this by hand were made of stronger stuff. Instead, we built the floor around the log which the boys suggested could serve as a bench inside the fort.

Once the floor was built, the rest of the fort came together quickly. Over the course of the week kids came down, both to help and to watch. We framed the walls and we covered them with boards.

My only regret was that I should have made the fort bigger. The moment it was finished, it filled to capacity – the line on the ladder backed up to the ground with excited kids. One neighbor thanked me for getting his daughter out of her room and away from the screen.

One evening, a few days after the fort’s completion, I saw a girl approach it alone. I didn’t recognize her from among our neighbourhood kids, so I asked my wife. She was one of the new kids that had recently moved here. Did she know about the bears, I wondered?

“There’s drugs in the fort!” shouted the girl and ran up and out of the woods. I tried to calm her down before following her back down to the fort. I climbed up the ladder, disgusted by the idea that someone had used our fort to get high. I popped my head through the hatch. There was a doll on the shelf and a couple of toy cars. Marcel’s tool belt hung on a peg.

“Why do you think that there are drugs in the fort?”

“I saw them!” said the girl. “There were needles!”

“Where?”

“In the can,” said the girl. “The drugs were in the can.”

I snatched a tomato can from the corner and brought it down through the hatch.

Bruise-kneed and tousle-haired, the girl appeared no different from my kids or the other kids, exhausting their imaginations all summer-long. Yet in this case, for some reason a tomato can of old nails was imagined as a junkie’s stash.

I’ve seen her in the fort a few times since. The woods and the kids will help return this little imagination back to its rightful place.

Peter Valing lives in Burnaby, B.C.

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