Shelter

A sheepish venture

The first sphere

I am building a shelter. From scratch. As scratch as I can get it, at least.

Over the course of a bit more than a year I have gathered hazelwood from the surrounding French forest, hauled three big bags of unwashed fleece from my native region in Holland, and hassled together a large pile of old bed linens and woollen blankets at twenty or so different Vide Grenier markets and thrift stores.

Those are the main building materials. Completed with some rope, a bucket of boiled linseed oil and eighteen second hand circus pegs. Big iron ones, to anchor the whole thing.

The shelter wil be a mix of a circus tent and a Mongolian yurt. This coming week it is raising time. We, my family of three, intent to live in the contraption year round. Summer and winter. No back up, this will be home.

Here, just below halfway France, it gets hot and dry fast, intensely wet in between, and with a good chance of snow in the cold season. Our little corner of a big meadow lies at almost five hundred meters above sea level. The views are wide. We get both the rising and the setting of the sun. The winds have their playground here. Hedges, Charolais cows and chestnut trees. Rich grassland with a thousand species. A rainforest half a meter high.

Untaching

It is an experiment. To see if it can be done. If I count every penny, we have spend almost three thousand Euros on the tent, the tools and the platform. And another two on solar power and bringing water up there from the well.

I am not a puritan. I don’t long for the old ways to return. I do like immediacy. The less there is between me and what -and who- I try to interact with the better. Every chance I get to remove unnecessary layers. Like a lover does, yes. Within reason, I am also a sucker for practical and convenient.

Regular astonishment at how little our enormous collective efforts add to functionality is one of the results of the project. A shaving horse and a drawing knife have no problem outcompeting power tools. On many levels. The quiet meditative joy of using hand tools can hardly be called work.

Wool is way up there with the very best modern materials. An almost supernatural list of qualities that come from a local renewable source. A ‘happy’ source, before and after extraction.

The same is true for the hazel sticks that form the trellis walls and rafters. No trees are killed. The pruning of a few poles per shrub is hardly noticeable, and even extends the life of the plant. A well coppiced area can provide the materials for many functions. And, the finding and gathering of the three meter long ‘straight’ poles is a very different experience than going to the hardware store.

The more I untach from modern life, the better I see how inefficient our efficiency has become. Not just on a societal level but especially much closer to home. We have become utterly unpractical. Obsessive compulsive detours fill our days. We buy tasteless strawberries from an extremely elaborate system while the original grows (or could grow) right where we live. We use freezers inside our heated homes while the temperature outside is way below zero. And I could go on and on with these examples.

Becoming aware of the layers that sneak their way in between me and the real world is an ongoing process. A deep dig that demands brutal honesty. Direct interaction is a courageous act.

This is the main reason I build and make. To reconnect. To expose myself. To line up with the physical. The task itself is mostly not crazy complicated, excavating my habits of approach is.

Because matter has this strange quality. All matter, not just the green stuff. The concrete and the steel as much as the seeds and the feathers and the worms. The bones as well as the flesh. The rocks, the ponds and the clouds.

They flow. Just like I can be fluid but hide from that kind of participation most of the time. Getting close reveals this. Getting intimate with trees, soil, fibers, excretions, skin. Getting covered in the smell. Exerting muscular force and feeling it push back. You feel it move, hear it whisper. It begs to be touched and loved. Just like you.

The shelter that I make will be intimately touched on many levels, over many days. It will be my house. Not because I have bought it, but simply through interaction. It is mine, I belong to it and it belongs to me. Even the polyester yarn responds to the good company. Even the hardened steel screws rejoice in the local heartwood. The whole thing is reciprocal and keeps an effortless balance.

Its parts will need replacing as an ongoing part of its lifespan. Just like my body. They get more character as they age. They move from one function to the next. It produces no waste to speak of.

The biggest job was the felting. We wanted the lanolin, the woolfat, to stay in, because it protects the fibers from insect damage. And it seems over time a chemical reaction takes place that makes the thick blankets repel moisture. For our walls we aimed for a thickness of about 2 cm. This means you need a layer of freshly carded wool of about half a meter deep. I made a simple rolling machine to provide the mechanical movement that lets the hairs hook into each other further and further. The result is a kind of carpet. The maximum size we can make is roughly 2 by 2.4 mtr. About forty of them will keep the cold out and the heat in, or the other way around. At least that’s the theory. We’ll see.

For the sewing I have used a foot powered industrial machine of more than a hundred years old. With love and care it will last another century or two. With some effort I am able to repair it. With each added feature of the tool we increase the distance. And we loose the ability to take care of it. We replace it with a new version. Disgard of the old. Aging used to be a sign of deepening, of quality increase, now the value is put on the new, the young, the next. Wishing to live long but not grow old is a weird sort of insanity. Placing the unwanted simply out of sight and then pretending it no longer exists is immaturity.

A returning theme for me. The arch of the tool. Because it is the tools that have started to block our access to the real. Tools are everywhere and it seems to me there is hardly any deeper knowledge, no tool philosophy. But that’s for another day. First we will make use of a few sunny dry, low wind days to set up our new home. Exposure time.

I will keep you posted.