Our 24- hour group shelter experience is in my opinion one of the highlights of this program, if I may name a highlight only three months into it. It is a certainly a day and night few of us will forget anytime soon.
We met early Wednesday morning for a short introduction to and discussion of different types of group shelters. Then we were lead out into a new area of forest where we would spend the rest of the day building shelters which we would share with our clan members that night. There are four clan groups, chosen early in the year by a random drawing. We’ve done various activities throughout the fall in our clan groups, so we already work fairly well together. This experience was a true test, however.
My own clan, “Devil’s Club” (a particularly interesting yet common plant in these woods), though missing a couple members that day, really came together to get the job done. After deciding to build a “lean-to” shelter, we spent a long morning and afternoon gathering all the necessary materials- logs, sticks, hemlock boughs, sword ferns, firewood for the night, and massive amounts of leaf litter- and assembling our home for a night. We were on a race against encroaching darkness and ever-threatening rain, and worked on despite aching backs, blackberry scratched arms, and heavy wet materials. Just when our shelter looked almost ready, we heard a loud crack and saw that our main support beam had collapsed. It took the strength and perseverance of all of us to fix and improve our shelter late in the day, but we had learned an important lesson. At dusk we found ourselves exhausted, sitting in the rain by a crackling trench fire, next to our proud creation. That night was the real experience, the one many of us had looked forward to with various mixtures of excitement and trepidation. Of our whole group of 30, a rare few slept soundly, many slept fitfully, some chose to spend the night outside the shelter, some tended fires all night. Some of us got cold, some got wet both outside and inside shelters, some were too cramped, others breathed in obscene amounts of smoke from poorly ventilated or rained-on fires, but we all made it through the night one way or another. Whether we choose to practice this skill often or never again isn’t important. What matters is how much we each learned, and the powerful sense of accomplishment we all had. I could see it in our bleary eyes and sleepy grins the next morning when we gathered at sunrise. Once again, we’ve been through something big together, and we are changed for it.

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