Thatch
As a home builder of some decades, I am, due to my professional upbringing, guilty of some prejudice when it comes to certain building materials and methods. This is nothing more than the result of laziness on my part as no prejudice can survive in a mind enlightened by truth unless, of course, that mind is defective or so pathological as to be bigoted in some way.
Anyway...I always thought thatch was so dumb, and I don’t know why anymore because it’s actually rad and fascinating.
As long as humans have been building shelters, humans have been thatching. Thatching is simply the easiest and fastest way to create a composite roof. Unlike with the rather dull rectangles, squares, and triangles that (rightly) have dominated architecture since shortly after the dawn of time, early peoples assembled structures from whatever they could hack or salvage out of the surrounding environs and piling it up to create shelter where they could hunker down and feel safe. After, I am certain, much chagrin at the vexing occurrences of the roof blowing away, sliding to the ground, and/or collapsing, methods of fastening attachments were devised.....and that’s about it. Boom, thatch roofs.
Flying in the face of my belief that thatched roofs were rather a British thing, despite seeing it everywhere for 50 years and somehow missing it, it’s not. Everywhere in the world where people had access to the required building materials ie. wood that could be fashioned into a pitched roof structure, and grass or fronds of some sort, though if we’re talking fronds we have the danger of getting into shingle territory, and then you’re likely to get some 20th century British Thatcher up in arms about the preponderance of Welsh slate, and “how am I going to feed my family, and where are they going to get all the wood to hold that stuff up, it’s heavy, you know, and they use nails instead of just tying it on with hazelwood sticks like a good common man, and it’s cold, innit?, unlike thatch, which keeps the heat inside the house where it belongs”, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Speaking of heat, that cranky old thatcher does make a good point, as thatch insulates at about R26 per 10”, and if the average necessary layer of thatch is 18” or so, in the possible parlance of the times, that’s something like a ‘fist full of warms per elbow’, or ‘five full tankards to a shingler’s copper nail’, or whatever.
Speaking of heat some more, I always just assumed that thatch roofs would simply ignite at the touch of a single spark despite the obvious reality that, as I may have mentioned somewhere amongst my digressions, that they were the primary agent of shelter in a world lit only by fire. Humankind wouldn’t have gotten very far if their shelters reacted so unfavorably to the entity whose adoption put them so far ahead in the race towards faster and faster races away from the stronger races like chimps and gorillas who also had, and still do have, thumbs, but, thank goodness, can’t light fires.
The reason that thatch roofs don’t burn very well actually has a sibling reason, so there are two reasons-as I forge ahead in this ridiculous sentence instead of submitting to APA formatting (as if I could) and fixing it-and those reasons are that fibre doesn’t burn very well unless you throw it on top of another fire, and the other reason has it’s own little family known as the fire triangle, the quorum of which is heat, fuel, and oxygen. In my career as a fireman I learned that there is another element to this little family, chemical reaction, but the fire tetrahedron does not lend itself to the imagery I want to describe, so chemical reaction has, for my purposes here, been relegated to the existence of being the elephant in the triangular-shaped room. There is no burning fire lean-to, and there is no burning fire teepee, and, to get back to the point by referring to previous points, densely packed fibrous materials such as water reeds, which, interestingly, contain a such a high volume of silica that researchers are working to find a way to extract it for commercial uses, don’t burn very well on their own as they are not a large enough source of fuel to maintain heat, and when bound together into yelms and fastened into dense layers, denies the flow of vital oxygen. This all protects the elephant whom I have affectionately named Phlogiston.
I still wouldn’t build a thatch-roofed house in Kelowna or Lytton BC, but they are quite naturally fire resistant because, science.
I could go on, but I think I already have. I know I was supposed to submit 3 articles, but I believe there is enough information mixed in here to satisfy the requirements of the assignment. If you want bullet points, I can procure them, but it won’t be nearly as fun for me.
(Jonathan Parlee)
