When I was a kid, I used to search everywhere for abandoned sheds or barns, abandoned shelters and even box cars, or abandoned anything, really. If it was abandoned, I wanted to know about it. I can tell you that I found some pretty neat things, including an old hideout of a bootlegger. A lot of people will leave an old structure up out in their woods to preserve the “footprint” in case they ever want to build again, or simply because they’ve forgotten or never knew that the shelter was there in the first place. Some people have some illegally built old sheds in the woods that they’d rather not have to pay taxes on or tear down.
The forgotten ones are the best ones to find because no one
is even thinking about them. I’d make
each tiny shed or hut into a potential command center from which I would
operate my spying of the woods. I took
my job very seriously then and still do.
I would also sneak anything I could from my mother’s house to try to
turn the place into a little home. So if
my mother threw anything out (or anyone’s mother threw anything out), I would
pilfer whatever looked semi-good and bring it to my new hideout. I had an old broom, so I’d sweep and clean
all my places out. Then I’d sit there
and plan how I might live through the winter in one of the forgotten sheds and
maybe plot the revolution while I was at it.
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| Very nice, but not the best candidate for a secret hideout. |
I guess I didn’t realize just how much I’d need to eat or
where I’d store the food or how I’d get it.
I could trap and fish a little, but I blew that up in my mind into a
whole supermarket. I would also sneak
food from home and store it in the shelters.
I had a couple of old pans for cooking that I found in the trash, and of
course, I knew how to start and keep a fire.
Oh, the wood I would store up around those places! I also had a couple of old broken crates for
chairs and tables, but the thought of a bed never occurred to me. I did have curtains from old sheets people
threw out. And, above all, I had my
little transistor radio with me at all times.
Occasionally I’d get found out and evicted by the
owner. Then I’d sneak back and get found
out again, and then he’d board the place up and put “keep out” signs
everywhere. That’s why I always had more
than one place, you see. But what
usually happened was that the weather simply got too cold. A fire outside is one thing, but I had no
stove inside, although I had half-rusted barrels I wanted to convert into a
stove but never quite figured out how to do it.
Eventually, I’d take to burying myself in the snow with just my head visible,
and while it was warmer than sitting in a frozen old broken-down shed, it
certainly limited my movement and wasn’t as much fun.
So I’d have to come home then and try to figure something
out. Soon the serious part of winter
would set in and I couldn’t even get to most of the shelters anymore, so I’d
sit back and plan and wait for spring again.
Each spring, I’d assess the damage of my current places and scour the
woods for new places or even build a few primitive overhangs with old dead
saplings and torn-up tarps. The animals
would thwart me by finding my food and eating it, and occasionally, the worst
thing would happen: Another human would
find my stuff and steal most of it and trash the rest. That always bothered me the most. The animals I could forgive; the humans,
never.
I’m not sure when I stopped looking for new command posts or
building new secret hideouts, but eventually I did. And now that I think about it, I’m not sure why I stopped. It was the most fun a kid
could ever have! So when I go walking
through the woods or driving down an unpopulated road, it’s just a natural
reflex for me to keep my eyes open for potential hideouts. The one you see here in the picture would
have been like the Hilton compared to some of the places I had, and it would
have been too risky as well because it’s not hidden enough in the woods. I probably would have passed this one
by. But a couple of nice little sheet
curtains in there wouldn’t hurt. Hey,
you never know.
