Up From the Rubble
From Grade 4 onwards, I attended Parkland Immanuel Christian School in Edmonton, Alberta. During my time at PICS, it was out in the country surrounded by fields and forests. Today the school is surrounded by urban sprawl without a gravel road in sight. We regularly took advantage of the rural element at our “city” school, particularly by building forts.
The first ones were primitive. There would be a skeleton made out of branches collected from a nearby stand of trees. Over the skeleton we’d put hay borrowed from bales from the neighbouring farmer’s field. These forts were okay – until the wind blew and the rain fell.
For some reason, a friend and I were excluded from the largest of these hay forts. We went off by ourselves and built a small fort in the tree line running along the road. This one actually had a wooden roof and walls. While rudimentary, it was more durable than the biggest of the hay forts. One day that hay fort was gone and negotiations began to join forces and build the best fort ever. I was elected president, my friend was vice-president, and we set off organizing the work. I didn’t have great construction skills, but management suited me fine.
There was a lot of plywood and other bits and pieces of wood lying around our school. We collected that and started knocking together our fort next to a tall pine tree on the south-west corner of the school grounds. We decided to have not just one floor, but two, along with a tunnel to an underground room. I could dig, so I did a lot of work on the underground part of the fort. Using a cut and cover method, we had a tunnel about 2 meters long which led to a small room. Above ground, one of our fort members had a father in the carpet business, so we had wall to wall carpeting on both floors. Yeah, it was an awesome fort.
Sadly, our fort had enemies. The youngest of them were just jealous, I think. They would launch attacks on our fort every lunch and recess, often with snowballs or chunks of ice. This led to the development of our arsenal. We took broken hockey sticks, sawed them off to maybe about a foot and a half. Then with electrical tape we affixed a clothes-pin on one hand and a strong rubber band on the other (thanks to the fort member whose mom worked in a stationary store). All we needed was the ammo. Two by four Lego blocks worked brilliantly.
It may have been this arms race that led a far more formidable enemy to attack our fort. One Monday morning, our bus pulled into the school driveway and we looked off to the left in horror at the pile of rubble that used to be our fort. Over the weekend, the school board had brought in a Bobcat and levelled it. Yes, they even destroyed the tunnel and underground room. We were livid. We marched over to the principal’s office to protest. Mr. Van Delft told us the school board had decided our fort was too dangerous and it needed to go. And we were warned not to try to rebuild it. That was the end of the PICS Golden Age of Forts.
Remembering this story led me to think of what the Apostle Paul writes in 2 Cor. 5. He describes our human bodies here and now as an “earthly tent.” Like a flimsy fort, this tent is going to be torn down. But, “if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor.5:1). Everything earthly is perishable, but our heavenly dwelling isn’t. It’s been won for us by Christ and his Spirit has been given to us as a guarantee. Moreover, in due time, when Christ returns, we will gloriously rise from the rubble. What came crashing down will be raised perfect and imperishable.
I had a look on Google Street View and the spot where our fort stood is now commemorated by a big green pad-mounted transformer. Forts came and went. I’m going to come and go much the same. I didn’t think about it much in 1984, but these days I realize more than ever how everything around us is fleeting. What really matters is what we have in Christ.
The photo with this blog post was generated by AI based on my description. Sadly, I don’t have a real photo of that good old fort.
