Welcome 3 - Elanboat
As though you were on a wide, gently rocking sea, and the mist that formed from that cool and incoherent night had been touched – who knows where? – by the morning sun. Gray became golden, chill became warm, and shapes materialized out of the glow. “Ah, it’s the lighthouse!” “Then this must be the point…” Near the shore the pine boughs are threaded with cotton. The earth awakens and takes a breath, the breeze shreds that veil. Stones whose forms were outlines begin to reveal themselves as mottled, lichen-laced. As you drift slowly into the day, what is around you becomes clearer and clearer.
I am not on a wide, gently-rocking sea. But the face of my third child becomes clearer at the fuzzy edge of my imagination – trailing behind his mother whose every moment is quite tangibly and not so fuzzily filled with wriggling and kicking and stretching and sleeping Elan – as though I were drifting in his direction, and his features were gracefully emerging from the other side of visible. And while I am certain the bustle and noise of the world haven’t dimmed one decibel, the cotton-ball sense of later-term pregnancy makes me less aware of them. There is this little rolling body behind a slim wall of muscle and skin, turning and twisting and apparently responding to our touch and to our sounds. Science says Elan can see a warm redness through the fabric of my partner’s body, if or when he opens his very new eyes. I imagine the same light reaching him reflects back in our direction, and gives his energy form, his form features, his features some labels (child, boy, being, name), none of which are accurate, but are short-hand scribbles for who this person Was, Is, and one moment after another into the future, will Be.
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Little Being needs a boat. A land-bound shell that sails him to and from the island of dreams. I sat for a while and thought.
Metal contraptions and plastic Crap are distasteful enough to both of us, that considering those materials to hold this precious new Being – one who has placed so much trust in us (warranted or not) to have chosen us as stewards – is even less palatable. We decided to make a small investment in hand-woven cloth and, when we were exchanging a large hammock that had been given to us as a housewarming gift for our terrace, we also found a baby version, sized for smaller bodies. Yes, that felt right and the rest would follow: how and where to hang it, or (if location dictated) “where then how” would be the order; how to protect it against a future tide of poo (you can’t), or make it easy to take down and clean; how to add back support if we need to or he wants it…
Idea Number One: Hammock on bar, bar from ceiling.
The hammock has two loops at either end, used for tying to ropes whose far ends are tied to trees. Having a shortage of trees in our living room, and also lacking them in the bedroom, I looked for other ways to attach the ends. Some weeks back I found a light metal bar left out for recycling, and collected it for our community garden to run beans; as it was still at home, I looped the hammock rings over the end and used some rope to lash them (adjustably) in place. The lashing worked well – cinched up tight, the angle of force from the hammock compressed the knot and held it in place while, if the pressure were taken off, I could slide the ends toward or away from one another, creating a baby-bucket in the first instance, and a baby trampoline in the most extreme form of the second.
As a design bonus, the contents of the boat would have a perfect above-the-head hanging place for anything… a mobile, an Ojo de Dios of yarn and sticks, baubles at (or just beyond) fingers’ grasp, a hanging milk bottle. But metal? I didn’t like the coldness of it, as the central part of the bed construction, contrasting with the material of the hammock itself and with most of our household furnishings as well. What about materials that were not mined, but grown?
Wood is hard to come by here – and even if you do venture across town to the lumber store, on bicycle, it is comparatively expensive. Recalling my magical success scrounging materials for the standing desk, I considered waiting for construction site tow-away day, to see if rippable planks would magically or karmically appear, or better yet, wooden rods or dowels.
Between me and tow-away day, however, stood a trip to our community garden. We’ve recently emerged from the scathing summer heat – it clears the land just as effectively as my Minnesota winters’ ice, though the result is ash and dust instead of mud and tilth – so the garden plots have been prepared for the fall season. Stakes are up for favas and other runners… all of them made of bamboo. Aha!
A stack of unused poles was against the garden wall, and I found the cleanest, strongest one, a couple of inches in diameter. So light! Bamboo is a miraculous plant, fast-growing, apparently designed with construction in mind. I replaced the metal with bamboo, used the same knots, and found that the segmentation of the bamboo pole, in this case, made it easier to create “stops” along the way, where the ropes would catch and hold better. Splendid.
The last question was how and where to hang it? It would be wonderful to be able to move it around to many places in the house, but unless we sunk several dozen metal eyelets in the ceiling, we would probably be limited to just a couple of hanging places. Secondly, while the arched ceilings in these old buildings were built for extra support between walls, and were very strong, the last half-century has equated these arches with poor taste or poverty, and many buildings have false ceilings dropped to hide the sturdy brick and cement. What is that ceiling? Is it simple plaster? Will vertical bolts pull out easily? Do I need to create some sort of a climber’s system of pitons and ropes to avoid pulling the whole thing down on our heads (simultaneously sinking the little boat I am constructing, along with its little sailor)?
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Idea Number Two: not hanging it from the ceiling
Ideas are delicious for rumination, but when plaster dust starts to fill the mouth, chewing slows. I mentally set our little boat down on the firm, unmoving floor, and considered ways to lift it, instead of hang it. Bamboo… bamboo. I wasn’t sure where my gardening friends had found stakes, but I had a good guess: north of our house is the Rio Besòs, whose banks and waterway had been transformed from gutter to community space, around the time the Olympic Village was being built closer to town. Bamboo is hydrophilic. Along the Besòs it grows like the border on a giant’s sidewalk, tall, impenetrably dense, a gracefully bottomless fountain of green.
From home to the Bamboo Fields is a trip of some 30 to 45 minutes by bike, depending how beautiful the sunlight on the Mediterranean is that day, as most of the ride is along the shore. Life had intervened enough that I hadn’t made that harvest trip, but at the urging of an (imagined) collapsing ceiling, and the desire of guests from the States to be “involved in a project”, the ingredients came together for a lovely morning adventure. I would ride my bicycle, friends Paul and Lisa would take advantage of our urban bicycle passes, and we would see what we would see. Down to the water, north beside the beach and its partially- or completely-baking bathers, past the soccer fields with their bobbing and pulsing bodies, up and over the broad event plaza and the museum, through the park that slaps a green seaside patch on the city’s effluent plant, across the Besòs that physically and legally draws a boundary between Barcelona and Beyond, down the ramps to the flood plain and its bounty of green – so much green! – in this arid land.
I planned for six 6-foot poles, four for legs and two for a base, and we walked a few hundred feet along the trail, inspecting thickets. Some were more thickety than others and defied entry, more defiant still were lessons from my life in Brazil (“Snakes love bamboo thickets! Poisonous snakes!”: “Are there snakes along the Besòs?”), but after a few minutes we found a bunch that had already invited a light harvest: green shoots came up from the riverbank and shot up like fireworks, with the dried canes from previous years mostly within, a human-sized bay cut in from the side. We used the saw blades on our knives to quickly cut through the hollow grasses, taking four dry canes; we chose three green canes as well as contrast – beautiful color and texture, though considerably heavier in water-weight. Soon we had them trimmed to size and laid out on the grass, with the twigs and clutter cleared back into the brush. Beautiful! Now, how to bundle them?
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It is a fortune to travel in good company. While I shaved stems from the poles, Paul had been busy with the leaves from the green cuttings. Broad and eight to twelve inches in length, he had folded or split them and woven three at a time into a braid, feeding a new leaf alongside a woven one as he approached its end. In a few minutes’ work, we had bound the poles in roped made from their own leaves, and prepped them for travel.
Transport by bicycle. I had considered carrying the bundle under one arm, but that begged Some Trouble somewhere along the route: the bamboo wasn’t overly heavy, but unwieldy. I imagined coming down a slope with this battering ram, this jousting rod of bamboo aimed at an unsuspecting pedestrian or car.
I had intentionally brought a few items along with us, and together with the leftover cordage made from bamboo leaves, we had my Colombian muchila (a bag woven from high-Andean sheeps’ wool, with a long shoulder band, used to Carry Things), the long strand that held my bicycle keys, and my adjustable hiking belt. My 100% army surplus pants, complete with ankle ties and imperfect but functional waist cinches, would stay up long enough to get home.
After several experiments on the ground, and a couple tests on the bike, we arrived at a repeatably fine arrangement: up to a dozen poles can fit end-first in the muchila, the strap comfortable over my shoulder, the bamboo poised vertically along my spine and up over my head; the belt is just long enough to wrap around the bundle of poles, under my armpit, and around my chest. The control was surprisingly exquisite.
One–two–three… go: along the river, over the bridge, past the effluent plant (stop to take pictures), up and down the event plaza, along the beach, into the back allies, up Carrer de Maria Aguiló, left on Pujades, and home!
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Idea Number Two: continued
Well, that was fun. If you define fun as: challenging, empowering, creative, communal, successful. The next day I used a camping knife to easily shave off the dry leaves, and then used an old green kitchen scrubby to gently scrub the dirt and powder away from the canes. When traveling in Indonesia, my guides saw me handle bamboo (as I saw it for the first time, discounting storybooks and National Geographic articles), and insisted that I rub my hands in my hair. In my broken Bahasa Indonesia I understood that the powder was an irritant…. so here, I was careful to wash my hands well, though there was enough superstition on the island of Java that I may have been washing away evil spirits for all I know. Trust the native, until it is proven you have more complete information.
I was careful to bring my Rope Bag when came overseas. Who knows when you might need a good rope? Well I know: all the time. I should have brought a selection of ropes to the bamboo-hunting party, but I forgot. With the frame pieces at home, the ropes jumped out of the bag (as snakes love thickets?). Somehow, in all these years leading mountain hikes and paddling canoe expeditions and backpacking and what-not, I had never found the need to learn lashing: and here was the need! In the final accounting, our children bring us far more than we give them…
So I brought out my favorite knots book – the Handbook of Knots, by the perfectly-named-for-a-knot-master Des Pawson – and read up on the basic techniques for lashing one stick to another stick: square and diagonal lashing to create a solid structure, and a sheer lash to that tighten a-frame poles when spread apart, that can later fold together easily.
Hoping to minimize the floor space needed to float this boat, I considered the metal hammock frames I had seen in my youth: the prow and the stern angled up and away from the center, where the weight of the passenger applied forces down the length of the frame: perfect for bamboo, whose strength is longitudinal, and fragility is perpendicular to the shaft. If I added two floor pieces to attach the uprights, that would keep them steady in two directions. Something like this, but with straight bamboo poles:
The metal’s advantage is its tensile strength, one long bar that is welded and bent into shape, so that the residual force of the hammock – while small, the part that pulls the two ends toward one another – is unable to do just that, and the frame is stable. Where the uprights meet the ground, the bamboo has to be secured both horizontally and vertically, and while that can be done, I haven’t spent the time to figure out how that works with rope lashing; and metal, it has already been decided, is out. Once Elan outgrows his boat, it can sit in the rain for a few seasons and simply… disappear. Now there’s a light, vanishing footprint.
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Paul added ideas to the mix, and working and winding together, we came up with a fine crossed-leg structure that is quite strong. We already had the hammock strung along a pole, like the ceiling-hung option, but instead of ropes from above, we needed crooks below to lift it above the floor. Poles that can open and close relative to one another use sheer lashing, and one possibility was to build a tripod (imagine the First Nations’ cooking tripods, suspending pots above a fire), where two legs would be on the ground, and the third would be the long pole, extending to a second tripod at the far end. That might still be the final form, since it readily collapses into a long bundle; but each time you collapse or rebuild, you must untie or retie the legs, so I opted for a simple 2-pole lash, like a pair of scissors:
When the poles are spread apart they form the legs at one end of the hammock, and angle toward the floor so that the force travels along the poles. They need something to keep them in place up and down, however. We tried a few different combinations that gave most space for the hammock, but they weren’t very sturdy on their own. When we brought the opposite legs close to one another, though, they crossed in the middle, and holding them by hand it was clear this was a best design. We snugged them up tight using a square (or could be diagonal) lashing, and though the surface of the bamboo is smooth and slippery, the multiple wraps of the lashing, pulled tightly at each turn, hold the poles firmly against one another, preventing them from splaying out under weight:
The cool thing about this design – if you define “cool” as elegant, simplified and one-hand-washes-the-other – is that we no longer need to tie the hammock to the horizontal rod from which it hangs. Since the hammock can loop itself around its support outside the scissored legs, it will hold itself in place simply by the inward pull of the hammock, once occupied. Here is the hammock loop, resting lightly in its bamboo cradle; it can’t go anywhere but “in”, and slips off then end with no effort whatsoever when it needs to be removed (and rinsed in bleach):
The poles’ smoothness makes that top notch a little loose. When we put weight in the hammock, the bow and the stern of the boat did lean out a bit, hold in place only by the strength of the lashed legs, and the center rod slid one way and another. So I added a single, unobtrusive line along the length of the center pole. It does two things: it is adjustable with a slip knot (actually, a tarbuck knot or trucker’s hitch, that keeps a single line tight when under tension) that ties the bow-stern together so it can’t ride outward anymore; and with a little loop over the center pole, keeps it snug into the frame. Depending on the knot, you can release the whole thing with a single pull of a line. Here you can see how the hammock loop is held in place:
This is taking an awful lot longer to describe than it took to make. Tie something together. Is it strong? Hmm. Untie it, try something else. Ponder. Put the meditation zafu is as proxy for a baby-sailor. How does that look? Pretty good, pretty good! On the rug. Put it on the fake wooden floor and the legs flatten out like a cartoon donkey on ice. Hmm.
Let’s learn another trick. Construction with bamboo relies not only on side-by-side lengths of bamboo, but often places them perpendicular to one another as struts, or angled as supports. That wicker chair you bought from the imports store used horizontal pieces between the legs to keep them together. Builders will drill a small hole in one or both parts of a joint, threading a cord through and around the hole to protect it, while lashing the other piece in place. I imagined this would invite splitting in those long, long fibers… but if the masters do it, so can I.
Here’s an example of a drilled, supported joint. The builder made the hole on the opposite side of the strong bamboo joint, and lashed the cord above the joint so it wouldn’t slip downward:
I could lash a pole perpendicularly between the legs, to make a solid base for the boat. We had found in our tinker-toy play, however, that a narrow and more upright boat had the advantage of occupying less space, while a frame with a wider stance offered close-to-the-ground space for rocking the hammock. We want both! I think.
Since the force spreading the legs is always in one direction, we can use an adjustable length of rope, instead of a fixed length of bamboo. And while we wouldn’t have to use the drilled hole method, it helps keep the rope down at he bottom of the leg… and let’s us learn a new way of working with rope and wood. Here’s one leg tied and wrapped. We untie the other leg and pull cord through to narrow the stance, or let it out to widen it:
Well. It was fun to build and looks really cute. This is my version of a knitted sweater, I suppose, or booties, and helps me receive this son tangibly, visibly and warmly. When we finished, my assessment for Paul was: “It seems to take up a lot of floor space…”, to which he replied, “A lot more floor space than this is going to be occupied in a few weeks!” Besides, to have a child rocking in a little boat you yourself made – it’s one step on the way to living in a house I’ve built by hand.
Here’s the boat floating on a sea of rug before we’d trimmed the poles and lashed them together; and another picture after we’d added the fetters, spread for easy rocking. Next experiment will be to add a rope to the foot-pedal of the old sewing machine where Cata works, or I work, so we can treadle the little boy to sleep on his low-cost, high-enjoyment ship of dreams.
Postscript 1 -- I had chosen square lashing for the crossed legs to allow the prow and stern more flexibility: the boat could ride high in the water, or lengthen and ride low to the waves. It felt a little too flexible, however, and trying the diagonal lashing (which is designed for this × form) I found it was stronger and still flexible enough.
Postscript 2 – The empty boat was taking up a fair amount of slip space in the marina, so we’ve collapsed it until the captain arrives:
Removing the center rail, the two sheer lashes flip together with ease. For longer trips or more precise packing, untie the diagonal lashing, scissor the legs together, and bring it all together in a simple bundle for travel:
