Shelter

We started this week with a discussion about the year so far. We have done some fun, challenging and rewarding things this year, and lately we seem to have lost some steam. Our conduct on the land has become lax, and our focus is lacking. We took the morning to check in with this pattern. We all had recognized a laxness in ourselves and others, and we discussed its origins and possible resolution. We took the morning discussion time to renew our focus on nature connection and the Native Eyes community.

When our discussion came to a close, we received a challenge: mock survival! We had the afternoon to find a shelter site, get fire from the land, find drinkable water, and feed ourselves, all off the Venture Retreat land. We stated with a stroll down to the redwood circle.


Our first work on the shelter was to design the space and figure our dimensions. Hard work! The sky said it would rain later that night, and rain usually comes in on south winds. So we chose a more or less northerly side of the redwood circle for our structure.


We settled on a fire-heated design in two sections: the tall guys on the right of these photos, and the short people on the left. We framed it with sticks and brought some gravel from the pile nearby to protect the roots of the trees from our fire.



A downed redwood branch provided green boughs to line the shelter.


A palm tree up by the main house gave us fronds, and the redwoods gave us much duff to pile over the fronds.


We layered as much duff as we could find on top of our construction. It was still pretty thin, so we knew we'd have to invest work in heating the space with fire. We made a heat reflector out of stones right behind our fire area, and then wove a larger windbreak and heat reflector out of boughs and firewood.


While the shelter progressed, some of us took time out to wander the creek for food plants, scout for fresh water, and find friction fire materials.


We worked for a long time on our red elderberry hand drill, but to no avail. I was feeling hungry and tired, and in need of a break, but we had no coal yet. While we still worked on our hand drill, the instructors reminded us that we were still part of the RDNA village, that we were in dinner time, and that we would be joining the Essentials and Cultural Mentors in the main house after dinner. I took this as a chance to go tend to some of my physical needs.

When I returned, I found that some of our scouts had located a cache of buckeye wood down the road, and we put together some bow drill kits. We were still in survival mode, though somewhat adulterated by the break to drink water and nibble food. We discussed the break in continuity of our survival scenario with the instructors and eachother, somewhat heatedly, bringing up past patterns that have gotten in the way of our learning journeys this year. In the midst of the discussion, one of our number was bowing steadily on his fire kit. When our discussion resolved and all had clarity, with dusk wrapping close and the need for warmth punctuated by the chill, we had our coal.

Because we hadn't had much warning, we chose to still eat some of the food we brought with us that evening. We walked our tinder bundle from our shelter back to the Native Eyes fire circle (a process that caused one of us to be newly renamed Running Flame) and lit our cookfire. After much discussion we chose to stay at our fire, eat and tell stories, and to rejoin the village the next day. As our meal ended, the first drops of the nights downpour sizzled into our cookfire coals.

We brought burning sticks from the fire circle to our shelter and kindled our fire there. All crawled in and snuggled close, most forgoing sleeping bags and and we started the firewatch for the night. For the first part of the night, rain rolled of our shelter. All inside stayed quite dry, if not warm. I took firewatch in the middle of the night, woke and tended fire for my sleeping compatriots. By then the rain had stopped, and the whole landscape was black clouded night, save for the gold of our fire on the faces of my friends.



The design left much to be desired: smoke swirled in under the low roof and choked sleeping people at times, so the fire tender had to keep handfuls of small twigs ready to kick up flame and burn off smoke. Our feet were universally freezing by morning. And the tall folk hadn't slept with faces to the fire, so some of them stayed very cold.

Still, the night of fire-tending and sleeping rough in a shelter of our own making seemed to kick loose the stagnant energy of the last few weeks, to tighten up that slack that we'd started our day discussing. At the end of my mostly wakeful stint as fire tender and my fitful and chilly sleep, I woke feeling rejuvenated in spirit, if not in body. The winter wrens woke us before the sun and we greeted the day with an awe and reverence that I hadn't even known had been lacking.