The wrecked fort from Forest School

Greta took the kids tromping down the Laurel Creek trail this afternoon with other kids from another family as part of "forest school".  They took along some scrap lumber to make a fort or treehouse.  They found a great spot by the creek---a large, sideways growing tree.  They nailed a few pieces of plywood and two-by-fours into various parts of the tree to make a "cave", a fort, and a few other structures I never saw.

After dinner we returned to the site so the kids could show off their creation to daddy.  We arrived to see their construction completely destroyed only a few short hours after it was built.  Some pieces of lumber and duct-taped tree branches had been launched clear across the creek, the rest were strewn about on the ground.  Someone had littered a cigarette package along with numerous cigarette butts.

Naturally, the kids were upset.  Darwyn was melancholy but Max was especially hurt by the incident.  At first he seemed fine---perhaps he hadn't yet grasped the meaning of what he saw.  He burst into tears all of a sudden, saying, "If we rebuild it they'll just come back!"  It was another one of those moments in which a parent can see a piece of his child's innocence disappear.

Max's words haunt me.  What broke him was not the fact that his fort was wrecked, nor the fact that it was wrecked by some idiot vandal.  Rather, it was the realization that he was trapped.  There was nothing he could do to recover.  He could build it again, but the vandals will just wreck it again straight away.

His words resonated with me because I have the same tendency to obsess about every bad thing that ever happens to me at the hands of some malicious jerk.  I'm a law-abiding citizen, so I cannot take revenge.  Even if some crime had been committed, it would be hopelessly impractical to seek help from the authorities.  The only remaining conclusion is that I need to pick up sticks and move somewhere else where I hope no one will bother me.  This line of thought turns even the most trivial of bad experiences into a feeling that I'm being oppressed by pure evil.  Talk about first-world problems!!!

Maybe my tendency to blow bad experiences out of proportion is not so unusual.  But it sure was eerie to see Max jump straight to the same feeling of helplessness that I often feel.  If it looks like heritable behaviour and it smells like heritable behaviour...

After talking it over as a family, we decided the kids would write a note to the vandals.  The note will explain that this fort was built by Max and Darwyn and their friends, and that they were very sad to see it destroyed.  We'll laminate it and tack it to the tree.

It probably won't have any effect on anything, but at least we'll feel like we did something rather than nothing.  We'll all hope that one or two vandals will see the note and feel guilty, and maybe our efforts will hasten them toward the day when they finally snap out of their herd delinquency phase.