Sifting Debris Huts

Sifting Debris Huts



DEBRIS HUT:  [duh bree huht] noun

-Noun

A small shelter designed to keep its inhabitant safe from the elements.  It is built from debris and fodder found on the forest floor and by its design can only fit one person comfortably.





         "Here boy!" my dad said, handing me five one hundred dollar bills folded neatly in half. "I expect some change when I get back." He winked and stared out into the darkening horizon.

         I shuffled my feet because at sixteen I didn’t know how to deal with someone dying of cancer and at sixty, he didn’t either. We both stood looking down the long dark tunnel that led to the bright interior of the airplane and neither of us said anything. This airplane was to take him to Mayo Clinic where he was to undergo several tests. To break the silence, he patted me on the shoulder, told me to be good, and boarded the plane. I imagined salesmen flirting with stewardesses, families on vacation, and travelers trying to get home all sitting together in a buzz of living animation while my dad drifted among them, the walking dead, grey in the midst of shade.

         

         

         I knew that I only had about seventy miles to go when I pulled off of the New Jersey Turnpike. I was going to Tom Brown Jr's Wilderness Survival School, the Standard Class. I had dreamed of doing this for a while, but dad and the farm had held me too tightly. After he’d died, I was free.

Tomiki a mid forties Penobscot Indian woman had told me to come. We had met while I was living a drifter’s life, just floating from one place to the next with no money and no real focus. A vision quest she had called it; a fucked up degenerated white man’s version of a vision quest and, so she said, I’d be lucky if I didn’t get killed.

    She stole my thoughts as I pulled into the dirt lot of the all night truck stop. Of course I had fallen in love with her, but she had never reciprocated. Instead she’d called me a foolish kid, told me to go to the tracking school, and then sold me a porcupine quill medicine bag for fifty-seven dollars plus tax. We still talked on the phone whenever I needed a dream interpreted or the bad spirits chased away.

         The truck stop was all but deserted at three forty in the morning. The long grey ash of my Marlboro cigarette hung limp in the glow of neon lights as I sat in my pickup truck and contemplated my next move. The Eagles wailed Witchy Woman on the radio from a worn out tape that had kept me company all of the way from Fort Ord California. Though I wasn't hungry, I knew I should eat, I probably wouldn't get a chance at a filling meal for a while; the Standard Class was to last a week.

                   I had intended to stop smoking at the survival school. It was the perfect opportunity to. Out in the wilds, there would be no opportunity to buy smokes. The brochures that I had gotten detailed the fact that once you were on the compound you were not permitted to leave. I smoked my last Marlboro at the truck stop, and sat through several cups of coffee to do so.

         When I pulled into the gravel driveway, I had to check the map to be sure I was at the right place. Where I was expecting rustic primitive wilderness, I found a well kept compound with a nice house and a big barn. There was even a corral with a horse in it. I parked where the sign said students were supposed to park, shouldered my pack, and made my way up the gravel drive to the big gray barn.

         I was the first student to arrive. I found a young attractive woman named Wendy walking around the barn who looked like a much earlier version of Tomiki. I approached her smiling and she stopped me before I even got started and started barking orders.

         "Stow your gear in the mound."

         "Sign the list for cooking, all students will be on cooking detail twice a week; that's breakfast, lunch, and supper!"

         "When you're done, step over to the gift shop and I'll check your name off the list."

         I hadn't known Wendy for five minutes yet, and she had already made my list of irritating bitches. I made a mental note to let her burn if the barn ever caught fire and I stepped over to the shop to sign my waiver form when I saw several cartons of Marlboro cigarettes for sale, stacked in a drawer behind the counter. I went ahead and bought a carton.



         

         I hadn’t known what was going on when my dad went to the hospital that last time. He had complained that he wasn't feeling well one morning, and I had gone out to mow the lawn for him. I was on the last and biggest section when I saw him and his best friend, Pete Logsdon, driving down the lane in his Thunderbird. I recall thinking that it was odd that Pete was driving my dad's car.

When I walked into the hospital that first day, I remember being overwhelmed by the entire makeup of it all. On the third day I learned that my sister was flying down from Maine. The cancer, it seemed, had escaped his lymph nodes and was working on taking over his lungs. On the ninth day, they tried an experimental cure.

         On the eleventh day he died.

         

         I had started smoking cigarettes about two weeks after the funeral. Great circular rings had appeared across my back, chest, and the bottoms of my feet; a product of nerves the doctor said. My grandmother lost her mind, tried to slash me with a broken mason jar and bought forty dollars worth of peaches and pineapples because they were on sale. She would cry out to Jesus in the middle of the night, great heart wrenching sobs pleading with Jesus to bring Billy back, “He’s all I had.” She would cry in between wails and shrieks of agony. I’d lay in my bed watching the ceiling tiles, smoking cigarettes,  and imagining the great tufts of fluffy white hair that she would be ripping from her own scalp as proof to Jesus that she was serious and not just fucking around.





         Tom Brown Jr.  was much different than I had expected. In his books, he is portrayed as an energetic and lovable nature boy; at least that was my perception. He turned out to be a very severe, broad shouldered person who was unwavering in spreading his message. A modern day prophet of Huntka, he was surly and focused; he seldom smiled and was not one to mollycoddle or intermingle with students. When he did smile, he had a roguish glint in his cold grey eyes which shone like twin chips of obsidian above a crooked grin. He was a hard man, hard and rugged and scary and the moment I saw him I felt inadequate and puny. I started to wish that I had never come.

         Other students came from everywhere and all walks of life.

         One was a male nurse with long tangled hair from New York City; others came from places like Georgia, Vermont, and California. One twenty year old had drifted in from out west and was from wherever he lay his backpack down. There were business people and teachers and cops; doctors and lawyers and drifters, all together in an old weathered barn, sleeping in bags in the hayloft and eating stew or oatmeal for every meal.

         Tom would storm into the one classroom three or four times a day, lecture us soundly about tracks and survival, and then disappear as quickly as he had come until he took on the persona of something unreal, a shade of a man who was almost human, but not quite.

         On the last night of Tom Brown Jr's Standard Class he took us through a sweat lodge ceremony. I have never been in a room so dark. The lodge itself was a large round construction of sticks, debris, and a tarp. It looked like a giant turtle shell. Tom took a seat in the center of the lodge around a pit full of hot stones. We each filed in from the north, and then walked around the east, past the south, and finally settled in behind him on the west side of the lodge. We were supposed to complete the circle and exit from the west; however, in our case the circle remained incomplete because Tom had us exit back the way we had come. He wanted us to realize that the circle would never be complete until we had finally rescued the earth from mankind’s destruction.

The heat of the sweat lodge was terrible, stifling in its overbearing potency. I can remember that something was dripping on me. I imagined that it was one of the people sweating on me as he stood hunched over, packed like a sardine in the little hut. I also recall that Tom Brown Jr. supposedly channeled the spirit of his long dead grandfather, Stalking Wolf, who spoke to us in the Apache language and who gave a stirring lecture on environmental issues. Many members of the group were so moved by the parting speech of Tom Brown Jr. that they wept openly; others, looking on him as some sort of Tom Laughlin inspired Native American messianic figure, had to be driven from the school, which they had come to believe was a type of monastery to them. I left with a feeling of nostalgic relief, a haunting of my spirit that left me with the impression that I had been ripped open and exposed to a stinging wind. The trip back to Ohio passed like a blur, and I slept for three days upon my return. Then I went out, looked for a job; and, finding none, decided that I needed a real vision quest, a time to wander the wilderness and live off of the land, I needed to get my head straight, to go someplace I wasn’t to find I knew not what.



          I parked my truck in the weeds along Four Mile Creek and wandered the length of it for several hours. My camp the first night was pretty simple, just a fire on a sandbar and a wool blanket. I made a fish spear, and prepared to spend most of the night hunting bullfrogs along the bank of the creek.

         As the sun was setting, a buck deer splashed into the creek just twenty yards from my camp. He tossed his crowned head and snorted at me, asking what exactly my business was in his forest. I told him to go fuck himself, and continued building my frog spear.

         In the darkest part of the night I cooked frog’s legs over some hot coals; and I drifted off as several screech owls echoed their shrieks to each other, splitting the silence of the creek bottom. They sounded like old madwomen lost in the night and screaming, “Whaaat?... Whaat?”,  to each other through the darkness. 

        Alone, I could easily imagine that they were in fact the souls of old crones who were doomed to wander the lonely creek bottoms, hearing but never finding each other and I could see their silver eyes and grasping claws as they stumbled around in their madness.

         The next morning I wandered along the creek and found an area that had a lot of slate laying around on the rocky bank. Almost as if on cue, I found a large square piece of sandstone, and I sat next to it and ground two beautiful ornamental spearheads from some of the pieces of gray slate. I traveled several more miles until I came to a grassy valley that was nestled between two steep bluffs. The creek ran along the bottom of one of the bluffs, and there was an open meadow that spanned the tiny valley to the bottom of the other bluff. I gathered several cattail tubers to roast and stuck them in my trouser pockets.

         I spent several days in the creek bottoms, wandering aimlessly and thinking. There was nothing to do but try to find food and collect clean water for drinking. I slept under the stars and enjoyed the summer like fall weather. At night I made camp wherever the darkness found me, and slept under the stars as my fire friend danced the night away until he too grew weary and faded into snapping smoky coals. It grew chilly one night, with a light rain and I had to seek shelter for sleeping.

         I built a debris hut, and started a campfire with a bow drill that I formed from a fallen cottonwood and one of my shoestrings. With camp made, I settled in before my fire, lit a cigarette, and awaited the coming night. I placed some small fish into a clay oven and laid them in hot coals for baking.

         As darkness fell, the ancient spirit of an old indian came into my camp and sat on the other side of the fire. He was quiet as I smoked my cigarette, but spoke as I exhaled the final stream of blue smoke and flipped my butt into the dying flames.

         "This" He whispered through the flames, "is no place for the living to have to be alone with the dead."

         I saw the wisdom in those words, lay by the campfire, and went to sleep. As I slept I dreamed that Coyote glided into my camp and sat across from me. He said: “long have you and I been at war with each other, it is time to put our differences to rest and let the past be the past.” He said this through teeth that had slaughtered my children and before he could escape I grabbed him by the throat and pulled him close to me. His claws dug and tore at my arms and belly as I strangled the life from him, his eyes bulged with panic and his sides heaved as he tried to draw breath into his lungs.

“There shall be no peace between you and I” I told him, “as long there is breath to me and life to you, there can never be peace.” When he was dead, I tore his skin off and consumed his flesh. I consumed the flesh of Coyote until I was full and then I kept consuming. In my dream I consumed Coyote’s flesh until my own stomach ruptured and as I lay dying I smiled, because I knew that there was peace at last between Coyote and I; the spirit of the Old Indian murmured quietly to himself in the shadows. When I awoke, I got up and left. My debris hut, campfire, and fishspear were abandoned to the spirit to use as he wished -I wouldn't need them anymore - and I walked out of the wilderness, traveling east.