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Night Drill
The
Wasp
Zero Shelter
Email
wfranck@mindspring.com
Late on a brisk December
afternoon, I went into the winter woods to build a shelter out of natural
forest debris, with the intent of spending the night. I happened to
be wearing tennis shoes, blue jeans, sweatshirt, and baseball cap.
I chose to leave my flashlight in the car.
I began building the shelter in the last two hours
of daylight. As the sun went down and the temperature began to drop,
I picked up my pace to add more inches of leaf insulation. Beginning
to feel the sweat work its way out, I removed my sweatshirt and hung it
over a limb. By this time, it was 42 degrees. Another 20 minutes
of work, and I noticed my tee shirt feeling slightly damp. I removed
it and finished the last 30 minutes of work shirtless. I was comfortable
and not sweating - a perfect balance. If I stopped for over a minute
or two, though, I began to feel the chill.
I finished laying the final branches on the shelter
as the full moon rose clear against the black sky. As I ate a handfull
of peanuts and drank some water, I put on my shirt and then my sweatshirt
and baseball cap. It was comfortable for about 15 minutes, but I was
no longer working, so I began to cool a little. The temperature had
dropped to 38 degrees.
The peanuts were fine, but Chicken and Rice soup
would be better, and sitting by a fire would be a help. So, I began
the process of building a fire. My experience with the hand drill was minimal,
but I had one already made and I began to spin the drill. I could
not really detect much smoke in the darkness, and my technique was marginal,
producing no coal on the first 3 tries.
I decided to give myself the advantage of
adding friction to the upper part of the drill by applying pine resin to
the shaft, but I had none with me. So, I looked around for a pine
tree. Almost all of the trees were hardwoods that had shed their leaves,
so by looking at the silhouette of the treetops, I could pick out two, maybe
three, pines within 100 yards of where I stood. I walked to each one
and felt its bark with my hands, hoping to find a sticky scar where some
resin had bled out to the surface. I was at the last pine and had
not felt any scars at all. Feeling higher up and circling its trunk,
I saw a moonbeam sparkle against the bark. It was a single drop of
resin almost as high up as I could reach. I smeared it onto my finger
and, just as suddenly, saw another droplet shining a few inches over to
the right.
I walked back over to the hand drill and took
care to spread the resin as evenly as I could along the upper extent of
the drill shaft. I began to spin the tacky shaft, and this time
there was some noticeable smoke. When I stopped, there was a strong
red coal caught in the notch. I placed it in a little bundle of bark
fibers, blew it into flames and placed it into the kindling.
I opened my can of soup, slid it up against
the fire, heated it and ate it. After the fire burned out, I took a slow
2 hour walk through the night woods and finally returned to my shelter.
It was 10:30 at night and I was getting tired. The temperature
was now 34 degrees, and by morning it would have dropped to 27 degrees.
I lay on my stomach and slowly backed feet-first
into my shelter. It was built small inside and packed with leaves.
I pulled in a double armload plug of leaves to seal the doorway. And,
as I lay in that dark cocoon of leaves, I felt at peace knowing that I was
but a small part of a much larger world. Yet it was a world that had
put its arm around me and shared something that I needed. From the
other side of the world, the sun had shone on two drops of pine resin in
the middle of the night, and I was able to recreate its fire. I gave
in to the night and fell asleep.
(Will Franck - Axton, Va. - 2001)
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