A Silver Summer For $11.00

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For the site, I chose a flat spot about 100 feet away from the beaver pond. It was covered by a roof of hemlock branches which would protect my home from wind and rain and the native inhabitants—beaver, deer, Great Blue Heron and even me—from the obtrusive appearance of the plastic. The trees were spaced such that I could just squeeze a 10' x 21' tunnel between their trunks . . . a perfect place.

We cut the network of vines and roots from the grove, raked and crowbarred out prominent rocks and generally made the surface as flat and clear as possible. I then went off to cut down 20 saplings—with base diameters of about three inches—to serve as the hut's frame. (Although my conscience nagged me, the recently logged-off area offered young trees to choose from and my thinning job was probably ultimately beneficial.) I next cut off the top of the saplings, leaving a ten-foot pole which I stripped of any remaining branches. While I was trimming and cutting, Van used the crowbar to make a set of footdeep holes, spaced about two feet apart along one of the long edges of the grove. We then dug a corresponding row of holes 10 feet away and parallel to the first and shoved a sapling deep into each of the 20 narrow excavations. When the fit was not quite tight enough and a sapling could still flex in its hole, we wedged the pole in with a five-inch-long leftover chunk hammered in alongside the length of the sapling.

Once the frame members were stabilized, we grabbed one of the end poles at about shoulder height, drew its top down to the middle of the 10-foot-wide space, did likewise with the sapling across from the first and overlapped the ends so that the maximum height of the curve was about six feet, ten inches. We then lashed the two together by tightly drawing the baling twine round and round the pair of branches in about three different places.

We repeated the process with all ten sets of saplings, forming a tunnel-shaped framework that we were careful to keep at an even height (the breadth of each arched pair varied according to the flex in the trees). To even out and strengthen the skeleton a little, we cut seven more saplings—all close to 20 feet tall—and ran them the length of the frame, spaced evenly across the top from about three feet off the ground. (Although we placed these supports on the outside of the frame, I later learned to weave the crosspieces in and out of the supporting poles.) One frame . . . complete by sunset.

The next day we (four friends and I) came back to drape the structure with plastic by laying the roll of film down beside the saplings on the outside of the frame and pulling the end of the material up over the top of the structure and down to ground on the other side . . . where we cut it off so that there was about a foot and a half left over on either side. We stretched and smoothed the ten-foot width (leaving about six inches extending over the end arch) and then the four of us took hammers or rocks and some vinyl squares and started nailing the plastic down at each juncture of crosspiece and arch (I found later that a staple gun works faster and makes it easier to remove the plastic and use it for something else later).

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