The Art of Building a Den

See, growing up on the seaside gives you a certain mindset. A certain outlook on things. I never really noticed it until I started living inland in my early twenties. I started feeling… I don’t know. Claustrophobic, maybe? Not real claustrophobia. Not the kind of claustrophobia that creeps up on you in a closed place and makes your palms sweat and your heart race and the walls pulse and bleed with oppressive weight.

But it creates a sort of… close feeling, when inland. Buildings seemed to hang. Clouds lower. Streets narrower. Air thicker. You know the way air hangs moist and heavy and dense before a good cleansing storm? Whole inland cities can feel like that when you grow up near the coast. Whole urban landscapes. Just that little bit closer.

Nothing like the coast. There’s something to be said for being able to see the horizon. A true horizon. The place where the world just falls away from you. You can follow that perfect curve all the way to freedom. Everything behind and everything ahead. I understood why pioneers would just load up ships with everything they could carry and sail off. It was just to see what would happen. Being seven I didn’t understand much, but, looking at the horizon, I understood that. It’s even better with a friend.

Look at that google map again. Face out to the river from the bottom of the road. See that little path there on the right? Heads steep up a slope? There’s a tiny little park in there.  Genuinely, it’s tiny. You can move around the surrounding streets and see the whole thing. Just a small little landing strip separating the concrete legs of the promenade and the main road. It was full of dog mess, of course and bottles, beer cans and the rest of the shit you’d get in a shitty park in a shitty part of town. But I was seven, and back then it was biggest playground I could have wanted.

Can you see the tree? One day, that tree will destroy that park and itself. The roots have been growing out for decades. At prom level, the bricks are already bulging. Muffin topping over cement foundations. Pushed out, brick by brick, by relentless suicidal growth. I’d worked in a bank, and there was a delicious allegory to be drawn there, if I could swallow the bile for long enough. I often wondered what she would have become had anything gone differently that day. Would she now be working in a call centre like the rest of our fucking generation? Nah, not in my head. She was too smart for that. No girl who could her bike down all sixty concrete steps outside the Town Hall in one go could end up in a call centre. Not with that giggle and the eyes to match. Who knows. When I knew her, the dawn of puberty was still a few years away but with the way she could build a den, maybe we’d have been childhood sweethearts? Maybe we’d have grown old together. Or what if it hadn’t been a tree? Maybe thirty years ago whichever park planner decided to try and renovate this park could have put a picnic table there, or a patio, and maybe she’d still be alive.

But no, it was a tree. And I was alone.

A tree that stood short on a grassy bank, branches bent back from the harsh Irish sea winds forming a half umbrella of branches right down to the grass. A bank into which years of rain and subsidence had eroded a root-strewn tunnel under the tree. It was perfect for a den.

And that’s what we built that day. A den. A perfect den.

Den building is an art. They say you’re born knowing how to swim. I think you’re born knowing how to build a den. Dens are not just building a small roof under which to eat smuggled choc-ices. Dens are primal. To a seven year old, you’re not stacking up boxes you’re building a house. A castle. A fucking kingdom. Anyone can make a cushion fort in the living room but that doesn’t count. They’re not your cushions, and it’s not your living room. Anything built with cushions is fleeting, lasting only as long as the need for a parent to sit down. Not like a den. A built den is like the first time you just cycle as far as you fucking can just for shits. It’s one of the first serious attempts you make to really make something your own. To really strike out. To actually make a claim of independence.