In 1993, I returned to my college dorm room to find that I had left the window open. I closed the window, and went to the bathroom. When I returned from the bathroom, the window was open again. I assumed that someone was hiding in my room. There wasn’t anyone under the bed, so I opened the closet. A man named Victor who had fled to Spain 12 months previous leapt out of the closet wearing rubber boots and brandishing a frying pan.

Victor, who lived down the hall from me in 1991, chased me out the door, upstairs, down the hall, downstairs, down the hall, outside, across the street, and into another dorm before I was able to find a door that I could lock behind me. I regret that I was not able to elude him; I think I might have been devoting too large a fraction of my energy to yelling things like, “I am being pursued by a ghost!”

The last time I had seen Victor was around 5:30 am on a Saturday morning in December of 1991. He had bought a ticket to Madrid without telling anyone. At 5:30, one of our friends whom he had brought into confidence was driving him to the airport. The college didn’t figure out that he was gone for a week or so. In his room, he had laid out all of his belongings with notes saying things like, “These ping-pong paddles are for George.” He had also hung a life-size sculpture of himself, made out of stuff he found lying on the street, from his overhead light. His bureau was filled with hundreds of copies of the college alumni magazine.

Makes me feel well-adjusted.

I grew up in a house next to an elementary school. In the 1970’s, there was an area of shrubs and tall grass in between our backyard and the school parking lot called “the field.” Around 1980, the so-called field was flattened out and turned into an athletic field suitable for playing soccer. At the same time, the school installed a cyclone fence topped with three rows of barbed wire along most of the edge of the field. The fence ended halfway down the back of our lot, which made the shortest path free of barbed wire to all destinations southeast around the end of the fence and through our backyard. The consequences of this traffic pattern will be dealt with at a later date.

The fence ran along two sides of the field. In the corner wrapped by the fence, there was a small tree and a clump of “pricker bushes.” The bushes formed a defensive perimeter around the tree, with the fence filling in where the bushes ended. As a result, the base of the tree was the ideal location for a fort.

The main trunk of the tree leaned out from the fence over the bushes. We were able to tie a knotted rope to the tree in such a way that it hung down over the grass outside the palisade of pricker bushes. To enter the fort, you climbed up the rope and down the tree. If you were being pursued by a would-be assailant, you pulled the rope up after you. In order to apprehend you, your pursuer would have to cross the expanse of prickers, an act widely regarded as impossible at the time. In reality, I suspect that even a moderately spry neighborhood youth could jump over the pricker bushes fairly easily.

We did have an secret escape route under the fence. This started as a little depression, probably dug by a dog. Using tools such as sticks, we expanded the depression into a muddy groove big enough to allow the average fort denizen to slip under the fence.

The premise of the fort-building pastime was that there was a significant population of thugs in town who were interested in chasing us. If we built forts with pricker bush barriers and secret escape routes, we would be able to evade these thugs. In hindsight, I think the thugs probably existed. However, the chances that we would see a thug coming from far enough away that we could climb the rope, pull it up after us, climb down the tree, and then escape under the fence are zero. The thug would have had to be so far away, I can’t imagine how we could have known he was chasing us.

No one ever said building forts wasn’t a stupid pastime.