Under the Stars by Dan White

Author:Dan White
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781627791960
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Robin Bliss-Wagner gave me a precise and elegant blueprint for building a debris shelter.

When I call this thing a “shelter,” I am being too kind. Really, it was just a heap of forest vegetation piled beneath and on top of me. It was fortunate that Robin and I had started this project with a few dozen armfuls of leaves during our “shakedown hike” the week before. To complete this glorified haystack, I spread my cotton half-sheet on the hill above camp, filled it with leaves, lugged it back, and repeated the process until I had a five-foot-high, seven-foot-long pile of duff and leaves that would serve as a mattress. This bedding would elevate me off the ground, saving my body heat and serving as a natural Therm-A-Rest.

In the two-foot-wide space between the pile and the rotting log, I fashioned a separate seven-foot-long, warm, thick “side pile” of leaves that I would pull over myself to use as a comforter, smothering me. In other words, I would be part of a sandwich: two piles of duff were the bread slices and I was the lunch meat. In theory, my trapped ambient heat would stop me from getting chilled. I had to force myself to lie down naked on the “mattress” pile; it was quite scratchy and itchy. Loose twigs twisted into my side.

Now came the tricky part: getting into “bed.” First I covered up my face and head with the cotton sheet. Then I reached into the “comforter” pile and pulled the whole thing on top of me.

I was buried alive. I pushed up from the top of the comforter pile, pulled away the cotton sheet, and made a sort of blowhole, with my eyes, nose, and lips sticking out of it. Immediately I felt claustrophobic. I was going to have to sit there like a mummy in a sarcophagus all night long. The wasp stings still burned and itched, but I tried not to rub or scratch them; if I so much as twitched or tossed in my sleep, the pile was going to fall off, leaving me exposed. Still, the shelter had its advantages. Considering there was nothing to hold it together, no blanket securing it, no overstructure or framework of any kind to stop it from slipping apart, it did a fine job of keeping the elements away from me.

If my numb nose was any indication, it was getting nippy out there. There was something lovely and intimate about this sleeping arrangement. I was part of the forest floor and was not sealed away from it. It was surprisingly warm. But the wasp poison kept moving through my veins; my neck still ached with it. Perhaps it had even leached into my brain.

As night fell, I looked up into the forest canopy, high in the redwood fairy circle, and saw an inexplicable presence in the boughs: a glowing silvery substance that looked like a bunch of mysterious grapes, each dangling on a phosphorescent tentacle of fog.

The ghostly grapes shone from the inside.

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