It wasn’t so big, really, but to my cousins and me it was our own private mountain fortress. How many times did we flop down on it for cover as Injuns shot arrows at us, then return fire over its crest with our woodknot guns. Or other times the woodknots were machine guns and we were fighting Nazis. But most often we played on the wood pile with our small toys, dumping out buckets and buckets of plastic army men and knights and dinosaurs and cowboys and indians, Star Wars figures and G.I. Joes. Epic battles were waged on that wood pile, wars that transcended time and space: a band of horseback gunsinglers taking down a t-rex? Why not? We could fix the timeline when we were back in school.

Sometimes a small, porous hole would open up in the wood pile, a dark cavity tunneling down between the buttresses of the gnarled, worm-gnawed wood. Erosion and the pressure of many small feet would cause these holes to open: in scale with our action figures they were gaping caverns–and if a figure happened to fall down one, abandon all hope of ever getting it back.

Years later, when we were all grown up, builders had to use the dirt from the wood pile for foundation on a new build-on to the trailer. My Nan recalled with fondness the long-lost army men and cowboys and indians that the diggers turned up in the dirt. Stirred from their graves, testaments to those battles of long ago.

All those accidents waiting to happen . . . I wonder how often they really did? There’s a theory around that kids have a much greater sense of self-preservation and what they are able to safely do than we give them credit for. I don’t know if I agree, but I do think it’s amazing that more kids didn’t get hurt once upon a time before litigation and precisely engineered safety.

One thing is for sure, we used to have a sense that some cuts and bumps and bruises and even broken bones were a perfectly normal and healthy part of growing up, and not grounds for litigation!

Marquee Movies — thank you for you comments, to which I will respectfully (in the spirit that you suggest) not respond, other than to say that I was saddened by Mr. Cronkite’s passing and, as a professional journalist (though, admittedly, it is sometimes hard to discern the fact) I certainly appreciate his contributions to the field and to our society as a whole (I’ll leave it at that).
However, I genuinely think Chris and I go back-and-forth just for the fun of going back-and-forth.
The book you noted that I mentioned is “Guns, Germs and Steel — The Evolution of Civilization” by UCLA professor Jared Diamond, It won a Pulitzer Prize and I do highly recommend it (and thanks for the opportunity to put in another plug for it!)

Fred is correct in his recollections of the “ocean wave” which was, indeed, a series of serious injuries waiting to happen. Just looking for an extended period at the chipped garish orange paint job was painful enough! My parents expressly forbid my siblings and I from venturing onto it (we did anyway). Such a monstrosity would NEVER be built today — the lawyers would scrap it in the design phase for certain!

In another version, there were no army men: the dinosaurs themselves were the main characters, and they talked, and their leaders were two Tyrannosauruses (one of my cousin’s and one of mine). They were an alliance or “gang” of “good” dinosaurs, and they had to fight against rival gangs of “bad” dinosaurs that would try to move in and take over the valley . . . or else the good dinosaurs had to try to survive a tidal wave that destroyed the valley, and they all got onto a raft we built out of sticks, twine, and a foam rubber pad. (Isn’t that a great combination? Just the sort of raft dinosaurs would build! You make do with what you’ve got, right?)

Most of the dinosaurs talked: I remember that all the Glyptodons ever said was “Glyp! Glyp!”

The rickety playground equipment you described reminds me of some that was in our local Manners Park when I was little. Now it’s all gone but the very safest stuff — swings and a slide or two. But as late as my junior-high years, there was a thing we all called the Ocean Wave. Imagine a cone made of metal rods: the bottom rim of the cone is a wooden seat; there are braces to hold onto, and the top (apex) of the cone, where the braces come together, is mounted on a central pole, so that the cone can move freely and spin. At rest, the seat is only about a foot off the ground. Kids can sit all around the circular seat, facing toward the center with their feet on the ground. Depending on how they all push and pull, the seat rises and pitches and revolves around the pole. It is like being on the deck of a ship in the roughest seas. But when one side goes up, the other side comes down with a shuddering impact against the ground. I never actually saw anyone get a body part crushed under the rim, but the potential was certainly there — which is why, in the litigation-happy present, such playground rides no longer exist.

There was a teeter-totter, too — at least that’s what we called it — that was like riding on a battering ram.

Sadly, the old barn is not still standing. Some 7-8 years ago, it fell completely to ruin. The hayloft collapsed into the stalls beneath, the walls all buckled, and the roof (more holes by that point than rotted boards) crashed down on top of all the rest. In the summer of 2006, I hired a guy with a bulldozer to scoop and haul and burn the ruins of the barn, the chicken house, and the tin shed. The messy, dangerous cottonwood trees are gone now (they were leaning precariously toward the house), but the old Glory Day grove is still standing! There will always be trees all around that plot of land, as long as I have anything to say about it!

Kids do have an overwhelming urge to write their names indelibly! I remember when Mom sent three of us up onto the roof to use up the very last dregs of a can of paint by painting the wooden frame of an attic window. We finished that and still had a tiny bit of paint left. . . . So on the green shingles of the window housing, for years and years after that, you could see our three names from the back yard. (It was only about 6 or 7 years ago that the roof was remodeled and that window — our names and all — was removed.)