Teepees Provide Time, Place For Reflection

Instead of finding relaxation in sitcoms and six packs, a lot of people seem to be heading to teepees in the back yard, where they can gaze into a flickering fire and forget about faxes, e-mail and nagging bosses.

"People out here aren't building decks any more," proclaimed Rhode Island resident Kathy Roche, "they're putting up teepees."

Witness Mike Caprarelli, a lifelong outdoorsman. He spends all but the coldest nights in the teepee pitched next to his cabin in the woods. He'll spend evenings there by an open fire, watching the shadows dance on the white canvas walls.

After the flames die down, he'll slip into his bed, draped with a red wool blanket and coyote pelts, and watch the moon glide across the smoke hole at the top of the 24-foot-high tent.

And on those nights when he gets home early enough from work, which might amount to a day splitting cord wood, bass fishing or carrying out his duties as town dog officer, Caprarelli makes dinner in his cherished retreat.

"I have more friends than you can imagine," said Caprarelli, a stocky man in his late 50s with muscular arms, "but I still need my own space.

"Even if I'm not out here for 3 of 4 days, at least I know it's here when I need it."

Caprarelli is not alone in his passion for these majestic, moveable shelters.

In recent years, teepee dwellers in rural Rhode Island, at least part-timers, seem as thick as black flies.

Last New Year's Eve, Caprarelli threw a party for four other couples in the neighborhood who spend time in teepees.

And the teepee craze is not just restricted to bearded outbackers and back-to-the-landers. A recent Italian issue of Elle magazine listed Ted Turner, Ralph Lauren and Amy Irving among recent converts to teepee living. The article was called "teepee, Dolce teepee."

A time to be alone

Foster's Kathy Roche and husband, Bill, a tech director for the Brown University theater department, are, as of this spring, a two-teepee household. She has parked hers close to house to be near the kitchen. Bill put his 180 yards away on the edge of the woods.

"If something happens in my personal life," said Bill, who built his first teepee 15 years ago, "I'll go out there to sit.

"If my wife comes home and sees smoke coming out the top she won't bother me, because she knows I'm working something out."

"It's a great mind-adjuster," said Mike Reynolds, cellist with the Boston-based Muir String Quartet.

"If I'm under a lot of stress," said Reynolds, who keeps a teepee in the back yard of his home in the Boston suburbs, "it really changes my state of mind."

You don't need to crawl into a teepee to feel the soothing effects of a night in the woods. But those who have spent time in teepees insist there is something special - even magical - about them.

"I won't go too far into the mystical side," said Mel Hoisington, owner of Blue Star Canvas in Missoula, Mont., "because people think you're crazy."

But Hoisington, who has sold teepees to people all over the world, did say that recent clients have included prisons and youth correctional camps in the Northwest and Canada, where inmates who spend time in teepees seem to have a lot better outlook.

"You just can't get too angry in a teepee," said Hoisington, who's watched business boom in the last four or five years.

Teepees seem to loosen people up, too. Roche tells of neighbors who drop by for a chat and end up telling their life stories. Their real estate agent once stopped by to say hello and began describing the birth of his first child, a story Roche felt would never have been told in his living room.

Encourages conversation

"They're very conducive to conversation," said Caprarelli.

Mystical or not, teepees, the traditional homes of Plains Indian tribes such as the Sioux and Cheyenne, are marvels of design.

They're warm in the winter, as long as the fire is fed, cool in the summer, and have an ingenious ventilation system that circulates air between the outside cover and an inner liner, making them pretty much smoke-free. Rain and snow can be kept out by adjusting the lapel-like flaps on either side of the smoke hole.

Teepees also have been known to withstand fearsome winds. Hoisington said wind tends to wrap around them and push them toward the ground, keeping them stable.

And you can pitch one just about anywhere. One Blue Star client has spent the better part of the past decade living in a teepee north of the Arctic Circle.

The Plains Indians favored these cone-like structures because they were easy to transport, and thus made it possible to track the vast herds of buffalo that once roamed the west. An adept teepee dweller can pitch an 18-footer (that's diameter) in about an hour, although Hoisington tells first-timers to set aside a day for tinkering.

But before you put your four-bedroom Cape on the market, you should know that teepee life has its drawbacks.

Mark Vinbury, a North Kingstown, R.I., woodworker, lived year round in a teepee in the early 1990s, but moved back to his home after contracting Lyme Disease and losing the war with dampness.

Blue Star teepees range in cost from around $1,900 for a 24-footer, to $768 for one 12 feet across, and that includes canvas, poles, carrying bag and instruction book. Children's sizes are available for less.

Several outlets on the Internet offer cheaper models. Mike Reynolds bought the pre-cut canvas cover for his teepee for about $500 at Reliable Tent and Canvas in Billings, Mont. He made his own poles from lodge-pole pine growing on property he owns in Montana.

Both Caprarelli and Roche cut their own poles, but cleaning them up is a chore. Once the branches are removed, the bark has to be stripped with a draw knife or it is apt to tear the canvas. Caprarelli said he spent about 100 hours prepping the 17 poles required to frame his teepee.

Or you can build a teepee from scratch as Roche did, using 8- or 10- ounce canvas, which runs about $300. Roche used a pattern from the Woodstock Manual, a 1960s publication which tells how to make sandals, tie-dyed shirts and all sorts of things.

Vinbury's teepee, ordered from Nomadics teepee in Bend, Ore., began to rot after a couple of years in rainy New England. But Hoisington claims with proper care, teepees can last a decade or more.

"I always tell people to treat them like their best cotton shirt. Don't put them away wet.

Serious teepee lovers, or those with money to burn, can order special decorations such as "visionary paintings." That, said Hoisington, is when a client discusses his or her feelings about the teepee with an Indian artist, who then translates that into a scene painted on the inside of the tent. But that takes months, he said, and is "very expensive."

Many Indian designs are sacred, though, and therefore off limits, said Hoisington. To commercialize such an image would be like "someone putting one of our religious symbols on the hood of a Ford."