by Matthew Clark | One Thousand Words

There used to be open fields, but by the time my parents built a house on the old family property, it was covered in trees. But many of the old furrows were still carved into the land. These may have been old drainage ways that over time became ditches for little boys to play in.  

My friends and I would sometimes gather sticks, branches, leaves. We’d rake out the ditch of as much debris as we could, before laying bigger sticks across the top to make rafters. Next, we’d lay branches to cross-cross them, and finally we’d pile pine-needles and stray leaves on top to make a sort of thatch. If we did our work well, we could huddle up under the roof in a cozy little forest fort. Under there, we’d imagine we were in a hidden clubhouse, dreaming of some adventure we were on, some bad guy we were hiding from. 

So much of the fun was just in the making of the thing. I still get a kick out of watching these time-lapse videos of folks out in the wilderness building little huts and hidey-holes with simple tools and whatever they can find in the woods. There’s still some childhood urge in me to build forts. 

We even used to build what we called air-forts inside the house. We’d take an old box fan, a big bedsheet, and several stacks of books to hold down the edges of the sheet to the floor and tuck it around the box fan. Then, we’d turn on the fan and the sheet would balloon up. We’d crawl inside our inflated fortress and play for hours. It’s entirely possible that I’ve made an airfort as recently as the last few weeks. It’s still just as fun. Actually, it’s even more fun now. 

Maybe that’s why when the odometer on my old Nissan rolled around to 300,000 miles back in 2017, I decided to sell it for whatever I could get, and buy a Sprinter van. I’d been nerding out over all these folks who were building tiny houses, but then it got even better. I started seeing people building tiny houses inside what looked like FedEx vans. Something about it absolutely captivated my imagination.  

I should back up and tell you about my Grandaddy Sam. I never met him. He died about a year before I was born, unfortunately. But his residual presence loomed large in my imagination, mainly through the things he made. He had been a civil engineer who later started a business making milling moulding for houses, then he started a business building cabinets. Apparently, he was something of a genius, because he went on to come up with designs for modular cabinetry and kitchens, inventing many of the processes and even the machines for manufacturing them. His business, called Belwood Kitchens, grew until it became a sizable factory.  

When I was little, and since it had only been a few years since his death, there were still lots of his things around, probably just how he left them. I remember his dressing room at my Grandmother’s house seeming untouched. I used to play with his shoe-shining machine. And he even had a James Bond style secret office in the house that was accessible through a hidden door in the garage. I’m serious. An ordinary peg board loaded with garden tools would unseal and slide away at the push of a secret button to allow entrance to this wood-panneled nook where stacks of odd old blueprints lay still, and a strange switchboard was mounted above a fancy built in desk.  

Mom had his old drafting table at our house, and I used to sift through his old technical drawings. One was for an electric car design he submitted to Popular Mechanics sometime in the 1960s. I grew up surrounded by his woodworking tools, meticulously organized. I was cutting plywood on his professional grade table saw when I was probably ten or twelve years old.  

All that to say, a sort of mythos accumulated in my imagination around Grandaddy Sam. Gadgets, craftsmanship, invention, the smell of wood, the sounds and feel of the machines. In my imagination he became a combination of Indiana Jones, James Bond, and Gepetto. I’ve even had a recurring dream my whole life of finding a hidden door on my Grandmother’s property and discovering a massive unknown workshop filled with shelves of strange inventions, beautiful mysterious artifacts, and an array of tools for woodworking—all untouched for half a century, covered in a fine layer of silent, secretive dust. 

So take all those things that populated my imagination as a child, combine them with a little boy’s fort-building impulse, add a dash of fascination with tiny houses, and the need for a new vehicle and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a Sprinter van build. Converting the Sprinter was like building the ultimate fort.  

I spent about a year and a half building it from scratch in the driveway, but I’d spent the whole prior year building it in my head. Sometimes a dream takes such a hold of your imagination, you just can’t brush it off, you have to make something of it. And, it’s not that I knew how to do it. I had a little woodworking experience, a little home repair knowledge, sure. But I learned how true the saying, “Third time’s a charm” really is, since many times during the build, I’d build something incorrectly, do more research, build it a little better, and finally get it working the third go round. 

There was also some hard-to-explain embodied reality to building it. I was still in a season of long grief post-divorce. There’s often such a feeling of helplessness that accompanies loss and grief, and a need to make some kind of meaning where meaning has been evacuated. I was spending so much time in my head. Something about the physical task and craft of making this thing was healing. A friend of mine who was a juvenile drug-court counselor used to say that, if a kid was panicking, he’d have them count the lines in the wood grain of the table. It would calm them. Something about designing and building the van involved me in a physical process of making that gave my anxiety and sadness something to lovingly attend to. It was calming, meaning-making, challenging, and fun. The non-verbal, embodied work of crafting a tiny house in a van helped rejuvenate my imagination that had grown so tired from sadness.   

I built a grown-up fort in a van. Fort is part of the word comfort, and a fortress is a place where folks wounded on the battlefield can withdraw to have their wounds tended. I named my van fortress Vandalf the White. I’m a big Lord of the Rings nerd, of course, so it seemed natural. But that’s not the only reason. Another is because Tolkien’s wizard is a pilgrim sent to roam Middle Earth, bringing counsel, comfort, and healing strength in the midst of terrible trial. I wanted to travel with that kind of companion, and I pray my life might bring comfort and wisdom to someone along the winding road as we all navigate whatever trying times we must face. 

by Matthew Clark

Can you find the hidden switch? 

Where the toolshed wall hides 

An inner world of crackling blueprints, 

Dusted images stacked in corners, 

Lost scraps, waiting for breath?  

Run your hand across the rough 

Wood rudely shapen, dry now, 

Still useful under good attention. 

Like the man waiting within the child, 

There’s hope for pulling the beam, 

Giving it place and structure 

In the integral joinery of hand 

And eye, love and material. 

Smell the pine resin, feel 

The resonant motions that turn the grain 

And, with frightening power, growl, 

Groan, and split the stuff for building. 

Can you sense the sudden switch, 

As the measured hours 

Are saw-dusted and smoothed

By the sweat of prayer, 

The good bones fitted again, 

Fortified by the work, cleverly

Held together by the hand. 

The post S6:E23 – On the Building of Forts appeared first on Matthew Clark.