The importance of building a fort

May 25, 2020 6:25 AM

I feel like you’re in a safe place, your own bubble of coziness. All forts, according to fort expert David Sobel, share common traits: They are handmade, somewhat secretive and “you can look out, but others can’t see in.” They are safe — physically and emotionally. “It’s your place where you want to be just you, observing but unseen,” he says. One fort-builder comments, “Everything is wrong right now, but it’s a safe space where no one worries about you...if you locked yourself in your room, people would worry, but if you hide in your fort all day, no worries.”
posted by stillmoving (24 comments total)

I had a new stove delivered yesterday, which meant that I also had a giant cardboard box. It was destined to be broken apart for the recycling, but before that? I had to make a fort out of it for a few minutes. It felt fantastic. Then I felt silly. But that first rush of FORT was awesome.
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:43 AM on May 25, 2020 [14 favorites]

I have been building a shed for the last month, and I have to admit that a major reason that it's come out as large and pretty as it has is because I feel the need to make a private, detached space for myself.
posted by wotsac at 6:51 AM on May 25, 2020 [3 favorites]

Many BBC radio presenters have been broadcasting from home during lockdown, using cushions and duvets scavenged from all round the house to build a small, soundproofed space where they can work. Sounds like a fort to me.
posted by Paul Slade at 7:48 AM on May 25, 2020 [5 favorites]

I'm pretty sure everything in this article that is about children, applies to adults, too.

See also: man caves, quilting rooms, "don't come into the kitchen when I'm cooking", basement conversions, cabins in the mountains, camping in the desert, and wearing giant headphones on the bus.
posted by cowcowgrasstree at 8:06 AM on May 25, 2020 [13 favorites]

My kids now have:
- the filing cabinet box, with two doorways and two windows cut out
- the play kitchen box, with one doorway and two windows cut out
- Kid 1's fort in their room, a sheet stretched from a dresser drawer to an easel, next to the bed
- Kid 2's fort in their room, a sheet stretched over the sides of the toddler bed/crib to a cardboard box
- "Fort Together" in their room. The above two forts are for alone time. Fort Together is for playing together. A sheet from a table to the easel and a large teddy bear.


This article is my life right now. Their room is an unnavigable landscape of waist-high sheets.
Honestly, it's pretty great under there.
posted by Adridne at 8:22 AM on May 25, 2020 [9 favorites]

Yeah I saw the headline a few days ago and immediately sent the article to my husband because our kids have been in truly top fort building form for several weeks now. I'd been kinda blaming how cleaning had fallen by the wayside - forts can be semi-permanent structures now in a way they usually can't - so it was interesting to see that this is apparently a Thing.
posted by potrzebie at 9:05 AM on May 25, 2020

I feel sad for my niece and nephew, who have been Officially Deemed "Too Old for Forts" and told to dismantle their garden fort. That it likely never qualified as a fort anyway doesn't matter: it had four huge uprights dropped in by a relative who was then too busy to add much more than a crossbeam. It was an idea of a place you could go, and had the most imaginative, most postmodern name ever: Fort Fort.
posted by scruss at 9:47 AM on May 25, 2020 [8 favorites]

My friends and I have been throwing a halloween party for like 30 years now (yes, it's true!) and one year one attendee had spent the year gathering giant cardboard boxes and in the park across the street from the party made a giant cardboard crawl-through fort-castle and the kids of the party goers all loved it. But I will tell you, basically every adult found some time to crawl through it and they all thought it was wonderful (if a bit cramped for adult bodies).

There's something magical about making a smaller space that you can claim is yours. I think it's somehow a basic human brain wiring thing.
posted by hippybear at 10:42 AM on May 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

When I was a child, long before Calvin & Hobbes was a gleam in Bill Watterson's eye, I wanted a proper tree fort exactly like the one shown in that comic. Alas, I never got it.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:57 AM on May 25, 2020

I live alone so my whole house is my fort.

As a kid, fitted sheets dropped over a box fan made an excellent, cool, billowy, but noisy fort during hot summers.
posted by emjaybee at 11:17 AM on May 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

I live alone so my whole house is my fort.

But, you see, what you haven't done yet is build a fort within your fort, and discovered the magic of that.

Also the sheets/box fan thing, man... We didn't use fitted sheets, but did use a sheet with books as edge weights and it was a cool space to be in. (Pun intended?)
posted by hippybear at 11:31 AM on May 25, 2020 [2 favorites]

I'd build a fort within my fort, but I don't have enough of the right stuff for that and just lay in bed half the day instead. Still in it now and it's nearly noon.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:54 AM on May 25, 2020 [3 favorites]

My wife and I are both 30. For a date night about 6 weeks ago I constructed a fort over our bed with spare sheets and string for us to sit inside and read books (basically a canopy and curtains, it makes the whole bed into a tent). We love it so much it's still up.
posted by Cheerwell Maker at 1:31 PM on May 25, 2020 [3 favorites]

Now it looks like I'll be WFH till the New Year, I've resurrected my tiny office in the attic. Climb a ladder through a trapdoor to get there, and it's just high enough to stand up if you're in the center. Room for a desk, chair and small bookcase, and a couple of roof windows that look out over neighbouring rooftops.

The only disadvantages are that it's boiling in summer and freezing in winter (and three floors down to get more tea or coffee) but I'd forgotten how much I like being up there. I had CAT-5 put in years ago, so there's no problem with the net. I'm going to get some slightly less ratty flooring and a beanbag, I think. I might not come down.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 1:36 PM on May 25, 2020 [3 favorites]

I have excellent memories of draping a light sheet over a square card table (3' each side, I think), weighing the sheet down on the top with a few Reader's Digests (as "roof shingles") and ignoring the world for hours at time on summer days.
posted by Mutant Lobsters from Riverhead at 2:58 PM on May 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

When I was little, my fort was the "secret caves" formed by holly bushes in such a way that grownups couldn't sit comfortably inside but a kid could. This was done away with when I managed to break my ankle in some kind of shenanigan back there.
posted by Countess Elena at 3:12 PM on May 25, 2020 [3 favorites]

The first house I grew up in had large pine trees in the corners of the yard which had child-useable space under their limbs. There was no hiding in there (nothing hanging low to mask occupants) but if you were well in the back people didn't even think to look back into the shadows underneath.

This was fun until the year of the black widow infestation. And then I got too big and then we moved, so oh well.

Thanks for the memory bounce, Countess Elena!
posted by hippybear at 3:16 PM on May 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

Let us pause to remember the battle of Pillowtown vs. Fluffy Town. INITIATE PROTOCOL OMEGA
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:02 PM on May 25, 2020 [1 favorite]

One place I lived a few years ago has a secret 'room' behind a bookcase. It just opened into a small space in the eaves of the house and was mostly uninsulated. But I was so taken with the idea I put a carpet remnant down, a twin sized mattress that just barely fit, a mosquito net to keep out the spiders, and some fairy lights and it became my bedroom inside my bedroom. I still miss it.

At my current house I just built a high gate to block off my backyard from the street so it feels like a secret garden. I hung a hammock up this weekend and may erect a sheet tent for sleeping on summer nights.

Forts are important.
posted by ananci at 10:14 PM on May 25, 2020 [5 favorites]

Important update:
The discovery of some garden stakes in the garage and an old sheet with a hole in it* have made possible the founding of Fort Sandbox, allowing the fort ecosystem tho colonize the yard.


"Sweetie, we're going to save the good sheets for the indoors forts."
posted by Adridne at 9:02 AM on May 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

If you lack space or boxes to make your own fort and a virtual experience is more the thing, recently on the JOLLY YouTube channel Josh and Ollie built "the ULTIMATE cardboard castle" for Ollie's 2-year-old daughter Juno. It's pretty adorable up until the Eye of Sauron gets installed on top.

Oh, let's be honest: it's adorable even after the Eye of Sauron gets installed.
posted by Lexica at 11:45 AM on May 26, 2020

From Nabokov's Speak, Memory:

With the help of some grown-up person, who would use first both hands and then a powerful leg, the divan would be moved several inches away from the wall, so as to form a narrow passage which I would be further helped to roof snugly with the divan's bolsters and close up at the ends with a couple of cushions. I then had the fantastic pleasure of creeping through that pitch-dark tunnel, where I lingered a little to listen to the singing in my ears - that lonesome vibration so familiar to small boys in dusty hiding places. . . . A dreamier and more delicate sensation was provided by another cave game, when upon awakening in the early morning I made a tent of my bedclothes and let my imagination play in a thousand dim ways with shadowy snowslides of linen and with the faint light that seemed to penetrate my penumbral covert from some immense distance, where I fancied that strange, pale animals roamed in a landscape of lakes.

posted by Caxton1476 at 2:20 PM on May 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

When i inspected my new flat my daughter immediately realised the wardrobes - ridiculously enormous wall length things - were big enough for us to stand in without bumping our heads (albeit the floor lining creaks ominously under me). They were a deciding factor for her. She does not hang any clothing up, and possesses a small battery lantern. I haven't lost her in it completely yet, or panicked since she is asleep there, but she retreats to it for reading. And will likely set it up more comfortably once I get some floor pillows and more blankets.
posted by geek anachronism at 12:31 AM on May 27, 2020 [2 favorites]

That reminds me of another memory! Once my parents bought an antique desk with a large cabinet on the bottom. When we opened it up, we found two sets of little bare footprints in the dust on the cabinet floor. Who knows when and where kids played in it?
posted by Countess Elena at 9:42 AM on May 27, 2020 [1 favorite]