Monday the excitement of finally having materials to make furniture for my house quickly gave way to frustration at how difficult it was. Now, bamboo is really cool stuff. It grows quickly in long, hollow, poles that can easily reach 20-30 feet in height. Poles can be as thin as your wrist or as thick as your calf. Every foot or so along a pole their's a solid wooden ring that prevents the hollow cylinders from collapsing in on themselves. Thus, each pole is naturally divided into little segments, separated by the wooden discs. Each segment is about half full of water, so if you're ever thirsty in the bush and tired of drinking coconuts, you can look for some bamboo instead. It's also surprisingly sturdy. One thin pole placed across two rocks can easily support the weight of several adults. You can also cut it to a point which is quite sharp, and bamboo cutting implements used to be used extensively in Vanuatu before the Europeans came over with metal. The problem with bamboo is that there's actually very little wood contained in a pole, as the walls are rarely more than a centimeter thick, so working with it can be a little tricky. For example, when cutting it with a bush knife, you have to be sure your knife is very sharp, and you have to use just the right amount of force; too little will produce no effect, but too much will mangle or even shatter the bamboo. It also doesn't respond very well to having nails put in it. If you're nailing close to one of the solid rings, you're usually OK, but try to put a nail in anywhere else and you will almost always split the wood. Thus, the ideal method of joining bamboo is to lash it together using rope made from the bark of a special plant which has the neat property of being soft and pliable when freshly cut, but hardening after a few days of drying. I'd asked Duncan if we could cut some along with the bamboo the previous Saturday, but he had told me that the nearest patch of it was a good half-hour's walk through the bush away, so we elected to pass. And so it was on Monday that I started work on my furniture equipped only with a small hacksaw, a bush knife, a hammer, a bag of nails, and a roll of twine. At first, I tried to eschew nailing and simply construct everything using twine lashings. However, the smooth surface of the bamboo didn't provide enough grip for the rope (and twine, unfortunately, does not dry and harden), and so the lashings had a tendency to loosen to the point of uselessness within a couple hours. Additionally, bamboo (especially freshly cut bamboo) is very fibrous and gummy and is not very amenable to sawing, and so by the end of the day I had broken two hacksaw blades and gone through a lot of twine and was absolutely nowhere.
Tuesday I changed tacks and went the nailing route. I'd already worked out that, as long as you nail near a disc, you can avoid splitting the bamboo, but this led to a whole new set of problems as I was now limited in the lengths of wood that I could use, as each piece I cut had to have a disc at both ends of it so it could be nailed. This actually proved to be more of an annoyance than a real issue, but I soon ran into another problem, which was eliminating degrees of freedom (ie. making sturdy, rigid, structures). You see, connecting two pieces of wood together with a nail creates a pin joint, meaning that the nail prevents the pieces from moving side-to-side relative to each other, but it does not prevent them from rotating. This means, for example, that if you nail together four pieces of wood to form a square, using one nail at each joint, you may think this to be a rigid structure, but it's actually not, as you can still rotate the sides in somewhat to form a rhombus. In fact, the only rigid structure you can make with pin joints is a triangle. Now, if you're working with timber, you can avoid this problem simply by putting two or more nails in at each joint (thus making it no longer a pin joint), but this doesn't work with bamboo because it can barely take even one nail, so two is out of the question. I set about trying to build a chair, trying to use a series of triangle structures to increase rigidity. Even this, however, wasn't really enough as the nails tended to wobble a bit in the bamboo, meaning that they weren't even effective at completely eliminating side-to-side motion. By Wednesday I had assembled a large bamboo monstrosity that sort of resembled a chair, and would support your weight, provided that you sat on it in just the right way and didn't move a muscle. The slightest shift and the whole thing would fall apart. Frustrated, I temporarily scrapped the chair project and started in on a bed. As I'd discovered with the chair, building the part that you actually sit or lay on is not really a problem, as you just take two long, parallel, pieces of bamboo and nail short cross pieces between them. The real problem is the legs. I was trying to use four upright thick bamboo poles as legs, but these had an unfortunate tendency to splay outwards whenever any sort of load was applied. Hoping to prevent this with the bed, I built the actual frame of the bed first and then attached the legs in such places where they could touch three or four other pieces of bamboo, thus providing lots of points at which I could nail them to the frame. This seemed to work pretty well, and the resulting bed was able to stand upright on its own without being carefully positioned in the just the right way first. As a final test, I stretched out on it. It creaked ominously, but it held. It was Friday morning, and I thought I'd finally done it: not exactly the kind of bed I'd want to be making out with someone on, but passable for sleeping nonetheless. Happy, I sat up. This, however, proved to be a bad idea, as one of the legs snapped out and dumped me on the floor. At the end of my rope, I removed the three other legs and decided to go with the much less elegant, but much sturdier, solution of simply supporting the frame on top of four cinder blocks. So, I'd spent the better part of a week and only had one piece of furniture, made only partly out of bamboo. Not really what I was shooting for.
Not to be deterred, however (and still having a lot of bamboo sitting in my kitchen, which I felt silly just letting decompose there), Saturday I started again. It was time for a paradigm shift. The board had fired most of upper management and brought in all new people. So far, I new how to build a sturdy frame, the only problem was somehow raising it off the ground. Obviously, legs just weren't going to cut it, I needed something more solid. In a sudden flashback to second grade and many hours spent at day care after school, I hit on the idea of using a sort of log cabin-ish construction to build a platform on which I could nail a frame (I spent a lot of time playing with the Lincoln Logs, you see). I started with parallel cross pieces, which rested on the floor. On top of these I nailed two parallel long pieces, and on top of these two more parallel cross pieces, etc. There turned out to be a number of advantages of using this system. First off, I didn't have to worry about cutting the bamboo to an exact length (like I needed to do for the legs), which made sawing a lot easier. Second, I didn't have to stack cinder blocks up to support pieces of my chair while I worked on it, as the log cabin arrangement was self-standing from the start. Finally, there was no danger of the legs slaying outwards and the multiple poles of bamboo nailed together right on top of each other had an effect similar to putting multiple nails into a joint, at last providing the solidity I need. The one downside was that it took an awful lot of bamboo to build up a structure of any height, and it wasn't long before I used up all my stock. I was, however, happy, to have finally mastered the art of making bamboo furniture and by Sunday morning I had a solid chair almost ready, lacking only some cross pieces to sit on, which I would need to wait and cut the following weekend. On top of everything, just as I was finishing, Duncan showed up to make sure I was still alive (I'd gotten kind of sick off of kava on Wednesday night, you see, and so since then I had not been going to the nakamal in the evenings, as I usually do, as even the smell of kava was making me nauseous) and, noting my mostly-finished chair, and some of the poles which I'd split while nailing, suggested that I cut some of the wooden rings out of a smaller piece of bamboo and slide them into the split sections, thus allowing them to maintain most of their strength, even when broken, further proving Duncan's talent for supplying very useful information almost, but not entirely, too late. This was the last piece of the puzzle that I needed, and I now felt myself to be a master of bamboomanship.
Duncan hadn't been able to procure any kava for that evening, so he, Calo, and I headed upo Norsup to drink there. On the way, I explained to them that I hadn't been to see them at the nakamal for the past few night because of my bad experience on Wednesday, which, coincidentally (I think), was a night when I'd gone to Lakatoro to drink with McKenzie. Duncan and Calo instantly picked up on this point, insisting that the kava in Lakatoro is unfit for human consumption (really, all kava is pretty much unfit for human consumption) and thus was bound to have made me sick. I thought about trying to explain the fact that I'd had plenty of kava in Lakatoro and felt fine, and that I thought it was more likely that'd I'd just had one shell too many, but I decided that this would be more effort than it was worth. Duncan went on to explain the various ways in which Lakatoro's kava was made incorrectly, shoddily, and without the necessary care and love for the work (his kava, of course, is perfectly safe and it's actually physically impossible to get sick drinking it, even if you down a whole bucketful). “And if someone offers you food at a nakamal in Lakatoro, don't eat it,” he continued. “What?” I said. That was a new one. “Because they can put something in your food.” He answered “And don't drink kava that someone buys for you, unless you see it being poured.” I wasn't entirely sure why he thought someone was trying to poison me, but I was a little freaked out. “Who would do that?” I asked. “People who use black magic.” Ah, of course, I should have known. I'm actually very interested in learning more about the various beliefs and traditions surrounding black magic in Vanuatu, so, like I always do when the subject is brought up, I tried asking more about it. The topic, however, remained an elusive one. Per usual, my questions were ignored or answered with long-winded monologues that said, essentially, nothing. I'm gonna get to the bottom of this one someday though.
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