Sub Terra Vita Chronicle #27—Part VI: A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground—Fortifying Us

Sub Terra Vita

By Tim Krenz

December 7, 2015

Chronicle #27—Part VI: A Brief Autobiography of the Valley Underground—Fortifying Us

Growing up in Osceola in the 1970s and 80s, we did not use personal devices. Indeed, we never imagined such things except in their Star Trek form, the tricorders, phazers, and communicators used by Kirk and Spock. While we did watch a LOT of television, some on fuzzy and snowy channels, it sometimes, and not always, came in color. Black and television even came to a pause in the night, by “signing off,” with fireworks, flag, and screen tone.

We found outlets, mostly involving the underground, to spice our time, when bored with t.v. The kids in the village became the masters, the architects, the engineers and builders of forts all over this place.

The first fort I remember, my siblings and the neighbor kids built along a dirt trail in a copse of oaks and elms not far from our house. Built with salvaged barn planks, if I remember correctly, it stood “hundreds of feet” high in the trees. I could only reach it by climbing up a “Swiss family Robinson” staircase, to a platform, and with my brother holding me, we swung by a rope over a “den of bears in a dry moat” to reach the main platform. From there we ascended to the “Tarzan condo.” Of course, we did, right? Those same trees no longer exist. Also, that path now forms Industrial Drive.

At what we knew as the “Clay Pit,” by the railroad and “Old M” crossing, my friends and I dug and burrowed badger holes, not too elaborate, but rather cavey. When it snowed, we sledded off that ledge, or rather just fell off of it, without too many broken bones, etc. We also played something akin to “Rock of Sogdiana” (google that), in red dirt, in snow, or dirty red snow, rolled, mounded and packed in castle-like imposing walls. Otherwise known as the epic tussles of King of the Hill, the loser could only fall so far there. It did not hurt, much.

Other forts abounded over the town. We would always find scrap pieces of discarded materials, a.k.a. garbage, with which to build our forts, and some of these had flooring. Whether the hobo shack down between the Upper Mill Pond and the Soo Line RR, or the stick-woven and grass-thatched “Gilligan” hut on the side of my hill above Third Avenue Creek, usable materials always surfaced. Often, they went at least a little below ground. Imagination, a rough scheme, supplies, tools, and us kids could overcome many boundaries of what we could build, provided we made it home for supper every night.

Some “forts” did not belong to us, but kind town neighbors would not mind the use of their “secret” picnic cave, with tables and seating carved from rock, under an overhang of cliff. We had only to provide respect and care, in order to enjoy the panorama north and south of the river valley, facing an orange autumn sun-setting under clouds reflecting a royal purple befitting kings. Other forts in the woods, and into hills, below village-level used natural materials, too, like green wood and fresh pine boughs (ooopps). However, they worked great for long-term, lean-to shelters in cold weather.

In winter time, indeed, we reached the pinnacle of fortifying our young lives with fun. When snow arrived, and got piled by plows, we burrowed tunnels and (near-) catacombs. The walls of rolled and cut snow blocks became ramparts and parapets emerging over days and weeks. Us Winter Knights, not watching television and before hot cocoa and supper, fought our dreaded foes on semi-Napoleonic scales of victory or defeat, pummeling us, pummeling others, with snow balls, or rather ice balls, for the right to proclaim one side the victor, the Kings of the realm—Lords and Masters of. . .the Fort.