Cristelle Comby - Alone Together

When he saw my design, I could tell that me correcting him had hurt his pride a little. His lip involuntarily curled downward, a sort of reflex in reaction to feeling the pain of inadequacy, which he bit into to stop. I shrugged my shoulders in a ‘sorry, but what else could I have done’ gesture. This was about survival, not a submission to Architecture Weekly . I returned him my new version of our proposed palace in the woods before motioning towards the branches I needed his help with.

Together, we brought our building materials to our spot on the beach. Hauling them over took all morning and half the afternoon. Once we were done, I was parched and famished, but we’d yet to hunt for our food. I gave Killian the gesture we had agreed upon for berries and then mimed that I was going to try to find us some fish.

The next morning was spent manufacturing the basic tools we’d need to cut and trim the assorted branches. We broke up medium-sized stones on larger boulders. The largest pieces would be used to carve out branches and large chunks of thick bark. The rest could be turned into a sort of pre-hardened concrete, which would help seal the support beams into the ground. I had to admit that this last had been one of Killian’s most brilliant ideas to date. That mesh of stone debris would keep the pillars wedged into the earth, able to stay strong through even the fiercest of windstorms.

It took us the entire morning to get four of those stones broken, sharpened and ready for burial. The bad part was that wasn’t even half of what we needed. Once again, the remainder of the afternoon was spent doing the rest until it was time to stop and hunt for our supper.

By now, I had a sense of the tides’ timetable. Consequently, I knew how long I had until the waves swallowed the tide pools and freed the fish that may otherwise be trapped within.

That night, I returned to the camp with two cod that we roasted over the coals. It tasted a lot like yesterday’s meal. And the one before that. But food was food. Much like Killian’s proposed skylight, menus were a luxury we currently didn’t have.

We selected the thicker and most linear branches we’d found to use as support beams. We readied them by trimming off their bark and removing the biggest knots. The branches were cut to a length of about one metre fifty. With fifty centimetres firmly planted in the ground, that would leave us with one-metre in support beams all around.

Speaking of which, the next step was actually planting them in the ground. I had no idea how deep we needed to dig for the structure to stay solid. Like everything else, we were going to have to wing it.

When Killian tried planting the first branch, it only went in a couple of centimetres. Since that wasn’t enough, we took it out and started digging, using some plane debris that were vaguely circular chunks of metal. We wrapped strips of blankets around our palms so that we wouldn’t cut ourselves using these crude tools.

We wound up making the hole larger than needed, leaving some room at the sides for the stones to be wedged into it as well. Once we planted the beams, the stones went in next. We used them to stab the sides of the branches—not enough to break them, just enough to keep them steady—before filling what was left of the hole with a mixture of sand, dirt and water. Thankfully, it seemed to hold after we were done.

By mid-afternoon, we had four branches standing proudly at the corners of a well-defined rectangle. The rectangular shape stretched out two metres long on the narrower side and three metres on the longest. At these lengths, we’d both be able to sleep with our entire bodies stretched out comfortably. I doubt Killian wanted a repeat of the cramped conditions of the galley any more than I did.

We planted two more beams in the middle of the longest sides, reserving one to install next to what would be our front door. I knew we had the loo door to use for that, but at this point, I had no idea how to affix that to the structure. Well , something else we could worry about at a later time , I thought as I continued to work.

By the end of the second day, my body was on fire. My arms, my legs, my back… So much of me hurt that it was hard to narrow down the exact spots. I had no strength left to go fishing, so that night’s menu de jour were the last three potatoes we had along with a couple of sachets of that awful dill sauce. And for dessert, of course, half a KitKat.

With dinner over, I started digging out the splinters that built up in my hands over the day’s work. Piece after piece, satisfaction seeped its way into me as I removed those wooden parasites from my rough, calloused hands. I breathed heavy sighs of relief while pulling each tiny fragment out of my hands. Killian kept looking at me with a curious, judgemental look, as if it were ‘wrong’ of me to be enjoying what little pleasure I found in the task. I was too tired to care.

Though he hadn’t worked as much as I did, his own hands were no better than mine. If anything, they looked worse. He’d been forced to bandage up the red, abused skin of his palms with more strips of blankets.

After what had seemed like about half an hour of tending to our individual wounds, we made our way back to our tin can shelter for the night.

The next day found me waking up to Killian tearing down and dismantling what was left of the loo door. While the left one was missing, the other had three flimsy hinges barely holding it to the wall. In a rare display of strength and power, Killian ripped it off its hinges. I think the fact that they were torn and mangled beyond repair played a big part in the feat, but I pretended to be impressed just the same. If it put him in a good mood, he could have this little victory. It probably made up for the throbbing I knew was running through his still-bandaged hands.

Getting up, I pondered unhinging all the cabinet doors in the galley, but I didn’t see what we could do with those. Maybe there was a way to use them like furniture or storage?

Well , interior decorating was something we could worry about later , I decided. For now, our shack needed the essentials of some walls and a roof. That meant long sheets of flat material. And something to hold it to the support beam we’d planted in the ground. Honestly, I had no idea what we could use as a roof. I hoped Killian had a better one in mind.

As I stood there looking around, my eyes settled on the curved walls themselves. Maybe whatever they were made of could come off? When I moved closer, I discovered junctions between the assembled pieces. Running my fingers along the material, I couldn’t figure out what it was made of. While it seemed light and flimsy, it didn’t dent when I tried pressing my finger against it.

Yesterday, I’d turned a lengthy piece of debris into something that resembled a chisel, with a piece of cloth tied around the end to serve as a handle. I took it to one of the visible junctions and tried cutting there. The material came away under the blade. To my surprise, it was much thinner than I’d anticipated. Still, it looked sturdy enough, made of some honeycomb material lined with thin protective sheets. All in all, it wasn’t much more than a centimetre thick. But no matter how much pressure I put on it, the stuff refused to lose its curved shape at the top. It must have been pressed into shape when it was super-hot. Well, never mind contemporary design—our home’s roof could have a rounded look. When in Rome, right?