by Ed Stafford
My first effort produced two and a half rows of thatching. Although the expanse still to be filled looked bigger than ever the rows looked professional and tidy.
‘What a difference a day makes.’ I stood back and admired the new thatch. ‘Yesterday when it was blowing a hooley I was feeling quite alone and vulnerable. And when the sun didn’t come out this morning it took me a long time to pick myself up. I had to really actively work at jollying myself along, I started singing songs out loud to raise my morale.’ I paused to savour the scent of victory that had altered my mood for the better. ‘Then I got better at the plaiting and the last few ones were really good. Tied on to the house and they look fantastic!’
At first it really did feel as if this simplest of achievements had lifted me once more. ‘Not a bad day. This thatching is not going to leak,’ I boasted. Then I realised that this was more than just satisfaction at my own handicraft. I’d lifted myself before I’d finished the task. At the time when I would normally have been getting stressed about the time I was taking and beating myself up, I had dragged myself up by the bootlaces and changed my mood for the better by singing. This childishly simple ability to jolly myself along shouldn’t warrant the credit that I’m giving it but in this case it was significant, because it was an indication that I was beginning to have more control but also because I was being kind to myself. Before I would have seen singing as an irrelevant waste of time that wouldn’t achieve anything. Now I was recognising my own need to be happy. I had started to look after myself.
My end-of-week-three exercises were conducted in the morning on a shaded beach with the tide almost too high to run my route to the rock. Salty foam licked my heels as I panted towards the camera.
‘Not bad – although I felt weak on the shoulder press,’ I droned. I managed sixteen chin-ups in Lemon Camp, however. ‘Sixteen! Yeeesss!’ and was elated to find my strength actually increasing. I put it down to the crabs that I’d been eating.
Clearly I didn’t need to get stronger – I had the physical ability to do everything that was necessary on the island. But the improvement did wonders for my morale. It was proof that I wasn’t degrading. It was proof that I was moving beyond survival and into the territory of a sustainable existence.
Pad – pad – pad. Buff! I bounced down the rocks and landed softly in the sand on two bare feet. There were fresh crab hills on the beach and I ran to see if any of the occupants were at home.
After a two-crab breakfast I did another hour of wood collecting. It was an hour that I wanted to spend in construction, and predictably – despite the inherently relaxing nature of this simple task – I stressed.
To complete the previous day’s health tests, I measured my resting heart rate and got an average of sixty. ‘Bollocks! It’s getting higher! That’s not actually that comforting.’
Then, before work, I had monumental diarrhoea that could have been easily passed through the eye of a needle. The brown puddles on the beach were bigger than cow-pats. ‘Is it too much sun?’ No – it had been raining. ‘Is it food poisoning?’ I didn’t think so as I’d not vomited. ‘Is my water contaminated?’ Only if the bottles were dirty, I postulated. Either way, I needed to up my intake of water to avoid severe dehydration.
Collecting palm leaves is the most boring of preparatory jobs. It offers little satisfaction and yet you just can’t skip it. If I’d been in a village on an island, I would have paid some kids to do this dullest of tasks and then I would have sat in my house doing the far more rewarding work of thatching. But in my primordial world I had no such options. I had to be everyone, from architect to labourer’s mate. So I collected and plaited palm leaves. It’s not that hard to chop down a palm frond with a machete with a half-decent edge on it. The fronds are fairly pulpy and the blade slips through the stalks as if they were soft fruit. With a broken clamshell in my hand it was altogether tougher. The soft stems actually have sharp edges and when your knuckles hit these edges as often as the clamshell, it becomes about as enjoyable as hammering in nails wearing a blindfold. I would tension and hang off the fronds to increase their likelihood of splitting cleanly and then I would twist, snap and smash the remaining fibres until the palm frond was free. Usually there was a pinkish tint to the exposed palm flesh caused by my blood. Once down, the palm leaves would have to be dragged out on to the beach, stacked up and dragged back to the shelter with about four under each arm.
Once back at my building site I would collapse in exhaustion. There was no satisfaction in the collection – I could not stand back and admire my work – I’d simply brought the raw materials to the workshop and the crafting now had to begin.
At lunch I made a soup of crabs that I had caught the day before. They smelled a bit and, as I had had the runs all day, I reminded myself to eat everything that I caught that same day.
By day three of thatching the weight of the magnificent-looking roof was already significant. The problem now was that the ridge pole bowed noticeably and I saw it wouldn’t support the weight of the remaining thatch. I needed a much fatter Y-pole to support the weight and prop up the sagging ridge pole.
At the end of a hard day’s work I had nothing for supper. Heavy-legged, I wandered round the coast in the evening glow and apathetically looked for snails and crabs. There is a state you can reach where energy levels hit a certain low and then you can’t be bothered. I would prefer to sit by the fire and conserve energy than go out on the hunt for food. This apparent laziness is, I am sure, a valid way of conserving energy but it’s not good for morale to sit and not do anything, so drag myself out I did.
A larger crab with a solid exoskeleton withdrew into a crack in a rock. It wasn’t the usual sand crab that you could bite through and swallow in one. It was a proper crab – a tough little number – and so I put down my Cinesaddle and camera and went to look for a stabber stick. ‘Dead or alive, you’re coming with me,’ I told the crab, quoting from RoboCop. After quite a bit of stabbing it ended up being levered out of the small crack pretty dead.
My feet were taking a pounding, despite my all-terrain flip-flops. They were tired and bruised and still covered in sores. They ached, too, as if I’d been jumping up and down in a field of nails and scrap iron.
I estimated that I’d eaten 600 calories in the whole day and I was having to battle with self-pity at my situation. Minor illness had clearly dampened my mood and sapped my energies. I clasped my open palm over my face and rubbed my smoke-irritated eyes. Bugger me, this was hard. Still, only thirty-eight days to go. My God, I really doubted that I could make it.
Firewood was taking longer and longer to collect. By now I’d had a fire burning constantly for about ten days and every scrap of decent dry wood in my immediate vicinity was gone. To combat this I made a point of always trying to bring a large piece of standing deadwood with me if I was out in the island’s interior, or driftwood if I’d returned via the coast. The hand-to-mouth existence was unsettling – I yearned for a gas cylinder and a reliable hob. It was like bailing out a sinking ship – even when you had bucketed like mad and emptied the hull, you knew that you would have to do it again very soon and that there was no opting out.
The lack of opportunity to be lazy had now begun to annoy me. I wanted a day off. I wanted just to eat and recuperate. But the truth was, if I wasn’t collecting water or looking for food or firewood then I would not eat or drink and I’d lose my most precious fire. I couldn’t afford to let that happen. Even if I took a day off from thatching I would just feel guilty that I was being idle and so there was no genuine relaxation. Interestingly, the times that began to be the most relaxing were the repetitive tasks that gave me a sense of satisfaction. I may still have been working but they allowed my mind to calm, and there was no quibbling with the results. I was being productive.
My one opportunity to add some form of variety to my diet was to be extra alert while out catching crabs and snails in case I stumbled
across a rare, unusual treat. ‘Stop biting me!’ I complained as my latest catch had swung its head back and clamped its teeth into the flesh between my thumb and forefinger. Eventually, its head pummelled with a rock, it lay limp in my basket. Eels, it has to be said, put up a fight. I washed my hands in the sea and wondered, with no antiseptic, whether catching eels was worth the risk of infection.
By my calculations, using hand spans and guestimates, I was adding about fourteen inches to the thatch each day. Today was the fifth day of thatching and I now predicted that I would finish in nine days. These calculations came with the sense of resignation that this was only one side of the shelter – a basic lean-to and no more. I had to step in to beat the converging depression off with a large stick.
‘Unless you can have a thatch that is watertight, what’s the point? It’s got to be better than the cave, hasn’t it?’ I coached. ‘And with one person this is how long it takes.’
On the sixth day of thatching I did no thatching at all. It was dropbox day and was raining so I split the morning between trips to Lemon Camp and time in the cave. I collected some fresh lemon leaves and two and a half litres of water from the clamshells. But I wanted more.
I gave in to my desire for laziness and allocated the day solely to my own comfort. For consolidation. For relaxing. I contemplated burning the old coconut shells in place of firewood because of my concern about running out of wood but they burned too fast and hot and so I decided that I would revert to driftwood and just increase the distances I had to carry it. I collected loads more bottles and realised that potentially I could now have a huge reservoir of water.
Coming back down the steep slope into my camp I spotted two goats, a mother and a kid, in my shelter eating coconut. From twenty metres I looked on incredulously at the audacity of these stupid animals and realised that my frustration was at myself. ‘Why haven’t I got a means of killing these goats yet? It’s just madness.’ It was more than three weeks in and I hadn’t even fashioned a basic club. ‘I’ve got to get some tools to kill goats.’
I felt so much better for giving myself the time to consolidate. In a good place mentally in the cave, I contemplated baiting a spiked deadfall trap with coconut to kill the goats.
For lunch I had my snails and taro root staple supplemented with a fairly big hermit crab. The abdomen of the hermits was full of fats and delicious. I still wasn’t sure whether that bit was actually edible or whether it was waste but as it tasted bizarrely fantastic and greasy I ate it all.
I now had six litres of water above and beyond my emergency seven litres and, thanks to the preceding day’s foraging, I had a further sixteen litres of bottles to fill. I wove my roofing tiles in the comfort and dryness of the cave and then ventured out in the afternoon to attach them to my new home.
I stood back and surveyed the lean-to. The thatch was above head height and I decided that, with a good day’s thatching tomorrow, it would be ready to move into. I hadn’t gone quite as high as I’d planned but I was bored with thatching and one more day would have to do.
It was the highest of high tides – and no beach meant no beach crabs. The feeder fire was smouldering and I pushed together the logs to reignite the flames. One long blow. Easy. Snails and taro root again for supper – a great day and a good amount of work done.
The tide was the highest I’d yet seen. There was no beach under the cave and the sea cleaned my doorstep of piss and palm scraps.
‘Last night in the cave,’ I reflected. ‘Am I going to miss it? Am I fuck.’ It felt good to swear. It felt like a deliberately edgy form of expression in a tortuously muted bland bubble. In truth, the cave had been amazing for me and I’d felt safe even in the strongest of tropical storms. My outburst might have been directed at anything. That said, I think the cave did now represent how long everything was taking; it was time to remove my training nappies and step out into the real world where I would provide my own protection. Bored with the walls around me, too, I also wanted a simple change of scenery.
Having noted on day four of thatching that my Y-pole brace was too feeble, it was now a fairly immediate concern. The weight of the thatch was already colossal. To understand how thick it was you have to appreciate the basics of thatching. Thatching isn’t like using roofing tiles for one simple reason: the materials are not waterproof. So, rather than putting something impermeable on your roof you are putting something vaguely weatherproof on it. This imperfection is factored in and you acknowledge that each layer of thatch will deflect only a bit more of the water. To construct a watertight thatch from coconut palms the thatch had to be layered so that it was about a foot thick. The result looked bomb-proof and yet, despite the meticulous construction, the whole lot would collapse if I didn’t prop up the sagging ridge pole with a stout brace.
Yesterday I had attempted to cut down a fat Y-pole brace but the difficulty of chopping such a tree down with a clamshell had meant that it was a job that had to take two days so as to ease the physical exertion. There was no point in doing any more thatching until I had braced the whole roof and so I set off up the hillside to finish the job I’d started.
The ‘huge’ tree had a trunk between four and five inches in diameter. It was a relatively hard wood and I inspected my previous efforts. The tree was already well ringed but required further ‘nibbling’ with the clamshell hand axe to get it to the point where it would snap.
Tired by the mere thought of the task, I sank to my knees next to the tree to save energy and so as to be at the right height to work. I hugged the tree with my left arm for stability and swung my forearm like the handle of an axe with the axe head being the clamshell fragment.
I felt I was becoming work-shy by using the excuse that energy conservation was key. But that wasn’t conducive to getting things done and so, rather than conserving energy and resting more, I had to tell myself that working hard was great exercise and that I needed to stay fit, so that every tree felled, every bundle of firewood collected, had the positive side effect of keeping me in good physical condition. This also helped me deal with the worries of wasting too much energy. I was killing two birds with one stone.
Here at my chosen tree I was alternating between nibbling away at the tree on my knees, hugging it for support and weakening the shaft, and trying to snap it. The latter demanded monumental thrusts to the trunk from the shoulder with my body in a horizontal scrummaging position. The thrusting in fact came from my legs and, for the most part, the tree did not even notice my efforts.
But plug away at the cycle I did until one thrust produced a faint crack and then a snapping in the internal fibres of the trunk. Then, gradually, with every scrap of my strength, I amplified these noises until the splitting sound tore through the forest.
Big tree down. ‘Yes – thank you.’ I expressed my appreciation to whatever forces were responsible for deciding that I’d put in enough effort and the tree should now fall. Thank goodness, indeed.
I snapped off the tree’s branches and hauled it down the hillside fat end first. Above my shelter I then launched it through the air over the last ten metres of very steep ground to watch it come to rest just inches from the precious thatch. In one thoughtless throw I had nearly taken out my shelter. ‘Think it through next time, Stafford!’ Tiredness and not thinking could have undone days of hard work in seconds.
Then, as if ignoring the lesson I had just learned, I decided to throw down some firewood, too, and forgot about the taro plants that were planted near the shelter. Both suffered broken stems as a direct result of my clumsiness and so I had to splint them with sticks and some very thin vine. Once supported they stood up again OK but it remained to be seen if they would survive. ‘Slow down,’ I told myself, rubbing my sweaty forehead with my dirty fingers.
Having used my coconut pole to make the ridge pole of my shelter, and having drunk the contents of all the fruits from the conveniently fallen coconut tree, I had
to admit that I now needed to make coconut pole mark three. Even though my frustration at using the second, heavy pole was etched on my mind as one of the most desperate times on the island, it had forced me to re-evaluate and evolve my tools. Clearly my next pole couldn’t be so heavy – if anything it needed to be longer – and the two requirements seemed contradictory. On examining the longest of the smooth, sun-dried boat poles I’d scavenged from the high-water line I found that one was long enough and yet light enough to work. But being a boating pole, it had no natural ‘Y’ on it with which to thrust upwards into the coconuts. ‘No problem,’ I decided. I could just lash one on with beach hibiscus.
That is when I had my epiphany. If I was tying on a Y-shaped section of wood, why not attach it upside down? A hook would be many times more efficient as I could just place it over the stem of the coconut and tug down rather than jerking up. It was one of those ideas you have that you know will work the moment you think of it. Once I’d lashed on the sturdy hook I found that the pole was so light and versatile that I could even climb small trees to a height of about three metres and use the pole in the air! This opened up the potential for a vast coconut mountain, and collection became fun rather than a frustrating and exhausting chore. I felt as if I could just reach up and casually pick the coconuts that I wanted as if from the top shelf of a pantry. ‘That’s what I call evolution!’ I grinned, as proud as a child who’s just ridden without stabilisers on his bicycle for the first time.
I slotted my mammoth Y-pole into place and even banged in a stake at its foot to ensure that it didn’t move. The result was reassuringly solid and I had no doubt that the structure was now inherently strong enough to support the weight of the thatch. The rest of the morning was spent plaiting and tying on more palm leaves.