Childhood Daydreams

When I was a child, I tended to have elaborate day dreams that consisted of running away from home and where I would live once I did so.  It wasn't as if I hated my family and wanted to run away, it was more that my imagination had been captured first by the first book of "The Boxcar Children" book series, and then by the book "My Side of the Mountain" by  Jean Craighead George.  I read all three books, but none captured me as much as the first book.  I feel in love with the idea of living on my own, in nature.

I wasn't as much in love with the idea of having to actually survive in the wild though, I didn't think I could skin a deer or make a hook to catch a fish, or hollow out a tree to live in.  The very idea seemed preposterous to me.  I figured I would live at the creek that ran through my neighborhood, right along the walking path that wove connected mine and the next neighborhoods.  That way I could run home and get food and use the bathroom and shower.  From the path and from the houses on either side, you couldn't see the location I had discovered.  It was sheltered from view with large trees and bushes and was a small clearing covered in grass.  There was a concrete barrier that ran across the creek to create a sort of failure of a dam, and a very tiny waterfall.  There was a pool at the bottom of the "waterfall" and base of the concrete barrier. Outside the little clearing were small and large trees and reeds and cattails on sand bars.  I decided that this clearing would be my future home, and I would work on building a shelter and all the things I would need to survive.

My first thought was to build a tree house, since I wasn't about to carve out a tree using fire and an ax.  A quick look told me that my idea would not work, because every single branch was at least 15 feet up.  Sadly, there was also no abandoned box car for me to convert into a house, as much as I wished it would be so.  However, I had other solutions for shelter that, at the time, seemed much more reasonable than carving out a tree.

Solution 1:  Weave the tops of these small trees and reeds and smash down the middle of the group to make a small hut.  Also, to take thin strips of reed and what not to weave in between the live ones to create the walls of  my hut.  I quickly abandoned this idea when I went down to my little hut I was building after a huge rain storm had passed and I couldn't even get to my hut because the sand bar it was on was completely under a couple inches of water.  I decided I needed to build my house

Solution 2:  Build a small shack.  I mean, actually build one using cast off 2 by 4's, plywood boards, and whatever else I could find in the construction dumpsters near my house.  But before I could search out the necessary boards and nails, school was starting up again and my dreams of building this little get away drifted off into oblivion.

I also had dreams of hiding out in Costco, climbing up to the top of the storage racks you see above the reachable merchandise, building a little shelter out of those boxes so you couldn't see it from the ground, and living off of the samples they pass out every day.  I think I read something recently where someone else had the same dream and I giggled to myself.  Its nice to know I'm not the only one with outrageous day dreams.