Our new home was a warped, rat-infested structure that smelled like mold and looked like it might have fallen over in a strong wind—if it weren’t for all the cracks in the walls that let the wind pass through. What was left of the paint on the exterior was peeling. The interior rooms were covered with wallpaper, most of it water-damaged with long rusted streaks running down the walls. Still, for a couple of boys from the California suburbs, the arrangement wasn’t all bad. The house sat on nearly five wooded acres bordered on two sides by a creek that ran high enough to float an inner tube during the summer.

That summer we scaled every tree—and there were lots of them—worthy of climbing. We also valued the trees for the food they produced. Money was so tight that my mother had stopped buying luxuries like potato chips and ice cream and now brought home only staples: bread, peanut butter, flour, and an occasional chuck roast for Sunday dinner. The trees, however, generously bent with ripe fruit. There were Bartlett pear, crabapple, apricot, peach, plum, Bing cherry, red Delicious apple, even a black walnut. Every day that summer we ate fruit until we were full, which satisfied us, but more times than not gave us the runs.

Joel and I spent that summer alone together. Joel loved baseball so we played a lot of catch, though it bothered me that he was four years younger than me and had a better fast ball. We also engaged in a fair amount of insect torture. On the east side of our home, on the slope of the underground fruit cellar, we found a hill of ant lion pits. We’d capture ants and drop them into the pits, watching for the buried ant lion to suddenly emerge. If we felt more adventurous, we’d hunt grasshoppers in the tall grass of the back fields, incarcerating them in a glass jar. We’d try them for some indiscretion—like reckless hopping or ugliness—and summarily execute them, usually death by rock or BB gun firing squad. Every day was something new.

I don’t remember whose idea it was to build the clubhouse. Years later Joel claimed it was his. Whoever’s it was, we never could have anticipated the chain of events it set in place.

We had all the materials we needed to build. My grandfather, who died long before I was born, was a pharmacist by trade. He was also a builder, and sheets of weathered plywood were stacked up against the old greenhouse and warped two-by-fours were piled in the smelly, straw-floored cinder block chicken coop my grandfather had built fifty years earlier.