My brother was always coming up with some wild idea here and there. My mother told the story of the time when he had watched a war movie on the television and later she looked out the back window and saw him digging a trench in the backyard. She went out and asked him what he was doing and found out that it was a trench like in the movie. Or like the time he was down the street in a vacant lot digging away and found a grave stone from civil war days (that made the local paper).
The best was when he got the idea to build a log cabin in the woods close by (probably from the movie “Treasure Island”). I think I was around 9-years old that summer and thought it would be fun. Besides, it was a little break from the backyard baseball and kickball games the neighborhood boys played during the summers away from school.
So a few of the older brothers and Mikie and myself started chopping trees down at a location in the middle of the woods. It took most of the summer to complete but it was a fine resemblance of a crude log cabin. It was about 6-7 feet high and tree length (about 20 feet long) in a square formation with no roof. We had many play battles and fun after the construction.
We built two more over the next two summer breaks. The second went just like the first except that because they were developing a new residential area close by we didn’t get to enjoy it very long. One day we heard an explosion from the general area of our log cabin and went to check out what was happening. We thought it might be part of the new development but found out that they had blown up our log cabin with dynamite. What a disappointment it was since a lot of hard work had gone into it. Well the next summer, out of spite, we built the third cabin but this one we made with bigger trees and more reinforced.
Again we heard the blasting sound of dynamite. In fact, it was several blasting sounds closely spaced together. When we went to investigate we found that they had blown our cabin up again but this time was a much harder feat to accomplish. Although disappointed again we enjoyed the fact that they had to use more dynamite to destroy our cabin this time.
Needless to say, that was the last of log cabins to be built since the older brothers were beginning high school. All in all, building those log cabins gave us a great sense of accomplishment. All because of my brothers creative imagination.
God bless and God speed
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