Logistics of tent life

For curious folks.

Building home from the soils up is really hard. The amount of tracking required conditions the brain in a way that both expands the capacity, but also wearies. So many things to remember, to accomplish, to take into account, to plan for, so many steps to attend to. Of course it isn’t the same as moving from a hard sided house into a hard sided house, where all the daily living systems are already in place - where to wash dishes, where to poop, where to store tools, where to sleep. Those things help smooth out the inevitable chaos of having all your things in boxes, disheveled and disorganized, the inevitable “shoving everything anywhere just to get it out of the old house” phase of tangled messiness. It adds another dimension of cognitive labor to have to plan and build each of those things, while also just trying to cook, wash, sleep, and have some little modicum of self care while doing it.

It requires so much surrender. Way past the point of which one feels comfortable surrendering. Living in a construction zone is so hard on my nervous system, having grown up with a golden hearted clinically obsessive compulsive hoarding father who was also a construction handyman, and LOVED tearing things apart, but never had time to put them back together. A lot of my childhood was spent with walls torn apart, floors ripped up, junk cars dismantled, scrap wood stacked in corners, piles and piles and piles of screws and bolts and tools, boxes of wires, gasoline and sheetrock dust on everything. He is one of the reasons I know how to toenail together junk I find into a cozy home. But damn, the chaos is such a challenge, and during the last month of getting systems in place, I really struggled with mental overload.

We would be felling and moving logs all day, get deeply exhausted, go back down the hill to our little home between home camp, but the cooler would be iceless, and all the dishes dirty with rain water pooled in them (which actually made it much easier to just wipe them out with moss), still without a chopping knife or a cutting board, slugs chomping the cabbage and pooping on the cast iron, the handforged knife Chris just made rusted out, craving vegetables but opting for pasta once again because it is just easier. The sheepskin would be wet, but there was no where to put it, we forgot to charge the light. In the morning we’d have to go poop in the rain, hiking out into the nettles to find a spot, wiping with wet moss, which is actually really pleasant, but cold, and leaves bits of tree in your butt crack. A damp camping tent, with damp boots and socks, completely inundated with sawdust. Trying to advertise for my slaughter classes on a laptop on a hotspot, bone weary and filthy and still hungry, hoping that folks choose to trust what I’m offering, even though I don’t have the bandwidth to post very thoughtfully, or thoroughly, or consistently.

But cooking on the ground and living humbly brings me back into alignment. It reminds me how little we actually need. That most of the material stuff I’ve been lugging around with me is illusory, extra fluff. All my craft and decorations, things I love dearly, but definitely don’t actually need. I think about getting rid of all of it, all the boxes of hides and baskets, skulls and tools. It feels good to think about.

Living here, in this rainforest, nestled in the bosom of gray misty mountains that breathe fog, I’m trying to anticipate mold. It is all new to me, and I’m having to cobble together advice from Rainforest vampires who have lived here longer than I, with half informed guesses and creative thinking.

We painted the platform with mold killing paint, that also helps repel mold. I think it is pretty gross, and I wasn’t super excited about having it off gas around my home. But living in canvas, the air is always circulating, moving, flowing, compared to having layers of wood and sheetrock and fiberglass severing the air from its vast body outside that blows and swirls and plays. Think about that - the winds as massive, multi-state size bodies that are all connected and alive and articulate as part of their very essence. Then we frame in a heave sided house that chops off a little piece of the wind and cages it inside a stale, stagnant box. It becomes limp, pale, sickly, still. And then we need machines that eat electricity to the recirculate the air inside. What would happen if you cut off your arm and put it in a thick box somewhere?

So I weighed the option of not using the paint, but then risking the underside of the platform going moldy, and mold spores circulating. At this point, especially since Chris is so mold allergic, we opted for the mold paint. I have no idea how effective it is going to be, but there is a hope and a prayer.

The platform itself is lifted off the ground at least a couple of feet in its shortest spot, so I’m hoping that there will be enough space between it and the ground that moisture will be able circulate and dry out. The rainfly hangs over the edge of the tent a couple feet on each side, so rain water will drop off far away from the platform, and I lined the edge of the platform with waterproof cloth, to help block splashes, dew, and other moisture from getting under there.

I wouldn’t live in a wall tent without a platform. I think that even in dry climates there is too much risk of dampness and mold on the ground.

My tent has a Velcro in vinyl floor, which goes right on top of the wood. Then we are adding carpet on top of that the help insulate in the winter. The Velcro was a custom order while I was living out east, where there are massive black widows that try to migrate inside during the autumn, and more than a few rattle snakes that like to slither into cozy nooks and crannies. One night I felt something tickle my side in bed, and I went to scratch it, and felt something cold and big and goopy. It turns out it was a half dollar size black widow that was on my skin that I accidentally smashed into my bed. I shudder even now thinking of it. With the Velcro, I feel like the whole perimeter wall is sealed off, and I never had black widows in the tent again.

We are leaving a small space between the furniture and the walls, to encourage airflow to decrease condensation and dampness. We have a couple of adjustable stove top fans to direct warm air around the room. To be honest, I’m not super concerned about the inside of the tent getting moldy. It is a 15x18 tent, and I keep a coal in the woodstove going all of the time (this stove can hold a coal for about 12 hours or more), so there is always warmth and drying happening. It is more the outside storage that I’m concerned about. I have a 14 foot cargo trailer with all my tools and craft stuff in it, and I don’t know if the hanging desiccant packs are going to be enough once the rains come, and dehumidifiers eat so much energy, I’m not sure if our small Jackery solar system will be enough to run one regularly. I’m going to try out an old timer trick of putting rock salt in a colander over a 5 gallon bucket, which supposedly pulls a ton of moisture out of the air.

We got a Joolca hot water system, which is definitely a level up for me. It is an on-demand propane water heater and pump, that can go fully off grid (we plug it into our Jackery battery, but they also make a small usb rechargable battery for it as well). Right now we are hauling all of our water in 5 gallon jugs from the spring down in town, so we just plop the intake hose into a jug. It runs to an outdoor shower and a sink. I lived for seven fucking years without hot running water, eating a ton of fatty meat out of jars, and the pile of fat covered jars on my porch was an almost constant bane. But now I can flip a switch and there is scorching water that just flows out. It is truly a miracle, and bougious as hell.

I do all my cooking either on the woodstove, or a Coleman 2 burner propane camp stove.

We are working on a rainwater catchment system for showers, dishes, and spring gardening, but have just begun our planning for that. We’ll just haul water for now.

Now we are turning out focus on getting our firewood area setup, which will probably just be a popup tent with pallets on the ground. I like creating spaces that I can dismantle, and the earth will spring back to life again.

There is so much obedience in our daily lives here, so much bending to the weather, the warmth or the chill, the wet days or the dry days, the impending rains, the forest and its ways, that I haven’t felt the deep philosophizing that tends to happen when I have more time to think. It is interesting, wanting to articulate the bigger learnings and wonderings that are moving through, but then actually just living them in the muscles, in the rhythms, and not having the words for them. And so it goes.