For 3 years he has been sleeping in a hammock on the patio of his house: the particular reason

Like three years ago, young Isaac Ortman woke up in his backyard. He grabbed his sleeping bag, got out of a hammock there, and went to his house to get ready for school. January 13 was the thousandth night he slept outdoors. Camping on the patio of his house, without a bed. On a hammock hanging, with a sleeping bag on cold days. Otherwise, outdoors.

Most of the 1,000 nights were spent alone, in a hammock strung between trees in the backyard of his parents’ home in Duluth’s Lakeside neighborhood. Some he spent outside the family cabin, others at his grandmother’s house. Others, with friends. Others, on a family vacation.

Ortman started this adventure when he was 11 years old. He was on April 17, 2020. He is now 14 and a freshman at Duluth East High School.

It was the height of the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic when his initiative began, and camping alone outdoors was good social distancing.

“We were in our cabin and I had slept out five nights and I thought, Hey, I can break my record seven nights in a row sleeping outdoors, so I continued when we got home,” says Ortman. “And I just didn’t stop from there.”

When he turned 12 on May 13, 2020, Ortman decided to go all in and see how many days he could sleep outdoors.. Nothing stopped him. Not a bear in the yard, not rainy summer nights, not freezing winter nights.

“At that point, after about 30 days, I told him he had only one decision to make: keep going or stop,” said Andrew Ortman, the boy’s father. “It’s easier for him, and I told him that he would get more support from people if he made one decision instead of 365 decisions every morning when he got up about whether to move forward.”

And that decision still stands. Ortman plans to continue the streak, possibly until he finishes high school. that is another three and a half years.

When people ask the obvious question, Ortman has a quick answer.

“I’m like, ‘Why not? It’s fun.'”

On the road for 1,000 nights, he slept on the deck of a trawler during a salmon fishing trip on Lake Michigan while the rest of the party were at home. He and his father found a campsite in the Wisconsin Dells while the rest of the family stayed at a water park hotel. There were sub-zero nights camping outside their hut, as well as mosquitoes and sweaty summer nights.

Once, during a family vacation, Ortman had to hide his hammock.

“The resort didn’t allow camping, but the guy at the front desk calmly told him where he could go in the woods, on public land where you could,” explains Melissa Ortman, Isaac’s mother.

Until now, Ortman has avoided adding any fundraising causes to his outdoor dream marathon. But you are thinking about it. taking advantage of what is probably a little celebrity attention to help a good cause.

Until then, she’ll continue to make sure her cell phone is charged every night when she brushes her teeth at home and heads to her hammock in the backyard. The hammock, stuffed with two or three sleeping bags, depending on how cold it is, was her bed for nearly a thousand nights. In the summer, she sometimes pitches a tent in the back yard “just to change things up,” she says. “I come and go in the summer.”

The hammock is waterproof and has withstood a half-metre snowfall. Beneath it are two padded “duvets” to insulate it, which are part of the integral system that suspends it one meter above the ground. When he enters the three sleeping bags, he is barely visible.

Ortman says he usually goes to bed in what he was wearing that day.

“If the temperature isn’t below freezing, I stick out a leg, because otherwise I get too hot,” he explains. “Actually, in the winter I prefer to sleep outside. There are no bugs. … It’s too hot in the summer.”