A common theme throughout my Natural Shelter Build Project was my reaction to being inside a small, dark, enclosed space.  An unstoppable flow of thoughts, feelings, awareness and images of my own mortality would flood my mind and body moments after I bedded down.  And I’m not talking about suddenly being aware that I will die one day or mid-life crisis; intellectually I get that.  I am talking about my entire being overwhelmed with an all sensory experience of my demise, my end, my death.  It was all encompassing and despite my best efforts to ground myself, manage the feelings and distract myself I was overcome with panic and a compulsion to just get out, get away and get to safety.

This feeling was most extreme during my stays in the snow shelters.  I was not able to complete even one full night in any of the snow shelters, even though I have camped for most of my life and slept in snow shelters in the past.

I have speculated that my reaction could be related to a natural claustrophobic reaction or a good ol’ panic attack related to anxiety.  I do suffer from PTSD from a childhood trauma and have wondered if my reaction is related to that.  There was no light or sound in the snow caves so I have postulated that due to the lack of sensory stimulation my subconscious thoughts, feelings and fears poured into the empty space in my brain. I even tried bringing a book and my phone to distract myself but these only had a mild temporary effect.

Considering the death theme, I felt strongly that my reaction might be connected to the fact that I actually have died.  About 8 years ago, I suffered a Sudden Cardiac Arrest due to a super high ventricular tachycardia or possibly ventricular fibrillation.  The details are not important beyond the fact that I was basically dead, turning blue, with no heart beat (or my heart beating or vibrating so quickly it was not detectable).  If not for the quick reaction of some of my fellow Ultimate Frisbee players, their experience with First Aid/CPR and the proximity of an Automated External Defibrillator I would be dead or extremely brain damaged.  My fellow players revived me just in time to see the paramedics walking across the playing field.

After that event, I was kept in the hospital until I could be given an Internal Cardiac Defibrillator.  Before I passed out I had this empty feeling in my chest, some dizziness, then everything went black.  Since that operation and prescription for beta blockers, I have experienced a few occurrences of v-tach or v-fib that were dealt with by my device or stopped on their own.  It’s pretty weird having this empty feeling where you can’t feel your pulse and wondering if you were gonna die. I have been event free for a number of years now, but for a while post event, any little flutter, flub or weird feeling prompted me to wonder if I was dying again.  I even had some realistic dreams/nightmares that I was dying resulting in me waking up in a sweat, my heart racing and wondering if I was still alive.

This is a rather long winded way of trying to connect my “death” flashbacks in the shelters to my actual death experience.  I often wonder if I was reliving the act of dying on a cellular level.

Until recently, I concluded that it was one of the reasons I have stated or a combination of them.  That was before I started having these same experiences every time I have gone camping the last couple years even in a tent and whether I was alone or not. Now this could just be an escalation of the feelings that are coming through no matter what the circumstance rising up once I am away from the city and my busy, distracted, disconnected urban life.

Or, it could be something else.  Now this is when the Twilight Zone music starts playing. It occurred to me that since it was only happening when I was camping and not when I was in the city , that I might be connecting to the earth, or nature or the life pulse or spirit something and that the earth was telling me or I was connecting to the fact that our planet and life and humans, were in grave danger.  Perhaps sleeping on the ground, with the sights, sounds, smells and rhythm of nature all around me I was more connected to the earth.  Intellectually, I do believe we are in the midst of a mass extinction caused by humans and concerned that there could be a major ecosystem collapse in the relatively near future so this could be my subconsciousness bubbling up creating this experience or ……………………………………………

Not sure where this fits in to what I have been experiencing or whether it belongs in an episode of the Twilight Zone but it is something to consider.  And not sure how I am going to deal with it as the experiences are so troubling that I have found myself very apprehensive before every camping trip recently.  So far I am persevering  using all my tricks and grounding tools to manage but end up with little or no sleep.  At this point not sure where to turn; therapy, continued use of feelings management tools or maybe get all mystic and try a sweat lodge.

I’ll keep you posted.

 

I’m a porcupine; thick skinned and prickly on the outside and wet and soft on the inside so it is with great difficulty and reservation that I share this last experience in my self-made natural shelter project.  I am reticent to acknowledge the “magic moment”, “spiritual awakening” or “lightning bolt of self-realization” but I feel compelled to expose my mushy middle in the interests of full disclosure and sharing.

My final natural shelter build occurred on the second day of our last Wild Deer 1 Course with the Pine Project.  Earlier in the day we attended a couple workshops on tool making and natural camouflage with the intent that later in the afternoon we would work on shelters for a solo night camping out in the forest.

Well the workshops went late so it was not until late afternoon that we started our shelters.  We still had to have dinner and walk back to the main camp to get any gear we needed, which was a 20 minute walk. Our instructors suggested not taking our gear or food down earlier so we would not be encumbered during the afternoon workshops.

I had come to the weekend planning to make a debris hut with poles and leaves and sleep in it without a sleeping bag or pad.

I couldn’t understand “why the fuck” the instructors gave us so little time to complete our shelters and seemed to make things more difficult by making us leave our gear back at the main camp. As I looked around for a suitable location to build, it became clear there were not enough leaves to complete my planned shelter.  I was pissed.

But then I saw a big ol’ dead pine that was partially clad in thick dark bark.  I paused for a second in my mounting frustration and thought, maybe I can use bark to make shingles for my shelter.  Not to be too romantic about it, but I kind of fancy white pine trees as my spirit tree so I allowed myself to get a little “mystical” and use this as a “sign” to follow this path. Not sure if there was enough bark, I approached the tree and saw numerous pieces of bark on the ground and that the bark on the tree was loose and easily came away from the trunk. “Okay”, I said, “let’s see how much I can get.  I mean, what else am I dong”.  This is not the last time I would use this motivation.

I peeled off as much as I could reach in as large sheets as I could and piled them on the ground.  There was more bark higher up the tree and I wondered how I would get at it.  I needed a ladder or something and lo and behold, just a few meters away, was a big ol’ dead branch with branches extending from a main limb.  “What the hell”, I said, “what else am I doing”, and proceeded to go all nature boy using the natural materials at hand to achieve my goal.  I leaned the limb against the pine, climbed up and was able to reach more bark.  I reached even higher by grabbing a stick, sliding it under the bark and catching the pieces as they fell.  I managed to get quite a nice pile of bark and was starting to feel somewhat pleased with myself although aware that I was not near completing any kind of shelter.

I carried the bark over to my shelter location.  I planned to use a fallen tree as the ridge pole of my shelter.  I gathered some long poles from dead fall trees and started placing the “ribs” on the ridge pole.  I quickly did a mock up of the shelter to see how it might work and whether I had enough bark.  Of course, I did not and I was having trouble keeping the bark on the ribs due to the extreme slant.  I had considered where on the ridge pole to build the shelter and for some reason chose the higher end.  I think I was hoping for an easy build and picturing a grand shelter with a nice flat floor, that I could sit up in, have a nice fire adjacent to and still be protected from the weather. Not!

I was getting pissed off again and the merry go round of blaming the instructors, blaming nature for not leaving enough leaves and criticizing myself for being so stupid and inept started going round and round again.

It was at this point that two of my fellow students happened by on their way back to camp for dinner.  They stopped by to see how I was getting on and it was obvious I was not.  One of them kindly suggested building the shelter farther down the ridge pole where it was lower and I would need less material.  “Thanks, Einstein”, I thought to myself, “but I don’t really feel like sleeping in a hole and having to clear away a bunch of debris and crap down there”.  Instead I said thanks and that I realized my shelter was too big and would figure out something.  I must have looked a mess and in dire straights as the other guy told me later that he was on the verge of staying and helping me but thought that doing so would violate the spirit of the solo camp out challenge.

When they left, I knocked down the shelter and had another look at the lower end of the ridge pole.  It was not as bad as I had thought but not the “perfect” spot I had pictured in my mind.  I slung a few rib sticks on the ridge pole that at this point was about two feet from the ground.  I did another mock up and it seemed that I might be able to make it work.  It was clear though, that I still did not have enough bark.  I found another dead pine nearby and repeated my gathering techniques but I was still short.

“Fuck this.  I’m going up to the camp and if I have to fuckin’ sit out all night in my clothes  then I’ll fucking do it.”  I then headed back to camp.

I will share two things about our exercise at this point: 1. We could build any kind of shelter including using a tarp and could use our sleeping bags and pads. 2. The forecast was for rain that night.

On my way back to base camp I passed another fallen tree with loose bark.  I paused, looked at it, thought “low hanging fruit”.  With another, “Well, what the fuck else am I doing?” I peeled of all the bark and piled it beside the trail, thinking, “What the fuck, maybe I’ll carry it back to my shelter on the return trip”.  I continued towards camp and came across two more similar fallen bark clad trees, stripped them and piled the bark along the path.  On the way back, perhaps as a way to rationalize my situation and justify continuing with the project, I decided to create a scenario that I was a day hiker that had gotten lost and had to spend a night out with minimal equipment and food.  I considered what a day hiker might have with him and decided that I would continue the project with only a back pack, bottle of water, my rain gear, a pack of matches and two Cliff Bars.  That’s right; no tarp, no sleeping bad, no sleeping pad, no flashlight, no knife,no nothing.  I was still pissed and disappointed and either inadvertently or subconsciously put myself into a “nothing to lose” situation.  At this point I was fully prepared to sit under a tree all night in the rain if necessary.  I mean, I wasn’t gonna die and “what the fuck else was I doing”.

Needless to say I got back to camp and most people were finishing up dinner and getting ready to head to a group circle then to their shelters.  I prepared some food and informed the instructors of my plan and that I would not make the circle as I still had to eat and prepare for my solo night out lost back packer scenario.

Still in my “At this point I don’t give a fuck”, mood, I started marching back to my shelter site.  One of the instructors who was checking in on people’s shelters joined me en route and helped me carry some of the bark back.  He had a look at my partially build bark shingled hut and concluded that it looked pretty good and that with a little work it might do nicely as a shelter.  He gave me a couple suggestions then left me to it.  I have to admit, although I would not have accepted it, I was a bit surprised and disappointed he did not offer to help me and wandered off to check the next site.

It started getting dark and I still had a long way to go to complete my shelter.  As dusk began to turn to night, I was still moving poles and bark from my original build at the high end of the fallen tree to the lower end.  It was awkward moving through the dense undergrowth with a lot of tripping, stumbling and swearing.

Then a funny thing happened.  Night fell and surprisingly things started going more quickly and smoothly.  My eyes adjusted to the dark  but more significantly I had to slow down and be more careful about where I walked and where I stepped.  It seemed counter intuitive but slowing down, taking more care and being methodical and precise actually sped up the process, reduced trips and stumbles and resulted in a better construction.

I actually found myself walking through the trees smoothly, efficiently and without incident.  For a little while I felt in some kind of “zone”.  I finished the build by constructing a side wall with logs to prevent rain from coming into the high open side.

Now the next hurdle; crawling into this thing.  I’m used to walking into my bedroom and flopping onto my bed or at worst, when camping, crawling through a large opening into a fairly spacious tent with a floor and a comfy Thermarest and sleeping bag; not crawling on my hands and knees in the dirt and leaves and bugs and squirming into a bark shelter and lying on the bare ground.

Again, what the hell else was I doing and I had spent the last few hours building the bloody thing and it was supposed to rain, so I crawled in.

So there I was, lying on the bare ground with no insulation under me or around me, staring up at the rib poles and bark wondering if it would keep the rain out.  I used my backpack as a pillow and my clothes and rain gear to keep my body warm.  I knew of course, theoretically, I would lose a lot of heat into the ground but I did not realize how much having always used a Thermarest for camping.  It was truly striking how cold my back against the ground became in contrast to my front.  I endured the heat loss for a while as I tried to get some sleep.  My recent psychological struggles with thoughts of my own mortality and the origin and ending of the universe while camping returned as I lay in the dark with no fire or other distractions.  I tried to focus on the moon and the few stars that peaked through the spaces between the clouds to distract myself.

Then more “magic”!  The forest suddenly filled with tiny blinking lights.  They floated through the air between the trees and on the forest floor.  Not sure if I was dreaming, the thought suddenly struck me; fireflies!  I had seen them at camp on Lake Simcoe as a child but had not seen them since.  I had also read that they were in steep decline due to habitat loss. I was truly in shock and awe and I sat there mesmerized.  I crawled out of my shelter to get a better look and the forest was full of them.  Again, I felt I was in a dream.

Now that I was out of my shelter, I realized that with no insulation under me I would have to build a fire or risk hypothermia.  It was dark night now with little light from the moon or stars due to cloud cover.  My eyes were now fully adjusted to the dark. I found I still moved easily through the woods despite the darkness and quickly was able to gather enough wood for a fire to last the night.  Everything seemed to happen naturally and with ease.  I started a fire and proceeded to build a body length fire about 6 feet long.  I did not bother to cut or break the long poles I found as I planned to feed the overhanging parts into the fire as the other end burned down.  I had several over-length poles in the fire and stack of kindling that was all reachable from inside my shelter.

I crawled back into the fire and was greeted by a firefly that ended up spending the night on the ground by my head. With my new companion and welcome heat from the fire I felt warm and comfortable.  In fact, I had to let the fire die down as the amount of heat trapped in the shelter was incredible and at times unbearable.  I knew the long fire in theory having read about others using it but did not realize how effective it could be in practice.

I spent the rest of the night taking in all the experiences of sight, sound, feel, thought and dream as I moved through various states of sleep, wakedness and consciousness. I rose with the dawn, crawled out of my shelter, somewhat disappointed that my shelter had not been tested by the predicted rain, but appreciative of my experience nevertheless.  Whether it was the choices I made with out knowing where it would lead or the steps I took in the dark building my shelter and looking for firewood, I had felt more grounded, efficient, productive and present for a few hours than I ever had before.

I still carry the memory of these lessons with me but sadly, have not integrated them into my daily urban life as I much as I would want.  I still struggle with living the camping lifestyle, approach and philosophy once back in my urban environment.  Perhaps I just need to ask myself the simple question that motivated me during my solo night adventure; what the fuck else am I doing?