11.19.2001
Had I grown up in the typical suburban environment, I would have built a tree house like any normal kid. But in California's central valley, the only thing more rare than trees was a college education. As such, I was forced to make due with what there was around me which was a large swimming pool - an extravagance my father insisted upon after moving here from Boston - and a lot of very flat and boring land.
It was never my plan, nor was it my destiny, to become an architect or engineer but as a kid I took a profound pleasure in the design and construction of structures that were cathedrals to my introverted desires. I was not a child who enjoyed the company of other children and my carpentry projects were an escape from the chore of having to participate with those of my own age. I was not the son of a farmer and it showed in my pasty complexion, small shoulders, and gentle hands. My father was the newest manager at the town's poultry processing plant, a step down the career ladder disguised as a promotion, and the rest of the "union yes" kids resented my management level dad and, by proxy, me.
This wasn't to say I had no dreams of playing with other kids - my various building projects reflected this. The first thing that I built in the summer of 1983 was a pool castle intended to be the unbreachable bastion in the ultimate water fight. My father frequently worked sixteen hour days which when combined with my mother having been left behind on the east coast with my two younger siblings and having no friends to speak of, left me plenty of time to hatch my grand schemes without his awareness of what exactly was happening with his pool.
The plan was simple. From an old fence that had blown down years before that was stored on our property before we moved in, I was going to construct a multi-level floating building that would consist of a full floor completely beneath the water's surface and another above with several portholes from which squirt pistols and balloons could be fired. The roof of the second floor would serve the dual purpose of keeping water from splashing in, thus sinking my fort, and also as a platform from which to intensify the battle by giving the person an unobstructed view of the field and with it, the ability to pelt any intruders from above. Over the surface of the water was to be a platform that extended out three feet so as to gain access to the solitary door and to stabilize it in the water, preventing it from being tipped on its side and sinking. The plans were drawn out in meticulous detail on several sheets of notebook paper and littered the floor of my room in multiple variations until I had settled on one design that was decided to be invincible.
Construction began on a Saturday in late June and I rummaged through the still as yet unpacked boxes in the garage for my father's tools. He was on one of his rare days off and watched as I fetched the appropriate boards from the scrap pile and laid them out in a seemingly random pattern that held some sense of order to me. He picked up blueprints and looked them over with a beer in his other hand as I started to hammer the floorboards on top of four sawhorses, joining them together with two-by-fours as the joints. He asked me a few questions but never anything about what I planned to do with it or whether I expected to use his pool as my structure's waterborne environment.
It took me a week to assemble the first floor then seal it with a wax I asked my dad to bring home from the hardware store. He obliged, still blissfully unaware of what my plans were and glad that I was doing something to keep myself busy. It was when the first floor was finished that I realized that there was a flaw in my construction. Originally I wanted to build it all then drop it into the water ready to play with but seeing the sheer bulk of what I had built told me that it was not going to happen. What I saw in front of me was a five-foot by five-foot box with the outside platform already attached and a ladder leading to where I wanted to put the hatchway to the above water level. I knew that were I to finish it where it was, I would never be able to move it. Transportation was already an issue as it was.
I stopped construction and started putting some thoughts into moving what I already had into the pool. Finally deciding that I needed to put it on wheels rather than pushing or dragging the mammoth tub, I again rummaged through the boxes in the garage looking for a skateboard that was given to me the year before. After two days of searching, it proved to have not made it through the journey though two pairs of mistakenly packed roller-skates did. It took another day to detach the wheels and build the moving platform that I would use. There was nothing to it but four boards forming a square around an empty center and a pair of wheels at each corner. The way I saw it, I could push it right into the water and fetch the platform out later.
Using two boards nailed to a sawhorse and the platform at an easy angle, I pushed the basement level of my water fortress down onto the wheels then with my dad's hammer, pried the boards off. Giving my dolly a test push I found that it was going to move easier than dragging the whole thing across the back yard but only slightly so. The sky was starting to darken and the clouds had a distinct red tint to them so I called it a day and washed the filth from the construction from my body, retiring to watch sitcoms for the rest of the evening.
It wasn't unusual that my father worked all night shifts, coming home either early in the morning or sometime around noon, and it was rare that I knew when he was going to do so, only finding it out after the fact. That evening I fell asleep in front of the television and assumed that it was just going to be another late night at the office and that I would see him another time. As it was, he came home just after I launched my little project into his new pool.
I was already inside of it, impressed with my own work and organizing my materials to start construction of the upper levels when he walked through the front door. From out in the back yard I didn't hear him come in, or go into the bathroom adjacent to his bedroom which had a window that faced directly out towards the deep end of the pool and my construction site. I doubt he would have even bothered to look out had I waited a few more minutes to begin hammering. I might have gotten away with if I had pushed my floating palace over to the shallow end where he had no direct line of sight. As it was, he was not pleased at what he saw when he peered through his little sliver of window and saw what it was I had been up to.
"Joseph, what that fuck are you doing in my pool," he bellowed from the bathroom which, because of its tiled walls and ceiling, had an acoustic property that really brought out the bass in his voice.
"Nothing Dad," I said as innocently as I could. "I'm just working on my fort."
"What the hell is your fort doing in my pool," he bellowed again. Because of the bright summer light that made it impossible to see his face in the window and the sound that the bathroom produced, I felt like I was being interrogated by the Great Wizard of Oz.
"You saw my plans Dad," I said, losing some of the innocence in favor of a tone that said, "You should have known what I was doing."
"I saw your plans but it never said any...," he trailed off and I could hear him flush the toilet. "You stay there, I'm coming out."
Sensing that I was going to be in not a little bit of trouble, I pushed off from the edge of the pool and floated in my waterborne box to the center of the deep end, just far enough away to be out of his reach. He rounded the corner of the yard and in his white collared management shirt, loose red tie, and gray Montgomery Wards slacks, walked with a tired gate over to the edge of the water and stood over me with his fists on his hips.
"Joseph, what the hell is this," he asked obviously exhausted.
"I told you Dad, this is my water fort. I had to move it in here so I could finish construction." I held up his hammer and saw as proof that there was still yet more to come.
He shook his head and pushed the dolly I'd built back and forth with his foot. "Okay, Okay," he said. "I don't want you to build any more, okay? I want you to pull that thing out of my pool then I want you to clean it."
"Dad," I said to him. "I barely got this thing in here. How am I going to get it out?"
He looked at me crooked for a few seconds, trying to decide whether I was purposely attempting to spite him, then slowly turned around and left to go back inside and to bed.
I never did finish my water fort. It was almost a week until my father had a day off during which he spent it pushing and pulling my structure until it was finally back onto dry land where I was then ordered to disassemble it and clean his pool. I might have been disappointed at the destruction of my dream were it not for the fact that over the previous week I had designed an underground bunker to be placed in the side yard that I needed the wood for anyway.