I got interested in gers about ten minutes before I first landed in Mongolia. As the plane descended to the Ulaanbaatar airport, I saw green hills dotted with white. The little dots were sheep - the big dots were gers.

Gers are circular houses, lived in by many Mongolians and by some other central Asians. They're portable, lightweight, spacious, well insulated and comfortable. While more people know the Russian word "yurt", many Mongolians prefer the word "ger".

The night before the hordes descended on our house, I was sketching ger designs and flipping channels. Just as I was thinking I wished I had more pictures of Mongolian gers, I flipped to Worlds Apart, a new show on National Geographic Channel. A family from St. Louis was living in a rural Mongolian village in their own ger. I took this as a sign.

As we began building the ger, it became clear we were dealing with different ger paradigms. Nate's paradigmatic ger was a model in a museum in Bishkek. The exhibit was designed to help persuade citizens that it was a good idea to move from primitive, hide-lashed tents into anonymous concrete apartment blocks.

We shared a lovely, colorful and comfortable ger. It was furnished with two beds, a TV, tables, a wardrobe, a vanity and a woodstove. The TV got a single channel, which largely showed a game show where senior officers competed to sing the lyrics of military ballads. I enjoyed my stay enough that I looked into bringing a ger back to the US, but was thwarted by shipping costs.

We compromised. Nate agreed to the purchase of heavy canvas for the roof and walls. (It wasn't much of a compromise, as I paid for the canvas.) I agreed to use non-dimensional lumber for the latticework and roof posts, though reserved the right to use 2x4's for the doorframe. And we agreed that sisal twine would look appropriately "organic" as our main fastener material.

Our friends sawed down several dozen black birch. We cut the trees to eight-foot lengths and drilled 1/8th inch holes every foot in the poles. Using narrow brass wire, sisal twine, pliers and the strength and patience of numerous friends, we managed to weave a couple dozen poles into a latticework.

But the amazing thing is that it's held together with string. Really thin, lightweight, easily broken string. But there's strength in numbers. The lattice is held together by at roughly 300 knots, spaced at one-foot intervals. (Should you decide to do this yourself, I strongly recommend NOT using sisal - while it's very pretty, it's hard to thread through the drill holes.)

Nate's vision for the roof involved lashing poles to the latticework and to a handcrafted central ring. The result was elegant, and for a brief shining moment, highly pitched. Unfortunately, when we stopped supporting it manually, it corkscrewed down to the point where it was nearly flat. After a good hour's worth of staring, and good advice from our friend Susan (who builds stage props for a living), Nate fixed the roof with two twelve foot poles that covered the entire diameter of the ger and supported the roof.

With the frame up, the roof and walls went up in less than five minutes. Add an additional ten minutes to put tarps on the ground and a layer of blankets on the tarp, and our ger goes up in about 20 minutes with two people.

After covering the floor with tarps, old blankets and quilts, it seemed like a good idea to fill the ger with people. Lots of people. Sitting on the floor, we fit about fifteen people in a space ten feet in diameter. But while it was easy to get folks to visit, I worried it might prove more difficult to get folks to stay the night.

Around dawn, I heard the sound of snow brushing against canvas. An hour or so later, there was a pyramid of snow a foot high on Allegra's sleeping bag - Amy was eating a handful of it, reading a book. When I woke again, it was eleven in the morning and the rest of my compatriots were still snoring. The miracle of the ger - it was the best sleep I got the whole weekend.

-Ethan Zuckerman, 1/8/2004