by Claire Dunn
I’ve begun to scale back my grand design. I imagined a round shelter made with thigh-high wattle-and-daub walls in the old pioneering style – woven wattle branches coated in a “survival cement” mix of clay and grasses – with a paperbark roof supported by saplings lashed like a teepee at the apex. Ryan was quick to point out that clay and mud are not so thick on the ground near my shelter, and that I might be ambitious to assume I could personally wheelbarrow in enough from the quarry. What a killjoy. I had been picturing myself hitching my skirt and stomping up to my knees in mud and grasses like a jolly winemaker.
I switch on my head torch, wrap the blanket around my shoulders and reach for my sketch book, flicking through the pages of my design ideas. One thing I am not willing to concede is the shape – I absolutely have to live in a circular shelter. Who ever decided on the four-wall rule anyway? It’s cheaper, I suppose. But the idea of building corners and straight lines here seems completely out of sync with the circular shapes all around me: trees and raindrops and planets and berries and fly bums. I haven’t as yet seen a square leaf. I want to be hugged by my shelter, encircled by it, the centre of my own little universe.
Design ideas go round and round in my mind. How can I make it waterproof and warm and also let light in? What would a primitive window look like? I try sketching a thatched shutter, but it has “leak here” written all over it. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity,” I murmur, looking beyond the overhanging roof to the larger roof of stars above me. That’s it! A roof of stars. I’ve been trying to design a house, but the forest is my house. All I need is to create one room within it that provides protection from rain and cold. The other rooms – dining and lounge, bathroom, rumpus room, home theatre – have already been built for me.
I draw the simplest design I can picture – an igloo-like dome, made by bending a dozen or so saplings into the middle and lashing them to their opposites, a central fireplace with an underground air tunnel and a chimney. I pause on the roof plan. Despite my troubles with paperbark, it’s hard to concede the dream – the no-fuss primitive equivalent to corrugated iron. It was too good to be true. I’m going to have to thatch with grass. Bundle by bundle. The thought is completely overwhelming, but we all seem to be coming to the same conclusion. Shaun has already almost finished thatching his treehouse with blady grass, and it looks like it might work. I guess millions of peasants throughout history can’t be wrong.
That’s the design taken care of, but what about labour? I know I can’t do this alone. I think I’ve burnt out Shaun’s help for the time being, and the others are fully consumed with their own shelters (and those of their besties), so there’s no-one else. I stay awake watching the Milky Way, wrestling with my fierce desire to do it alone and the reality of what it will take to make a space to be alone in. I finally conclude that there’s only one way I’m going to get this done.
*
“Hi, Dad, um, you know how you said to call if I needed you, well … I think I do,” I cough humbly into Dan’s phone the next day.
My parents respond to my lifeline call with the same gusto as if I had asked them to help move me into a dorm room at Harvard Law School. “Of course, we’re happy to help,” Mum said, after Dad had passed the phone over. I’m relieved, but a bit surprised. There previously would have been a provisional “Yes, but (as long as it’s something we approve of).” If I had pulled this stunt ten years ago, they would have had a whole lot more to say about it before picking up tools. Perhaps things really are changing. After watching five children, and their friends and classmates, grow up and try to find their places in the world, some keeling over from the pressure or falling by the wayside, my parents were softening into a wisdom befitting their sixty-four years, one that said the only thing that really matters is that their children are happy and healthy. Maybe this could be a bonding activity, fun even.
“So, where do we start? Which wall should we tackle first?” Dad says, within ten minutes of his arrival. I see he’s unearthed his old moleskin trousers for the occasion. I think he’s secretly excited. With a skilled eye for beauty, form and function, Dad loves a good building challenge.
“Well, it’s all just one wall, actually, Dad. It’s round, remember?”
“Round?” he says with a frown. “Are you sure? Four walls’d be easier. We’d have it knocked up in no time.”
I sigh. This is going to be interesting, especially with me as the foreman and Dad as my lackey. We have a chequered history of working together. In fact, unless I relinquish all control (which I never do), relations often strain to breaking point. The front carseats turned into a navigational battleground during a three-week driving trip through Europe with my parents some years ago. It didn’t help that Dad assumed I could successfully direct us through Paris with a map of Europe. Mum was the backseat diplomat, trying desperately to keep the peace. Perhaps it is this memory that spurs her to gather us together on the first morning for a pep talk.
Mum perches in a ladylike manner on a log and smooths down her bobbed hair before putting on her folding travel hat. I eye the goodies packed neatly in the picnic basket next to her.
“Now, Bob, this is Claire’s shelter so we need to remember that – we’re just here to help. Agreed?” Agreed. Next thing he’s off with saw in hand, headed for the nearest patch of leggy saplings, while Mum and I trail behind.
The first tree is down before I have even sized it up.
“Dad … I just need to lay my hands on the trees first before we cut them, okay?”
“What for?”
“Oh, well, I kind of check in with it. It’s just something I do.” Well, something I’ve just decided to do. I want the shelter building this time to be a bit more ceremonial. And, besides, if I would do it with an animal I was about to kill, then why not a tree? I kneel and lay my hands on the next intended victim.
“Any screaming?” Dad asks, but I’m too distracted by him watching me to feel anything.
Dad sets a cracking pace, cutting and hauling as if a snowstorm were on the horizon. It feels at odds with the slow, quiet movements of the bush I’ve been getting used to. By the end of the day we’ve knocked up half of the poles. I should be overjoyed and grateful, but instead I’m resentful. My shelter feels foreign, forced and tainted. This is not how I want my shelter to be built. I pictured myself kneeling beneath each sapling, gently asking if it would sacrifice its life to become part of my home, sinking them into holes sprinkled with herbs and aligned with the four cardinal directions. The reality is me struggling to hold Dad back for a few seconds while I perform a perfunctory, ‘Um, so I really need another pole, do you mind, yeah great, thanks.’ Chop.
The next morning, summer has returned, the ground hot before the sun has even peaked over the tops of the stringies. We eat breakfast in silence, despite Mum’s attempts to lighten the mood with updates from home. I sulk into my oats, gulp down my tea and stomp over to where Dad has already started.
“Dad, can you just wait a second before putting that pole in? I’m not sure it’s directly facing east.”
He sighs. “I just measured it. Come on, we haven’t got all day.”
Well, we do actually, I think, swallowing my retort.
“Dad, let me tie the knot. I know how to do a clove hitch.”
“Dad, can you wait until I bless the hole before you put it in?”
He leans heavily on the crowbar as I sprinkle in some native mint.
By morning tea the tension is rising with the thermometer. I take the tea Mum pours me from the thermos and sit by myself watching Dad work on, claiming, “No time for tea.” His hands move deftly, throwing up the crowbar and catching it on its way down, a move he tried to show me yesterday. “Energy efficiency,” he explained, but I turned the other way.
He suddenly looks old, tired and sad. What am I doing? I’m acting like a spoilt teenager. Something has t
o give here. Dad already has given something just by being here. It’s my stubbornness grating between us, my clinging onto ideals that is the real source of any impure energy hanging around.
Picking up the crowbar Dad fashioned for me from a sapling yesterday, I join him on the other side of the hole, pounding the earth in syncopated rhythm. I catch his glance as our bars float up, and we grin at each other.
“Hey, you’re getting the hang of this,” he says. “Don’t forget to put mint in the last hole.”
Mum gives me a thumbs up behind his back. Soon we’re joking around, bouncing ideas off each other. Having decided to use only natural cordage, I show Mum how to make string from the bark of wattle, separating the inner from the outer bark, softening it on the back of a knife. She quickly picks up how to reverse wrap the two strands, making a crude but incredibly strong cord. We slip into comfortable roles.
With the frame in, it’s time for the nerve-racking process of bending them together in the centre. Pressing my whole body against a pole, I reach my hands up to grab its top, lowering it gently over my head, the curve of my body supporting the curve of the tree. I can feel it stretching, like ligaments pulled tight, the water in the veins of the tree bubbling as it bends. Dad stands at the ready in the centre to catch it, crooning to it in the same hypnotic language he reserves for rounding up the cows.
“Easy does it … there she goes … just a little bit further … yep, yep, yep, that’s right, you can do it.”
I breathe in and release the tree a little, breathe out and pull down a little more. It feels like we’re breathing together, Dad, tree, me – breathing the shelter into being. Eventually it yields enough to rest in an almost horizontal position.
Mum’s not so sure. “Ooh, Bob, I think that’s enough. It’ll snap.” Dad and I smile at each other as we reply simultaneously, “She’ll be right.” And it is, mostly: the trees are incredibly forgiving, except for the one that really does snap. Even then Dad and I look at each other with a “She’ll be right” smile, applying a wet wattle-cord bandage around the strained fibres.
To the frame we attach four rows of horizontal runners from smaller saplings, Mum working double time to produce enough string. The chimney slows us down. I quickly cut off any talk of an inside fire being too dangerous. If it’s good enough for millions of Africans, it’s good enough for me. There is no way I am going to freeze my butt off outside all winter. As I’ve recently finished carving my kit, I show Dad how to make a bow-drill fire. Using a stringed bow and spindle is a hell of a lot easier than the hand-drill; however, with no evidence of it being used in Australia, and with a shoelace as a cord, it’s nowhere near as sexy. Still, Dad’s impressed. We sit around the fire long into the night, deliberating on chimney designs. How can we allow air to escape, but not let rain in? Several times I catch Dad muttering, “If we had nails …”
When the billy is empty and there is still no resolution, Dad turns to me and says, “You know, Claire, when I can’t work out a problem, I sleep on it, and somehow during the night the knot unties itself and the solution is right there, clear as day, in the morning.”
Lo and behold, the old fella is right. Although I stay awake for a good long while trying to grind out an answer, in the morning an exact replica pops into my head in 3D form. Dad has also been struck with inspiration over night, of an entirely different kind. Amazingly, he concedes to my simpler design – three concentric rings made from wattle, spaced at intervals and gradually narrowing, a wide bangalow palm-leaf sheath secured to the top. In theory, smoke will escape between the rings and rain will drip from the bangalow capping onto the thatch, and then, hopefully, slippery-slide to the ground below. It is fiddly work, carving the inside of the wattle to make it more pliable, lots of “She’ll be rights” ending in a sharp snap and curse, but by the end of the third day an elegant spherical skeleton of my shelter stands adorned with a seriously cute top hat. With a feather stuck in it, I wouldn’t be surprised if it started whistling.
After we pack Mum and Dad’s boot with most of the guff I arrived with, we spend the last morning in the shade of the gum trees in the nearby paddock, laughing and chatting as we uproot the first of what I shudder to guess will be many loads of blady grass. As my pile grows, I look over to where Dad is barely visible, bent over in the grass, humming a Chuck Berry tune. It’s the same one he’d play whenever it was haircut time, lining the five of us up for matching bowl cuts. I join in with my own harmony hum. He looks over and gives me a wink. As I feared, our seemingly enormous pile of grass bundles up to cover one single small panel of roof. It’s daunting, but I’m just relieved to have a frame to hang it off. Now it’s just sweat and hours ahead.
It was initially hard to see my decision to enlist the help of my parents as anything other than a serious compromise of my integrity – selling out my desire to craft by my own hands and in my own way a place of retreat, in exchange for a instant shelter forged from the values of “just get it done”. But it doesn’t feel like that now. It actually feels important that they were part of it.
As we’ve been weaving together the foundations of my first ever home, it is like we’ve been weaving to completion the role that my parents have played in my life until now. Starting in the east, the place of dawn and birth, I travelled to the farthest side of the circle, rejecting outright many of the values of my upbringing. Now I find myself walking back around to meet them, able to accept the gifts and shed the burdens that my parents, as every parent, passes on. I’m able to have gratitude for both.
Our easy enjoyment in each other, as we tie on the first bundles of grass with the string Mum has made, is laced with nostalgia, as if we all know something is ending. It is. It’s more than a shelter. We’re weaving me a cocoon. A second womb. A place in which I can cast off the remaining skins of childhood. Without it being said, our teary goodbyes recognise that nothing will be the same again.
AUTUMN
*
Believe one who knows: you will find something greater in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.
Saint Bernard de Clairvaux
*
The sacred order of survival:
1. Shelter
2. Water
3. Fire
4. Food
1.
Before enlightenment, cut wood, carry water. The water barrel I’m attempting to lift into the wheelbarrow catches on the rim, threatening to tip the whole thing over. I strain on tiptoe to steady it, employing one knee to push it over the edge. Tin roof, tank, wheelbarrow, plastic jug – it’s not exactly the picture I had of kneeling to drink from a free-flowing river. I did recently experiment with a survival filter on our creek. Cutting the flat end off a two-litre water bottle, I stretched a T-shirt around the drinking end, packed in layers of fine sand, ground charcoal and grasses, and filled it from the creek. The water that dripped through was definitely clearer and smelled good, but after I learnt of the chemicals dumped by the blueberry farms upstream, I’m not about to drink it. It’s fine for an emergency, perhaps, although again that hinges on my having a plastic water bottle handy. The old “plastic fantastic” is still a crucial part of my umbilical cord to society. It’s difficult to imagine that before white settlement you could drink from just about every water source. The land would have felt so much friendlier, so amenable to carefree wandering.
I pull up at a wattle and draw the knife from my belt. It’s definitely losing its ninja novelty now. For a while I was conscious of it against my hip as I moved, but it’s just become part of the bush uniform. I make a two-inch incision and tug at the bark. It falls from the trunk like orange peel in a long, loose spiral. For ages I couldn’t work out why sometimes the bark would crack and split, while other times it practically fell into my hands. I finally saw the pattern: in the mornings or on really humid days, sap swelled and rose
in the cambium cellular layer, making it moist enough to harvest. On hot, dry days, the tree conserved water, the bark clinging hard onto the trunk. It’s high-school science knowledge, really, but my wattle cordage experiment is making the results very tangible. Of course trees are going to be different at different times of the day – just like me. When I rise every morning and take a big swig from my water bottle, I imagine the trees around me doing the same. I suddenly feel surrounded not so much by solid wood but by mini pump stations, drawing water up out of the soil, into their veins, and out into the leaves that stretch turgidly to salute the sun. Hidden waterfalls are all around me.
Surely this is the place for a survival slurp. Ryan and I experimented with cutting a sapling and sitting the base in a bucket. Four hours later, a cup of sweet eucalyptus-flavoured water had dripped out. It was good in theory, but in survival terms it’s a “hole in the bucket” scenario – first I would need a saw, then a means of lifting it back into a standing position, and then a vessel to catch the water. Even the simplest tasks are deceptively complicated in the wild, and time-consuming – thatching with wattle string, for instance. After I tied on the first rung of grass with natural cordage, I realised that to do so for the entire shelter would mean stripping all the wattle within a radius of many kilometres, and six months of twiddling my thumbs to make the string. This morning’s harvest is for frame reinforcement (which must remain pure), but from now on I’m using made-in-China sisal string for thatching – plastic fantastic to the rescue again.
There’s one plastic item that’s now redundant (hopefully). I’ve optimistically de-tarped my lean-to after completing the third layer of paperbark. Manoeuvring the wheelbarrow down my trail, I smile at the new vista, my site feeling more habitat than hobo camp without the lairy blue roof. The recent layer of paperbark, while yet untested, is my last. I’m not prepared to strip one more tree, and I don’t think the shelter could support it, anyway. It was a bittersweet finish, though. I was rushing on the last paperbark and carelessly cut too deep, the tree spurting fluid like a burst water pipe. I pressed down on the wound, trying to stem the flow. Despite my learning that the tree is a great source of potable water, there is a chance that my haste has killed it. I bandaged it and mentally logged its position so I can return to find out in six months. Still, I celebrated the roof opening by donning my favourite moss-green woollen vest in camouflage camaraderie.