In my memory, everything is bigger, taller, fiercer. Guard towers thrust upward from a looming palisade wall. Around their base, gardens sprawl forever in maze of sun-drenched foliage and gravel paths. Inside the gates, heaps of cannonballs litter the ground around menacing cannons.

My memory is false. When I return to Fort Vancouver, I find the palisade does still loom, but the garden is a modest patch at the foot of one wall and there are only two cannons, with a single tidy stack of cannonballs apiece. It’s a shock, how much smaller everything is. But then, I was much smaller back then.

When I was very young, my father volunteered as one of the living history reenactors who populate the fort on busy summer weekends. He worked in the blacksmith shop, a dark space that was intimidating to a small child like me. My father’s presence somehow made it more so, because seeing him dressed in strange clothes and performing unfamiliar work made him seem like a stranger. But it meant my mother and brother and I often went to go see him there, and so the fort lingers among my childhood memories like a kind of recurring dream.

On an unexpectedly gloomy August afternoon I went back to the fort for the first time. I was motivated by my slightly-crazy life goal to see all of the national parks (Fort Vancouver is a national historical site), but also to see how the reality of the place lived up to the memory of it. My first stop was the visitor’s center, which I hadn’t even known existed–never, in all of my childhood visits, had we ever set foot inside or even gone to the upper parking lot that services it.

When I finally strolled down to the fort itself, my first reaction was one of disappointment. Maybe it was only the overcast skies coloring my mood, but everything seemed small and a little shabby. The displays and interpretive materials were mismatched and sometimes dated, clearly installed at various points over the last decades and in some cases not updated since then.

But those displays did offer me something my past self could not have appreciated. As a child, the fort was nothing but a giant, if unusual, playground, a place where I could run and explore. Now I could appreciate the historical significance of it and imagine the lives of the people who lived there.

As I wandered in and out of the reconstructed buildings, I was struck by the contrast between the lives of the everyday residents of the fort and its environs, and the lives of those who lived in the “Big House.” On the one hand: bare wooden structures, a narrow bed, and few crude possessions. On the other: a sumptuous mansion filled with ornate furniture and delicate glass and china.

The extreme concentration of wealth in the Big House was an important display of power in a region caught in a tug-of-war between Britain and the young United States. Fort Vancouver was an outpost of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a commercial corporation that effectively ruled the no-man’s-land of the Oregon Territory.

I vaguely remembered hearing about the Hudson’s Bay Company from my childhood visits, but living in Canada has brought what once seemed like distant history into new focus. Where I had thought the HBC was a thing of the past, in Canada it’s alive and well as a chain of department stores. And where U.S. history often frames the tension that surrounded Fort Vancouver as conflict between America and Britain, Canadian history seems inclined to frame it as tension between America and Canada. Smaller and more humble wasn’t the only way the fort was different to me now.

I saved the blacksmith’s shop for last. It, too, was smaller than I remembered, and less intimidating. But the smell was the same: scorched metal and ozone and coal and through it all the determined clang clang clang of hammer on steel on anvil. Here at last was was the Fort Vancouver of my memory.