Rome may not have been built in a day, but on Sunday morning it felt like Stick Man’s fortress might be.
The small, wooded lot behind a Pizza Hut on Mountain Creek Road was a beehive of work as volunteers carried armfuls of wood back and forth or hammered nails out of pieces of bamboo.
“We can put another stack over there by the street,” Andrew Auber hollered to a group of workers pulling branches from an enormous pile in the woods.
Thirty minutes later there was a neatly stacked pile of wood reaching 4 feet tall, just one of several growing along the road as the morning progressed.
Spirits were high among the 20-30 volunteers who happily put aside their plans for the day to haul timber in a lot situated between a culvert and an empty parking lot. They came from across the region and worked feverishly for one reason – to help Stick Man.
Glen Lee, who will turn 94 in May, began earning his nickname almost 10 years ago when he came across the vacant lot and started building something that would become a hidden Chattanooga marvel.
Stick by stick, he coaxed something out of the most fantastical corner of his mind, slowly, carefully building a convoluted maze of walls and rooms out of bamboo, fallen branches and scraps of old lumber.
Anyone who wanted to come and wander the baffling construction was welcome to do so while Lee regaled them with stories of his time fighting the Germans in WWII.
But a week ago, tragedy struck. The entire center of the fortress collapsed, leaving only the exterior wall standing, and a painful mess in the center.
The morning after the collapse, Auber saw a distraught Lee surveying the damage to his precious creation.
Volunteers started organizing immediately, determined to help the local legend and salvage what they could. Eager to return the fortress to its former glory, Stick Man agreed and in the span of a morning, the group managed to clear the interior and leave him with several piles of material to begin work afresh.
Auber, one of the first people to start organizing the philanthropic mission, said they were setting the wood aside because “he wants to rebuild it himself.”
“I just hope I’m still going at 93 and am able to do something like this,” Auber said with a grin about the fortress.
The cause brought in help from all over, including an electrician named Gary Patterson who brought his whole family from Trenton, Ga., to help.
“I’ve never even seen it before,” he said while showing his grandson how to pull a nail with a hammer’s claw. The nail came out with a yank and the boy tossed it into a bucket.
Patterson’s wife, Bo, said it was her birthday and she couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate.
“It makes you feel good to see so many people out here,” she said. “You read too much negative stuff and you see too much negative stuff.”
For his part, while volunteers cleared out the wreckage, Lee sat as he often does at a Burger King 200 yards away, sipping coffee and thinking about how he would rebuild.
He was optimistic – the collapse was a blow, but even at 93, he said he’s excited to get his hands dirty again down in the thicket.
“There’s a wall about 8 feet wide that’s come sideways,” he said about his first project.
Building an open-air labyrinth out of sticks comes with a certain guarantee that repairs will be needed. Lee said he dealt with another collapse about two years ago.
“I fixed it back once before,” he said. “I’ll do it again.”
Contact staff writer Emmett Gienapp at egienapp@times freepress.com or 423-757-6731.