A Week in the Woods: Day Four

Whenever I'm free from the constraints of a tight schedule, I like to take my time waking up in the morning. Sleep is great, but hard to enjoy in itself since you're asleep the whole time, so it's the dreamy period between first awareness and finally getting out of bed that I like to appreciate. On day four in the woods, I woke up at 8 AM and marinated under wraps for an hour or so before being brave enough to poke my entire head out of the hole in my sleeping bag that had been previously occupied only by my nose, periscope-like, for breathing purposes. Having thus greeted the dawn, I played some music on my phone and sang along for another couple hours until I finally emerged entirely for breakfast and a trip to the stream.

In the afternoon, I did some light construction work. One of my coworkers had let me know via walkie-talkie that she would try and visit my camp that evening, so I built a bench from fallen poplars and spruce branches in anticipation of the event. My clearing was getting fairly civilized by this point, and I wanted for nothing-- at least nothing that could be made of tied-together branches.

That evening, an expected halloo sounded over the hill from the trail and I had company. We had a nice meal of spring rolls brought from Squirrel Camp, and a thermos of hot chocolate for dessert. Now, hot chocolate is nice just about anywhere, and it's pretty great in a wood-heated shack in the Yukon, but for a temporary inhabitant of an unheated hovel in the woods, it's just about sublime.

After dinner, we adjourned to the parlor and made a small campfire in an improvised firepit (many precautions were taken). It was late August, so the unending brightness of earlier summer nights was replaced with a slow twilight. We sat on the spruce-scented bench and watched the fire, and then we told stories. She told the Greek myth of Arachne, the weaver who challenged Athena and was turned into a spider, and I rehearsed the story from the Champagne and Aishihik First Nations of how the raven got blue eyes. It was almost dark when we finally put the fire out.