More Structure!

Fantasy survivalist visions: thoroughly squelched. We spent Tuesday and Wednesday night in a shelter we built ourselves, and the most that can be said for the experience is that nobody died of hypothermia. 

We started with the four of us lying on the ground in a circle, head-to-toe. I scuffed out a line in the dirt around our bodies and we got to work at 9 AM on Tuesday. An hour later, we had a number of piles of sticks and Scotch broom, but no actual shelter. Two of the men industriously sawed down an alder tree and cut it into three pieces about six feet in length, but after we had lashed them together, the conical structural frame that resulted turned out to be too small for the four of us to sleep in. 

Take two was more pyramid shaped and somewhat better suited to the 6'3" height of our tallest classmate. As the sky grew dark and our energy lagged, we beheld a smoky pile of scotch broom draped on a frame of alder poles. A few piles of leaves around the bottom and a couple of inches of fir boughs on the floor did very little to provide any insulation.

We spent that endless night in a cold delirium. We took turns falling into a half-sleep, half-awake state interspersed with brief conversations over what time it was and whether we really needed to pee or not. It felt warmer outside the structure than in. The fire smoldered through the night, providing a teasing glimpse of warmth, but no real comfort. 

We stumbled out of the doorway early in the morning, bleary-eyed and sore. Grey fixed us up some rocket fuel coffee and a package of taquitos, which we devoured with reckless disregard for the rules of civilization. Conversation around the breakfast fire consisted of barely intelligible grunts and expressive squints. 

It began to rain. The beatings did not improve morale. But we needed more structure, and so we buried our collective group grumpiness and got to work.

One can never have too much debris on a debris hut. We added multiple loads of Scotch broom and fallen leaves to the exterior of the structure, as well as piles and piles of boughs on the inside. We added more Scotch broom to our door plug and, hearkening back to our Lincoln Log days, constructed a massive windbreak outside the door. We rearranged the fire pit inside, lengthening and centering it. Instructors stopped by with their students on parade for a couple of hours and we gave several tours. Someone made a suggestion about adding more poles to the inside of the structure before adding the Scotch broom in order to reflect the firelight better. I made a mental note for next time. Rakes, saws, a hatchet, and two tarps sped our construction process.  Our work would have been much more difficult without the modern tools. I pledged to not get lost without a tent.

After a dinner of mutton stew and some fireside chitchat, we squeezed through our much smaller door and curled up around the roasting hot coals for a second time. We were not freezing. We were not wet. We were not, however, all that comfortable, though we did get more sleep on our second night.

There is the sleep of memory foam mattresses, central heating, down comforters, and there is the sleep of fir boughs, the close patter of rain, the smoky aroma of a fire in your nose. The two share only the shadow of a reflection of the word "sleep" in common. We woke up every few hours, singly or in pairs, to build up the fire, to face a different direction, to seek some relief for our hips. At two in the morning we held some kind of group conversation, everyone awake, wondering what time it was and how much longer before the morning. I was lucid, I thought, but I remember not a word of it.

Finally, it became light enough, warm enough, to consider exiting our womb-like structure and collecting our various items. I crawled out last after staying to put out the fire and gird myself for the departure process, a squishy low crawl with a risk of getting permanently lodged in the door. I joked to another student that we should start a new fitness revolution that consists of crawling out of natural shelters. It will be bigger than Crossfit, I think.

And yet. And yet, I would do it again. There was something about the process--choosing a piece of land, collecting the materials, laboring for hours, sleeping in a structure I had helped to make (and helped to name--The Flying Scotchman), that felt altogether different than the much more comfortable experience of plopping onto my king size memory foam bed, or even smooshing into a sleeping bag inside a tent. The structure became personified, took on a character all its own. It became a part of the group, a fifth member, silent, strong, shielding us from the elements as we slept beneath the sky. The Flying Scotchman has a soul.

Photo taken by Cameron MacPhail. Working on the door plug on the first day.