...Down the Hill

At age 7, we moved from the city at the lakefront and to a suburb, with a little more land and a better school system. Our house was on a street on the top of a hill. We don't really have mountains in this state, but we have some big hills and changes in elevation.

From the second floor bathroom window you had a nice view of the city toward the lakefront. In the winter when the trees were bare you could see all the lights stretched out ahead. I never compared it side by side, but the view was similar to one I had photographed over looking LA from the Griffin Observatory. No tour of our house was complete without taking the surprised guests into the bathroom, closing the door to see out the window and shutting off the lights. LOL

But the feature that no kids could resist was the hill. After a modest sized backyard of grass was a retaining wall and then the hill covered in trees slopping moderately down to the street. This hill was part of our own private property. Ours was the widest and least overgrown on the street. Everyone on our side of the street lived on top of this hill and had at least 300 feet behind their yards as private property until the end of the street where the metropolitan (public) park started. But some were quite overgrown, hard to get through with fallen trees, eroded banks, and poison ivy.

Well thanks to my Dad, the poison ivy was eradicated on our part of the hill, fallen trees were cut and removed, ground cover planted (Pines, Orange Lilies, Ferns) to prevent erosion. That meant that we had our own private park, our own woods. No making noise in the house or yard. If you were looking for us, we'd be "down the hill". Exploring, making forts, blazing trails. If you wanted to play hide and seek or war, this was the place, lots of places to go. Of course my brother and I could get through the trails the quickest, we lived there, we made the trails. Our friends couldn't run over this terrain as well as us.

Even our neighbors who had their own hills preferred ours, especially as we got older and improved it even more. It got so good it needed to be defended, but I'm getting ahead of myself. And then the neighbors who didn't have their own hills, of course they came to play at ours. Pretty much if you were looking for anybody they were down our hill. Occasionally we'd have multi hill battles, that's where advance scouting and map writing came into play so you could get to the enemy quickly. Can't run down a path and trip over roots or come to a dead end or to where the pond drained out to make you a muddy mess.

No need for video games (there weren't any, I'm from the pinball era) we had real games. And then we started building... Improving the trails, patio, picnic table, and the beginning of the best fort ever. It started as "the platform", 4x4s buried deep by my Dad, on the side of the hill and a wooden floor up off the ground. In the middle of the woods, with a perfect view everywhere. The front was about 3 feet off the ground, the back was over 6 feet off the ground.

Then the improvements - a tarp A-frame roof, a (drawbridge) plank entry, then a wooden roof, then walls, front door, a back screen window. Then electricity, a long line strung through the trees from the garage. Now we could have a radio, fan, lights. So it wasn't just a day time play area, sleep outs, sometimes large ones, involving little sleep.

My parents stretched their budget a bit to afford that house, but they had some foresight on what a fun place it would be for growing up. They liked the woods and the double level patio area we built. A little wildlife so it didn't feel like crowded city living.

Must be why I bought the house on a wooded lot. My house is barely visible from satellite images. It's not as big as my parents, but it's in the best school system in the state, just as theirs was back then. My son has seen where my fort stood, it didn't survive all these years. We walk around my back yard talking of where I might build something for him.