The Farm as Fantasy Landscape
The hedges came first.
They surrounded the whole house, thick and old, the kind of hedge that a grown man would have to push through but a five-year-old could slip under. There was a gap between the bottom of the hedge and the foundation of the house — a crawl space, really, just wide enough for a small body pressed flat against the dirt. I found it early and claimed it. This was a whole world.
Down there with my dog Dori, a Labrador retriever who would not let anyone touch me without her permission, and my trucks and my Ertl farm vehicles — the small die-cast tractors and implements that were scaled-down versions of what the real farm used. Dad had built me a barn, a miniature of the actual barn, sized for the Ertl line. Stove pipes for silos. The lawn beyond the hedge became the fields. Down on my belly in the dirt, looking out through the hedge gaps at the yard, the scale was perfect. The farmstead above me was enormous and adult and full of chores. The farmstead at hedge-level was mine — a place where a boy and a dog and a handful of metal toys could run a whole operation.
I loved farming as a little one. Helen was along for most of this. Dori for all of it. I felt safe with her.
This is why The Secret of NIMH spoke to me the way it did. Don Bluth’s film — the world-building I am still trying to get at. Magical, whimsical, dark, miniature. The idea that inside a cinder block was a house for mice. The owl, the raven, all of it. It haunted me. I was already living at that scale, already knew what it felt like to occupy a world hidden inside a larger world, invisible to anyone not small enough to find the entrance. Bluth validated the experience and gave it a visual language. Watership Down hit the same note years later — the same resonance, the miniature civilization inside the landscape the adults walked over without seeing.
The microworld thread ran through everything I watched: the Smurfs, the Littles, the Gummy Bears cartoon with its tree-base fortress. I was consistently drawn to miniature civilizations hidden inside larger worlds. Not because I felt small. Because I knew the small places were where the real life happened.
Dad built the sandbox. I spent hundreds of hours in it.
First with Tyco excavation vehicles — the yellow steel backhoes and bulldozers that moved actual sand. Then Star Wars figures. Then Matchbox cars. Then all of them at once. The sandbox was the first multiverse. The first crossover space. A place where Luke Skywalker could meet a Tonka dump truck and neither one had to explain what they were doing there because the sand made everything possible. I’d dig roads and mountains and rivers, carve out landscapes, build cities from wet sand and demolish them with a well-placed boot. The Star Wars figures stood on ridges I’d shaped with my hands, surveying kingdoms that would be flat again by morning.
We’d dig so deep the dirt mixed with the sand. Dad scolded us for that. But the mixed sand was much more packy, better for building, which we tried to explain and which he did not find persuasive. The engineering of childhood: every constraint becomes a technique if you’re stubborn enough.
Any object could be a planet. My Millennium Falcon could visit a rock at the sandbox edge and find new forms of life there, indigenous to that particular stone, with their own culture and economy that I’d invent on the spot and forget by dinner. The world-building impulse was running before I had a name for it. I wasn’t playing. I was practicing — I just didn’t know for what.
The farm had outbuildings the way a medieval estate had towers, each one a distinct territory with its own rules and dangers and treasures.
The granary was divided: upstairs was mine, downstairs was Helen’s. I’d made a secret passage by climbing through the upper window and blocking off the stairs so she couldn’t come up. The buildings were all chock full of antiques — I didn’t know that word then. For me it was just stuff, turned into toys. An old hand-crank drill became a weapon. A butter churn became a turret. A wooden crate became a cockpit. Everything was raw material for whatever the afternoon’s scenario required.
The barn. The outbuildings. The century farm machinery, horse-era equipment that had been converted for tractor use — fascinating to play on. Levers to go to light speed. Little compartments with rusted old tools that would serve as blasters. A seat meant for a man and a team of horses became the command chair of whatever vessel the afternoon demanded: spaceship, submarine, western wagon, pirate ship. The rust and the old paint and the heavy iron of it gave everything weight. You couldn’t pretend a plastic toy was real. You could pretend a hundred-year-old thresher was a starship because it already had the heft of something that had done serious work. I want to do a whole art series based on this machinery someday. The shapes deserve it.
The pallets changed everything.
Dad worked at Fort Howard, the paper mill. His coworkers made fun of him for bringing home pallets — junk, they said, firewood at best. But Dad brought them home by the stack, and to a nine-year-old they were endless building materials. You could leave them intact and they were walls, floors, roofs. You could pull boards from one to finish another. You could build forts the size of rooms, with doors that opened and roofs that kept the rain out, or at least most of it. Dad was repurposing before anyone called it that. The men at the mill laughed, but the farm filled up with the evidence that junk is just material waiting for someone who sees differently.
He also brought home the tan felt-like interface paper from the paper machines — big sheets of it, heavy and soft, the color of deerskin. We called it fake deer skin and built everything from it. Tents. Lean-tos. Coverings for pallet structures that made them look like frontier outposts. Between the pallets and the interface paper and whatever else Dad hauled home, we never lacked for building materials. We lacked for nothing that mattered. We didn’t have art supplies. We had a paper mill’s waste stream and a father who couldn’t pass up a free pallet.
He had tons of tools too, though none of them were ever findable when he needed them. Hearing him yell Don! Where’s my hammer!! from across the yard was a frequent occurrence. The tools migrated to wherever my latest project was, and the projects migrated to wherever the tools had last been set down, and by August the whole farm was a distributed workshop where any building might contain the thing you were looking for.
The wood piles were adventure zones unto themselves. One was as large as a building — a mountain of split firewood stacked and restacked over years, with gaps and tunnels and passages that changed every time Dad added to it. We burned firewood exclusively my whole childhood. Dad didn’t put a furnace in until 2007, when he was trying to sell the place. The wood pile was permanent infrastructure, and it served double duty: fuel and fortress.
Sometimes I played at human scale, climbing the piles, building forts from the gaps, defending them against imaginary enemies or Helen, depending on the day. Sometimes at three-and-three-quarter-inch action figure scale, where a gap between two logs became a canyon and a knot in the wood became a cave and my Star Wars figures could stage entire campaigns across a landscape that smelled like oak and birch and was already warm from the sun.
The territory expanded as I got older, concentric circles of freedom opening outward from the house.
First: accompanied picnics to the back woods, begging to go alone. Fall: through the corn, which during dusk on the way back would be frightening — the stalks taller than me, the light going orange and then gone, the rustling that could be wind or could be anything. Then riding bikes: and the world opened up. I discovered a trail alongside the road that led into the forest, a whole network of trails made by the neighbor farm kid with ATVs — another thing too scary according to Mom. I’d get Helen to come sometimes. My adventuring buddy Aaron would bring his bike and we’d get lost for hours on the neighbor farmer’s property, following trails that branched and rejoined and sometimes dead-ended at a creek or a clearing we’d never seen before.
The play evolved. GI Joe became survivalism. The reenactments graduated from shooting at each other with pointed fingers to something more serious: sneaking through bushes for real, setting actual booby traps with trip lines and counterweights, starting campfires with flint and steel, catching fish with nothing but a line and a hook. We actually succeeded at all of this. We cooked fresh-caught fish over fires we’d built ourselves, under stars, on ground we’d chosen, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt more competent than I did at ten years old, sitting by a fire I’d made, eating a fish I’d caught, on land I knew better than any adult.
Finding the best fishing holes became its own quest, especially with my cousin Jimmy — who deserves his own chapter and will get one.
Star Wars was huge on the farm. Could convince Helen to be one of the GI Joe women. GI Joe transitioned into the survivalism phase. She’d go along with most of my interests, which was generous of her, since I rarely returned the favor. Barbie was not at all my territory, though the world-builder in me couldn’t resist any narrative system, even to destroy it — the Joes would occasionally storm the Barbie horse trailer and slaughter all her horses. Ken lost his head many times. Helen tolerated this with the patience of a younger sister who understood the terms of the alliance.
We played with the real action figures — she got Princess Leia, I got Luke. We’d reenact scenes together, sometimes to the little read-along records that came with the storybooks, sometimes from memory. The figures went everywhere: sandbox, hedges, granary, machinery, wood pile. Every surface was a set. Every structure was a location. The whole farm was a backlot for whatever story was running that week.
My parents once thought about buying a house on Uncle Ken’s street. I remember standing on the porch of the house they were considering, looking at the sidewalks, the other houses, the tidiness of it, and knowing with absolute certainty that I did not want to leave. The farm was the world. Every hedge, sandbox, barn, wood pile, outbuilding, and rusted piece of century-old machinery was a room in a house I’d built over years, and no city street with sidewalks and neighbors and chain-link fences could replace what I’d already made.
I didn’t have the words for it then. I do now. The farm was my first designed environment — a landscape I’d mapped and populated and mythologized and knew at every scale, from the crawl-space under the hedges to the trails at the property’s edge. Every world I’ve built since has been an attempt to get back there. Not to the place. To the feeling of a place that was entirely mine, that I’d made real by believing in it hard enough and long enough that even the dirt cooperated.