By the Shores of Gitche Gumee

Let me tell you about living in a tipi. It’s really great. I’m really connected with nature, which is something that I truly appreciate. The grass growing inside my domicile is a constant reminder that I am on planet earth; I really KNOW that I am a being, surrounded by beings, existing on a being. Oh no… we’re getting too existential for so early in this post. Let’s step back a little bit. The grass growing in my tipi makes me laugh every morning. I mean, really, have you ever had grass growing in your house? It’s great! Even a tent has that capsule feel where you know dirty old nature can’t mess with your civility. I get out on multi-day hikes and mmmm, “I just love the dirt and the grime and all those plants and animals and bugs, but really, please, can I just have a moment to myself so I can clean my fingernails? All these mozzies (Kiwi for mosquitos; coincidentally [?] rhymes with Ozzies) and sand flies are just too much, I need a break.” But in a tipi, nope, the bottom of the encapsulating canvas is 20 cm off the ground, the smoke flap is the open gateway to the stars, and the door is a swatch of canvas weighted down by two sticks. The injins, er I mean Native Americans, usually used some kind of woven reeds or animal skins for the flooring, but here in the 21^st century, I use a combination of astro turf and carpet. Isn’t the synthetic future amaaaaazing? On a massive side note, if anybody was talking about “red skins” and they didn’t mean the NFL team, I might find that quite despicable. And yet I readily call certain white people rednecks; you’re probably just like me. Isn’t that funny? Let’s reflect together for a moment. Anyway, them old injins also generally had fires in their tipis for warmth, but it being New Zealand with their stringent quasi-British laws, open fires are not allowed. So it’s just me, the astro turf, and the grass (the juxtaposition to end all time). But there’s more! Every morning, I have this fly friend, who isn’t really a friend, but more of a frienemy, who flies on in at 6:20 AM and then flies about in meaningless circles. Excuse my immature valley speak, but, like, WTF are you doing man? Why are you even up so early? Have you heard about the early bird? He eats more than worms, my friend. Get out of here, go home! No, no, he came in through the smoke flap and he’s just fly flying around, buzzzz, for no particular reason beside the fact that he can. Most of the time it’s just circumnavigations of the inner tipi perimeter, but sometimes he takes a momentary break for a site-specific-survey. Sometimes this survey takes place on my face, which is when I explode. Ok, I can look at Mr. Fly as a funny part of my routine: Oh he’s just flying about, he has no concept of considerations for other beings, but OMG GET OFF MY FACE!! It’s the 4 square inches that I want to consider mine, can you please GTFO. But my explosion only creates further interest in my face. “Ohh,” says Mr. Fly, “This place is forbidden… maybe I can just…just…just sneak up on it and…” GO! Get out of here! Fly away! You have a whole dang monastery to fly around in, why do you want my face??!! Every morning, same story. But to be honest, what am I complaining about? I would have to get up at 6:45 AM anyway. Its only 20 minutes. But I take it so personally. A fly on my face; its mine! But what’s mine? What is I, me, mine? Let’s reflect….

Ok snap back. I want to assure you this isn’t a complaint rant. My words seem cynical, but really I love living in the tipi. If I didn’t love it, I would move out; no problem, I could be staying in a nice wooden hut or a metal caravan totally sealed off from the elements. But I take that nature walk every night on down to my canvas A-frame, and my pillow is usually a bit damp, but I lay my head down and I have super sweet dreams every night. Except when there’s a possum party going on. Oh man, those possums really know how to party. Maybe I’ve told you that these are not the same possums we have in the States. They’re quite a bit cuter… so cute you might say, “Awww,” with three W’s. But don’t be fooled, they’re little devils. I’m living next to a pond right now, which is actually really awesome for many reasons. One of those reasons is that nobody has lived down there before, so the nature is pretty natural. Every night when I approach my home I make a friendly, very loud announcement: “I am home creatures! Time for bed! Go to your home, you cannot stay in mine!” This usually creates quite a tussle. I don’t know how many creatures are living in my area, but there has got to be at least 10 family dramas going on around me, not to mention the lone travelers; I know I’ve seen no less than 4 species of animals all living in or around the pond. But the possums are the wackiest of them all. Similar to Mr. Fly, I sense no method to their madness. They’re scavengers, so they’re used to picking around without having a specific goal, and the tipi is no exception. Thankfully, I have not had any full intrusions that I know of. There is a lot of testing the boundaries though. It all started with a bit of rooting around the perimeter, digging up the rocks and shifting through the bushes. I realize I’m in their environment, so I kept to myself and let them root around. Then I started hearing the possums brushing up against the outside canvas, but this only really happened when they were walking by, so I continued to let it pass. Finally, one night as I arrived home, I saw a possum climbing up one of the poles! That’s a little too far-- I’ll let the things go about their business, but what business might a possum have on top of my tipi? Mischief. That’s all. So I told that possum to get off of there and gave the pole a good shake until he slipped off and scampered away. It was quiet for the rest of that night, but ever since then I’ve been getting a lot of possum visits from above. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and can hear two or three possums shimmying up and down the poles (and may I remind you: for no apparent reason!). It’s not that big of a deal for them to climb around, aside from the fact that they wake me up, but my biggest fear is that one night I’m going to have an overly-curious varmint fall through the smoke flap into the tipi itself, and then I’ll have a big problem on my hands. They’re not vicious or anything, but they have an instinctual love for purposely pooping on man’s finest and most frequently used inventions (trash can lids, hand rails, the middle of the porch, benches, window sills, etc), so I don’t even want to imagine the places they would want to poop in my tipi. Then there’s always the tendency for other possums to follow the example of their stupid friends. Long story short, when I hear a possum climbing up one of my tipi poles, I get out the stern voice and try to sound like I mean business: “Hey! Get down! Don’t make me come out there!!”… but this is quickly losing its effectiveness. Oh, those possums.

So aside from the fly and the possums, and a few other noise making creatures around the pond, the tipi is very peaceful and serene. Nobody ever comes down there, and there are very few vantage points where I can even been seen. The pond and the surrounding narrow valley keep the humidity in, so I stay warmer than everybody else at night, and it never gets very windy. In the evening, the swallows swoop around the pond and catch bugs and the frogs line the shore and croak at one another. A very contemplative place, and I even sometimes feel like, dare I say, old Henry Thoreau. Yeah, other than coping with a few strange creature habits, it’s not so bad. Oh, except when it rains. It’s summer here, so it doesn’t rain too much, but we had a big storm about 2 weeks ago. I woke up in a puddle. I thought waking up to grass in my house was weird… a puddle was not just surprising, not just unusual, not just something to check off the bucket list, but really, really sucky too. Luckily I opted to use my waterproof bivvy sack to keep my sleeping bag dry, but my pillow was like a sponge. My foam sleeping pad weighed about 60 pounds and smelled like a wet dog. Haha, man everything was just soaking wet, and it was still raining. I can close the smoke flap and the canvas is waterproof, so very little rain water actually gets into the tipi, but the problem is the water that collects on the sticks above the canvas. Most of it just runs down the poles all the way to the ground, but some of it collects on the rope I have holding the structure together, so there is a constant drip right in the middle of the tipi. Again, this is where the fire would normally be, so it probably wasn’t a big deal for the Native Americans, but it just creates a nice mud pool for me. This is never an issue, as I normally just avoid walking through the middle. During this big storm, however, there was so much water that the earth was just completely saturated, and thus rather than rainwater pouring down, I had groundwater coming up, soaking me from the depths. I keep my personal belongings in plastic storage boxes for this very reason, but the weight of the boxes created a low spot in the carpet, so there was one nice big pool under me and one under my stuff. Funny how that worked out. Everything stayed dry thanks to the boxes though, so that was good…except for my dirty laundry which I didn’t bother to box up and currently smells an abandoned science project. I hate to admit it, but I had to wave the white flag during the storm and headed for the caravan on high ground. The sopping wet pillow was really my breaking point I think. Eventually the rain stopped of course, so I pulled out the carpets/astro turf and my sleeping pad and let them all dry for a day in the sun. When everything seemed [mostly] dry, I pulled it all back inside, arranged it to my liking, and took up residence once again. After staying outside for so long, three consecutive nights in the caravan began making me a little stir crazy, so I was really happy to be back. There is something special about peaking under the canvas to see the pond and all of its life, and gazing up through the smoke flap to the stars of the great beyond. Have you ever seen a shooting star from your bed? Just look up.

So the moral of this story? Living in a tipi is something you should really consider doing! What can you really know about yourself until you have the opportunity to live without weather proofing? How can you get up in the morning without a fly alarm? Wouldn’t you like to hear/see what kind of animal life lurks about in the dark of the night? What’s the point of a night’s rest without a visit from a possum? People lived for thousands of years without double pained windows and rubber strips around their doors, not even a zipper or a rain fly. Give it a shot; I’m not saying you’re going to like it, but you might enjoy parts of it… maybe. And really, there are a lot of little things to laugh at when you realize nature is neither for you, nor against you. I would, however, highly recommend having a fire… it’s a pretty basic tipi requisite, it’s cool to have an open flame inside your house, I think the heat would solve a lot of my moisture issues, and it would definitely make a creature think twice before getting too adventurous around the smoke flap. I’m not saying I’d like to raise a family in a tipi (…although…), but it’s a real interesting experience and something about the rudimentary life helps me find a sliver of humor in every heap of potential suffering. Let’s reflect…