Trapezoid Monkey Biz For A Cool Tent
Or, how to shade a wall tent using free timber and an A-Frame design
By early August 2018, I’d slept in my tent-house for 61 days. With two winter months and the odd sub-zero degrees Celsius night behind me, I was ready to go easy on the propane heater and sleep without a ‘lasagna’ of blankets and multiple layers of underwear.
Spring was on its way and the days were warming up, heating the interior of the tent to temperatures around 30 degrees Celsius. The time had arrived to erect a shade sail above the tent.
The shade sail was, more accurately, a salvaged not-too-garish blue-stripe pool net with rugged stitching and industrial-strength grommets. All I had to do was cut down 12 or so poplar trees to build two timber A-frames to support a 25-foot-long poplar ridgepole.
I was doing this single-handedly so bracing the A-frames to the poplar trunks staked prostrate around the tent (serving as retaining walls for the tent’s earthen base/platform/deck) was my plan.
Two lateral poplar lengths suspended between the two A-frames would serve to anchor and stretch the shade sail so that it hung taut at least two feet above the tent roof. I figured nylon twine would suffice for rigging.
Discovering the Magic of Triangles
My yellow bow saw and I set out early for the poplar forest to cut down a dozen 30-foot young’uns (about five inches in diameter at the base and tapering to around three inches at a suitable length).
I used a machete to strip the trunks of branches and dragged the ‘structural lumber’ the short distance back to the tent. All told, a sweaty business, but the harvest was complete by lunchtime.
The two A-frames were given a ‘footprint’ of 13-foot and an ‘apex’ 9-foot high: essentially, two isosceles triangles with a poplar cross-brace two feet below each apex from which to suspend the lateral rigging struts (and add rigidity to the shade sail support structure). And, for the front A-frame, two short lengths of poplar screwed to the adjacent platform poles.
The A-frame at the rear of the tent-house (behind the wet room) was braced using a thick length of poplar, screwed at two points to an adjacent old tree sporting two trunks and at two points on the A-frame. This arrangement gave the shade sail support structure the necessary ‘deep anchor’ to withstand strong winds.
Using a cordless drill, I countersunk four-inch wood screws at all the joins. I raised the A-frames first using the aforementioned bracing, followed by the lateral rigging poles. Getting the ridgepole up to the apex of each A-frame required a spot of aerial acrobatics using a ladder and the A-frames’ cross-bracing as a second pair of arms. A length of rope helped lift the ridgepole into place where it was screwed into place.
A Shady Net for a Troupe of Monkeys
Then came the task of getting the shade sail up and over the ridgepole. Once again, the ladder and rope trick helped to get me high enough to anchor and unfurl the sail from the ‘fore’ end of the ridgepole (where it was secured with galvanized wire) to the ‘aft’ end above the wet room.
Green nylon rigging weaved its way through the grommets (20 of them) and around the lateral poles, pulled taught by gloved hands at a height of around seven feet.
And there it was, an odd-shaped trapeze net for a family of high-flying Vervet monkeys that, to this day, find the roof of my tent delightfully bouncy. The younger Vervets descend from the treetops in search of food and fun, landing on the shade sail with a light thud as it hits the canvas and catapults them back into the trees.
This form of home invasion, however innocent, never fails to get me outside my tent in a mild rage, clapping and barking and feeling like an idiot as my attempts to shoo them away result in nothing more than amused stares from the little devils.
Humans fascinate Vervet monkeys, obviously. The attraction is all about food and has nothing to do with some primal DNA-sharing cockamamie. My opinion, only.
“Don’t feed the monkeys,” shout the naturalists, so I don’t. However, my compliance with primate protocol didn’t spare me a heart-stopping moment one sunny afternoon when my cell phone ended up in the mouth of a hungry monkey, perched on a branch way up high in a tall syringa tree.
That’s a story I’ll relate in a forthcoming post, tentatively titled, ‘How to get WiFi when there’s seemingly No Signal’.
More Porch Please!
But back to the poplar grove, which saw more of me shortly after I’d hoisted the shade sail and transformed my tent-house from a ‘squatter camp’ into a ‘formal settlement’ (as Bazza poetically put it). If my visitors and I were to enjoy bonfires and outdoor cooking on level ground, my modest porch needed extending, amounting to more poplar trunks, soil, rebar stakes, and gravel.
A 12 x 10-foot ‘deck’ requiring three lengths of poplar – easy enough. I had extra rebar stakes from phase-1 of the tent-house build, Colonel K’s excavator had piled up soil on the borders of the site, ready to fill the poplar porch frame. A heap of gravel lay nearby, authorized to be ‘leveled’ by me, a spade, and Bazza’s wheelbarrow (thank you, Col. K!).
My brother, Brett, was arriving for a final visit before he emigrated to Australia. I wanted the new porch ready to rock for our farewell bash so I got to it with gusto. An estimated 20 barrow loads of soil and gravel filled the porch frame. I used to a tamper bar to compact the soil before packing in the gravel topping.
A trio of logs (rolled in place after Col. K’s man dragged them in behind the old Massey Fergusson tractor) and a freshly transplanted clump of pampas grass set the stage for a righteous jam.
Brett arrived late afternoon and set up quarters in Betsy the Syncro Bus. I lit a bonfire and poured a couple of drinks. While Brett strummed a few of our favorites, I captured the scene on camera. And indeed it was good!
‘Contrition Track’: Rain on Canvas (cos I didn’t post last week)
When the first thundershower struck after the shade sail went up, I recorded the sound of raindrops falling through the netting onto the canvas roof of the tent. Beautifully soothing…and a damn side better than a bouncing monkey!
