Farm Fortcraft

When my boys were young, I would watch them sit in front of the TV for hours playing the paint dryingly exciting game Minecraft. Now if you’ve never been on the edge of your seat and your sanity playing this game, let me break it down for you. You wander through an imaginary world that sports Atari 2600 graphics (divided by sixteen) collecting tools and treasures, digging holes, building forts, and avoiding monsters.

That sounds exactly like my childhood.

Sorta.

When I was a kid, we played a similar game called Farm Fortcraft. We dug holes, built forts, and searched for imaginary treasures. And we had monsters. Oh yes, we had monsters.

To be precise, we had my dad stomping through the front door muttering a level-three profanity flurry and slipping his belt off for a level-five whoopin-storm. While we cowered together in a corner offering up our Hail Mary’s for mercy, mom narrated our day’s misdeeds. The threats of “You just wait until your dad gets home!” were suddenly quite real and scary. There were no extra lives or game reset buttons, just monster…whoopins.

But before we could build, dig and misdo our deeds, as in my sons’ games we had to acquire the necessary tools. Acquiring tools in Farm Fortcraft was no easy quest. Tools did not just lie about the farm willy-nilly waiting for us to wander into them. Ok, well, they didn’t willy-nilly lie about before we had gathered them and subsequently left them lying about.

Willy-nilly.

The farm’s tools were secured in ‘The Shop’. The Shop was a small shack dad had built himself. Its sides and roof were covered in shiny silver colored corrugated steel making it gleam in the sun, the one farmstead building that was not covered by grey slab boards, weather beaten by brutal Minnesota winters. Inside he kept his tool hoard meticulously stacked in large piles. Piles for which only he understood the intricate organizational structure. As if following some memorized treasure map, he would locate a particular tool by reciting a mystical chant such as “Where is my gaberdyfricken muckardycracken screwmajadriver! It was RIGHT HERE!” These secret deciphering enchantments always ended with the phrase “it was RIGHT HERE!”

My brother, who we’ll refer to as ‘the Timstigator’ to protect his identity, and I would slip into The Shop with great stealth to locate our fort building tools. We did not have dad’s secret map nor his magical phrases but after clanking and clanging through several tool piles we would eventually sneak back out with our bounty. Careful to avoid detection, we then made our way down the dirt driveway towards woods where we intended to build our fort.

I should point out that these tool hauls rarely came away with complex and highly techy instruments such as a level, square or tape measure. More often our inventory consisted of a hammer, a saw, a couple pockets overflowing with nails, and a shovel. In later years I would come across the ancient and sage advice ‘measure twice, cut once’ and learn the mystic ways of that more sophisticated toolry. But for this story the Timstigator and I stuck with much less well known construction wisdom ‘if it fits, nail it down’ and ‘if it doesn’t fit, use more nails.’

Our tool inventory fully, uh, adequately stocked, off we went to scavenge lumber. It just so happened that there was no shortage of old wooden buildings on our farmstead. On the edge of the woods that hid our construction site stood one such building, the chicken coop. After lying our tools about willy-nilly, we scurried up the coop’s back side and onto the roof where we were hidden from view by the woods and the building itself.

Why the roof, you ask? 

I’m glad you asked. 

Unlike the coop’s siding boards, which were grey and weathered with age and generations of exposure to the harsh Minnesota seasons (also known as freezions), the roofing boards were covered with old tar shingles that protected them from the elements. They were as pristine as the day they had been nailed down. Also, we were sure all the siding boards had chicken poop on them. 

We tore off the shingles and tossed them away, then went about prying up boards. Once we had a fort sized stack of boards, we hauled them through the woods to a little clearing we’d made in the hazelnut underbrush for our fort.

Timstigator and I had never been trained in the dark arts of carpentry or drafting. But we did have a stack of pristine, poop free chicken coop boards, a hammer, a saw, and a couple pockets nearly full of nails. Without blueprints or plans, the dimensions of our fort were driven largely by the size and length of our boards. All afternoon we hammered away at the fort; the sound of our hammering covered up by distant, angry chicken chasing sounds dad was making that day. How fortuitous we were that the chickens happened to pick fort building day to somehow make their great escape!

It is important to note for later in this story that due to the lack of advanced tape measure technology and other construction mythologies, our fort was not square, nor level, nor straight, nor plumb. The walls were not all the same height (although Timstigator insisted this was by design and the resulting sloped roof would allow the snow to slide off in the coming winter. More importantly the floorboards did not cover the whole floor. It also did not cover the secret room hole we had dug below our fort. This was, of course, also by design. Building a secret trap door to cover the secret room hole would be far too obvious. Timstigator said.

The secret room hole did, however, remain hidden by the way the sunlight would glare through gaps between wall boards. It temporarily blinded you as you entered the fort when the sun shone from just the right angle. Blindly trusting that the floor was indeed there, to enter the fort you had to hop over the secret room hole and onto the fort’s floorboards.

But we’ll get back to that.

With a sense of pride at our hard day’s construction labor, we headed back toward the house for Kool-Aid and egg salad sammiches. On the way we encountered dad, looking a bit haggard from chasing the chicken escapees all day. He was changing two truck tires that had mysteriously been punctured by three nails. “Geverdemerkin gollarwanking flebubub tires! Where did all these flamarkinin nails come from!” He eyed us with suspicion as we suspiciously tried to sneak past him innocently. “Ken, Timstigator, what are you two shysters doing! You look like you’re up to no good!”

“Nuthin…” we dryly replied in unison, hands in our pockets and staring down at our work boots.

“Well run along then. And stay out of my flargarmarrgon muffiltotin Shop. I can never find anything after you two have been in there!” He pulled off his John Deer cap to brush away a bead of sweat and a chicken feather from his brow then returned to cursing the tire he was working on.

What transpired next I pieced together later that evening as I nursed a sore behind.

After repairing the flat tires, dad spotted a nail in the dirt driveway, then another. In fact he followed a whole trail of nails leading from the driveway right to the edge of the woods behind the chicken coop.

Leaving the nail trail behind, he followed a suspicious path that had been cut through the hazelnut underbrush until he discovered a mysterious crooked fort in the middle of the woods. He noted that this fort was not square, nor plumb. “What in the madderdyplack?” he muttered as he opened the door. Although the sun gleamed through the wall gaps right into his eyes, he was still sure he spotted his hammamerdebobbner on the floor inside the fort, so he stepped in to grab it. He did not, however, use the special hop over the secret hole room under the floor.

It was said afterwards that you could hear a muffled level-nine profanity flurry for miles around coming from the secret hole room. “Flufermergerten gettenwaffler magadagafram trambegodied…” 

At the time, I didn’t know what any of those words meant, but I was quite certain it meant a severe whoopin-storm was brewing.

Author: Ken Gack

Ken Gack grew up on a small dairy farm outside of the tiny town Akeley, Minnesota. This farm was littered with old wood slab buildings, cows, chickens and stories. 

It is quite possible that many elements of this and other of his outlandish stories have a shade of truth from actual events.