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 look into wilderness some more. I watched some youtube videos on survival and found a type of shelter called an A-frame shelter. The foundation is built from forked sticks that hold up a long branch held at ~45 degrees above the ground. Then more sticks are leaned up against the long branch to create a roof of the shelter. A couple sticks can be seen here on the right side of the picture that are the beginnings of the roof. 

But this is not the first shelter we made. As seen in this picture, I am laying in a little ditch in the ground. We dug out this little ditch so there is more space in the shelter. We dug this ditch because couple weeks before, we made another shelter, but sadly it was too small. I wanted the shelter to a like a fort, big enough to hang out in comfortably. Unfortunately I couldn’t even sit up in our previous shelter (it was originally designed as a emergency shelter), but our dimensions were limited by the size of the sticks we had. We couldn’t find larger sticks to expand our shelter upward, so we expanded down. But as usual with this project, we didn’t actually have tools to dig. We didn’t have a shovel and I could have probably gotten a shovel somewhere but it was less work and more fun to find an alternative; a stick! I found a strong, pointed stick and used it to dig through the mulch. And digging with a stick is much more fun and interesting than a boring shovel. 

Although I’ve outgrown the cloths I’m wearing in this picture, I vividly remember each piece I’m wearing. The purple pants I’m wearing are Puma sweatpants that were a bit too small. But even so, these pants were one of my favorite pairs and I wore them constantly. Eventually the sad day came when I outgrew them but not before they served a long life. I did everything in these pants. I ran, climbed, and as evidence by the dirty knees in the photo, dug in them. The shirt is a UMS cross country shirt I did not have the same connection with, but reminds me of cross country. Cross country gave me the opportunity to explore and find my love for running which has allowed me to explore even more of the outdoors. On runs I would go to the arboretum, Urbana parks, and Meadowbrook park and allowed me to see the trees at the parks. 

The Grove and the shelter Alex and I made changed my perspective and taught me about nature and trees, but most importantly, it brought me happiness and purpose during lockdown. This photo reminds me that although lockdown was very difficult, I did find good moments in it. 

-Kai