My Shelter Story
This is a picture of me after me and my sibling Alex finished the groundwork for the shelter we made over quarantine. Behind our house was a frisbee golf course where we spent hours exploring and whiling away the hours of lockdown. After climbing trees for weeks, we found a spot of trees pictured here, which we named “the grove”. The grove is clearly man-made, but that didn’t prevent me from imagining I was in the wilderness. I tried to imagine the mulch ground was a lush soil. I saw the small, slender plants as saplings. I saw the small trees as powerful trunks with a thick canopy of leaves. Not that I was pretending I was in a jungle. But subconsciously I wanted to see the grove as more than it was. I wanted to escape to the wilderness and the grove let me escape. During quarantine I looked into wilderness survival. I read “Hatchet” by Gary Paulsen, a story where the protagonist was stranded in the Canadian wilderness and forced to survive. The story intrigued me and I wanted to loo