Woods in February

Last night I went out to the woods on the bus and made camp for the night.  I was surprised to find a couple of centimetres of snow on the ground, but it was pleasant to be in the wood while it was snowing.  I don't like weather forecasts; they stop you from experiencing the world as it is.  I'd rather be wet than afraid of nature.

Anyway, I went out to a wood, and I built a shelter.  I'd seen Ray Mears make a long shelter with a long fire in front of it, so I started off making one of those.  I found a medium-small fallen tree I could lie underneath and laid sticks up against it enclosing it completely on one side.  I threw a couple of inches of a mixture of snow and pine needles over the twigs until no light came through.  Then I suffered a failure trying to start a fire.  Dry wood was hard to come by, and much of the wet wood was frozen as well as waterlogged.  We've had a week of mist so it's unsurprising everything was so wet.  I must brush up on my firelighting skills (which I'd thought were pretty good).  I gave up on the fire and decided to enclose the shelter completely.  At either end I repeated the process, then I made a porch with a doorway from a lintel and an upright, which I finished the same as the rest of it, with snow and pine needles.  I hung my waterproof trousers up to enclose the door, and laid out my bed inside and found myself warmer than in my house.

I read a biography of Frank Zappa for an hour or so and drifted off.  I dreamt that a fox had come inside and was trying to eat my cheese, so I chased it away.  Then I changed my dream-mind and threw it pieces of cheese and enticed it in, where it curled up and slept on my belly.  Then it was morning and the dawn sky was beige-orange.  I had slept soundly for ten hours.

I struck camp (leaving the shelter) and walked back to my house.  As I came over the moors I meditated on empathising with the DIftW hermit, and reached some answers.  Then I encountered three joggers: "...I asked her over coffee."/"Morning!"/"Morning."/"And she said she earnt three times as much!"/"Hahaha."  That was the end of that.