I woke up and got up. Did everything I needed to do to start the day, including a mouth full of ash paste, wake-up routine going into morning routine. Check this, check that, collect this, collect that. Don’t stop, keep going.

Not a long routine, I finished before midday, adding the dry sticks and twigs to my firewood. Looking over it all, I noticed the reed I’d cut some days ago and idly picked it up. The plan had been to try weaving a basket or something, but it had been so difficult to cut, I gave up on the spot. Now, it looked too dry to weave; I tried bending it and, sure enough, it cracked and snapped.

Ready to throw it with the firewood to eventually burn, I tried to pull the two ends apart, but they didn’t want to? I bent it the other way, another crack, definitely snapped in two… except I still couldn’t pull them apart.

Wondering what was going on, I held up the reed to check where I’d snapped it: there was something stringy still there. I froze for a moment, then tried twisting, the outside splintering some more, inside still the stringy bit.

Heart thumping, I tried not to get excited and failed miserably.

Over by the fire pit, holding the reed on my rock chair, I hammered it with a stone. Did my best to break off as much of the outside as I could. Harder than threshing the wheat, but I hammering away until my hand felt numb, then scraped as much of the stem off as I could.

The more I did, the more it looked like a bundle of thread. Not just a sinewy branch, but thread that I could twist any way I wanted, swishing around as I waved it, hanging loose. Kind of. There was still a lot of the stem attached, so the thread was kind of lumpy.

I could do it.

Searching around for the sharpest stone I could find, I tried to remember as much as I could from a podcast about jute. There was no doubt a lot I’d forgotten, but the main thing was using water to rot away the plant bits, leaving behind the threads. Or should I call them fibres? Doesn’t matter.

The important thing was that I didn’t just have water, I had warm water—that’d definitely be better for breaking down plants. I didn’t want to drink water where plants were decaying, though, so I’d need to do it in the stream part, which was probably also better because the running water could, like, pull off bits as they died. Everything coming together.

It took a while to find a sharp-enough stone; how hard it had been to cut, I couldn’t settle. Coming up to midday, I decided to have lunch first and set off afterwards.

My focus on the routine the last few days meant I had bigger pea sprouts to eat, letting them soak for a day, then sit in the dark. I wasn’t sure if they sprouted better in the light or dark, but didn’t want birds stealing them or anything like that. Better to keep them safe in the larder.

Eat, drink, toilet break, then I set off, rock in hand, following the stream as I walked under the trees at the forest’s edge, mind full of plans. Whether they’d work out, I didn’t know, but it gave me something to do.

Not much grew by the top of the stream, mostly just overgrown grass. Eventually, things like reeds and water lilies and watercress popped up here and there, becoming more common the farther down I went. That made some sense, not like their seeds would travel upstream.

I kept going until I found a big patch of reeds. It was on an outside bend, some of them growing on the bank, so very easy to get to. Nothing else for it, I got to work. The sun shone down and I hacked away at reed after reed. Having a sharper stone helped, sawing through what I guessed were the threads that made them so hard to cut. No wonder I’d struggled.

One, two, ten, twenty. The stems were thicker than the wheat, not much, like comparing my thumb to my index finger. Felt better to carry, more weight to them. The wheat kind of felt like a waste considering an armful wasn’t close to heavy. Oh and the slope was gentle here, so it was fine if I couldn’t use my hands at all.

Part of the cutting, I also scattered half the sort of pine cone seeds, let it all eventually regrow. Not all of the seeds, though. Water couldn’t carry seeds upstream, but I could, so I wanted to try growing some near the top. If I could make fabric out of the reeds, I wanted as much as possible.

Anyway, the first step was bringing it back, so I got to walking. Step by step, stream gurgling, birds twittering in the forest, cool wind brushing past, changing direction every time it blew. Such a different world to living in the city.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

At the camp, I dumped the reeds by the fire pit, then started working on the next part of the plan. The spring came out in a shallow pool, marshy at the edge, then filtered through some rocks into the stream, flowing down fairly fast, the “valley” it had carved out narrow.

I didn’t have a spade, just rocks and sticks and I couldn’t even stick them together. No point complaining. I wanted the water to still be warm for decomposing the reeds, so I started right where the stream began. Took a fairly flat rock and used it to dig. Slow, repetitive work, one swing after another, taking plenty of breaks to drink and get out the sun and cool my hands. It wasn’t as bad as some of the other stuff I’d done, though, the ground by the stream kinda soft, not like when I hacked branches off of trees.

Rather than anything fancy, I just dug along the stream’s edge, the last part scooping up the marshy mud either side of the water. I tried to dig the top end deeper, making the new valley flatter and hoping that would be good enough to get the water to fill it.

Well, it kind of worked. The fast, narrow stream was now a bit wider and slower. To keep the reeds from being carried downstream, I added some rocks at the bottom bit, which helped fill up more of the valley.

The last step, I carefully added the reeds, making sure they wouldn’t just clog up the “drain” or get pushed around and end up floating down. That took some adjustments and more rocks. Eventually, I got to the reeds that still had seeds. For now, I made a pile of those, then added the reeds to the water.

By the end of it, I stood there, looking over what I’d accomplished, and smiled. I did something, I thought. I really did something.

Evening coming along, I started on my evening routine. While the carrots roasted, I went for a short wander down the stream, sowing the reed seeds where I thought they’d like to grow. From what I’d seen, they liked the outside of bends. Maybe that was just where the seeds ended up stuck flowing down the river.

The next day, at the end of my morning routine, I checked on the reeds. Used a stick to poke them and move them around and tried scraping one, happy to find some of the stem fall off when I did. It was tempting to spend all day scraping away at them to speed it up.

However, looking up, some darker clouds were in the sky.

My thoughts locked up for a while, unsure what to do. It wasn’t like the rain would be a problem for me. I had food, everything that shouldn’t get wet as safe as could be. No, what I hated was what it would to do to my routine, what would happen to me after being locked in my bedroom for however many hours.

There was nothing I could do about it, though.

For now, the best thing was to roast carrots, so I worked on that. Made a fire and put the carrots to cook. While I waited, I looked over the progress on my room. Even though I hadn’t focused on it as much, I had weaved together the side walls, had done the roof right at the start, but the gaps between the sticks going across were far from waterproof.

Going back to the fire, I thought things over as I ate the carrots and “fried” some wheat.

I still didn’t really know how to do thatching. Maybe once I had thread, I could tie them into bundles or something. But I didn’t have thread yet. I could maybe find enough fairly flat rocks, like roof tiles, but I had nothing to keep them in place. No way to make planks of wood.

It really sucked. What would suck more, though, was being stuck in that crevice if the rain kept going.

A pretty bad plan, but it would have to do. I went through my spare weaving sticks to find ones long and thing enough to fit in the gaps on the roof. No time to tie them down, but the roof wasn’t too steep and they fit between the sticks that were tied down.

With the big holes covered up, I plucked bunches of leaves to stuff in the rest of the gaps. So many bunches and just for the roof. The side walls weren’t perfect, but I hoped it wouldn’t be rainy and windy. As long as the rain fell straight down, a roof was all I needed, that what I focused on.

The roof about twice the size of the door I had made, meaning four times the area, it took a lot of leaves to thoroughly cover it. I still doubted it’d work well, the door not even perfect and it hadn’t needed to keep much rain out—being a door and not a roof.

At least I was doing something. At least I was trying, trying to move forwards, however small that step.

I worked into the evening, dark as the clouds smothered the stars, the moons, no crackling fire to bathe the camp in amber light. It started spitting, but I kept working. Every bunch I added was one less raindrop leaking through. Who knew if that was true, but that was what I told myself. One less raindrop.

When it grew into a drizzle, I retired into the room, bringing fruits and sprouts with me. And it was fine. Not perfect, but fine. Bigger than the crevice, still missing a door, a drop slipping through every few seconds. That was fine. As long as I was dry, I could stay warm without the door, and most drips didn’t land on me, curled up with my back to the rocky outcrop. I kept the food in the crevice, still the driest place.

The drizzle carried on, at times lightening up, other times growing heavier. Distant rumbles of thunder rolled through the ground, no sign of the flashes. Maybe far off on the other side of the mountain.

And I sat there, watching the rain fall, listening to it. That was my world.

Time meant nothing to me. I had no clue when the rain had begun, no clue what the time was now. I just experienced the rain, curled up in my room, sometimes jumping when a cold drop of rain landed on me, most of the time staring out at nothing. Not cold, not warm, not hungry, not full, not happy, not sad.

I was.

That was all.