A palapa is a thatched roof.  We have one rising in our back yard.  How it came to be is a little story.            

[We have pictures of the palapa, but they load very slowly. Click here to see pictures, or wait until you've read the story. 

When we were selling stuff at the flea market in Colorado Springs, I discovered the awning that you make out of plastic tarps and conduit.  You build a frame of conduit,  and pull the tarp(s) tight with bungee cords.  You can make the roof flat (for shade) or you can get a really big tarp and put a peak in the middle so that it will properly shed water or snow.

Most trailers nowadays come with an awning on the side that you can swing out when you park.  Our 1976 model didn’t have one of those, so I checked into getting one. $700!!  Wow, one-fifth the cost of the whole trailer!  So, I bought all of the basic stuff to make one after we got down here: welded corners into which you stick the conduit, 150 feet of light bungee cord, a grommet kit to put extra grommets in a locally purchased set of tarps.

We got the trailer in place and I watched the sun peg the Jack Daniels thermometer on the outside wall of the trailer, so I bought two 8x10 tarps, and started looking for conduit.  Oops – they use PVC pipe for electrical conduit down here.  So I got 130 feet of ½” diameter PVC and assembled a 10 x 16 awning for the front of the trailer.  The PVC pipe isn’t nearly stiff enuf so I got some rebar (cheap down here) and put it inside the PVC to stiffen it.  It worked, but the PVC bent under the tension, and the whole thing just looked cobbled together. 

We went out to visit “Tony’s Trailer out by the airport.”  Tony is a  Dutchman/Belgian/Oregonian who built a big awning over his whole trailer (instead of a little awning on the front like I had) and it really worked well.  He had conduit sticking up 20 feet in the air, completely covering the trailer and a nice space out in front for parties.  We had a party there, and I REALLY hated my wretched little awning.  I started plotting to get some conduit, but nobody in town stocked it or wanted to order it for me.

Then about a week after Tony packed up and left for Oregon to sell his house up there, there was a moderate blow (not really a big one) and it blew his awning to Smithereens!  The awning was over on the next property, and the conduit was all bent up.  My little awning survived, but every day, the trailer would get up to 100 inside, in spite of the fact that we’ve painted the roof with two coats of Snow White rubberized paint.  I started thinking about putting an air conditioner on the top of the trailer.  (This would probably cost three or four hundred dollars.) 

Then Trooper Ed put a little palapa up in his back yard.  It was just big enough to hold a hammock and a table, but it was nice, and COOL.  So Charlotte and I talked it over, and decided that we might be willing to spend six or seven hundred dollah for a palapa over the trailer.  Charlotte asked Ed’s palapa man, whose name is Salvatore, to come over and look at our trailer.  He arrived with his posthole digger & machete.  He looked at the trailer, and measured a little (with our measure) and nodded.  I wasn’t there, so Charlotte negotiated. 

  “How much?” she asked.

  “One thousand dollah?” he says.

  “Ooh!” says Charlotte.  “We only have 700 dollah.”

  “OK!” says Salvatore with a smile!!

  “When can you start?”

  “Now!”

So he starts digging, and in an hour, he has the four corner post holes dug.  He tells us that the next day, he will be out in the bush cutting poles. 

The next day, Ed goes looking for him and gets recruited into bringing poles over for our palapa. Ed has a little Dakota pickup, long enough but barely heavy enough to carry a load of poles, so they switched to hauling thatch.  The thatch is built with round palm fronds, each about 5 foot in diameter. They grow deep in the bush, and Salvatore knows where. He and an accomplice cut a couple of pickups full, and shortly we have two big six foot piles in the back yard.  Salvatore finishes digging the (eight) three foot deep holes for the support poles.  

The next day, Salvatore cuts until noon, and then we take the Scout to the bush.  With the back seat folded up, it’s a little pickup, and of course, it can haul a big load, so we used it for big poles.  Salvatore has me back it in, and he obviously believes that it is indestructible, so he doesn’t notice that I’m catching the right tail pipe on a pole as I’m backing.  It’s bent to the ground, and broken at the manifold.  We take a little break while I bend it up out of the way and hang it up there with (surprise) duct tape.  Then we resume hauling. Even though we tie them up with rope, some of the poles hang way out the back and drag on the road. We’re sneaking across town, hugging the side of the road, exhaust roaring, poles dragging, two of Salvatore’s boys (Daniel & Jeremiah) sitting inside, hanging on to the poles for dear life.  Two trips and I’m sure that everyone knows I’m building a palapa!  Then we make about six noisy trips with truckloads of thatch.  Altogether, we have cut and hauled  fifteen hundred palm fronds, and over a hundred poles.

The palapa is twenty-five feet long, and twenty feet wide.  The trailer (8’ x 22’) takes half, and the other half is a veranda which we will eventually pave with tiles. There are four corner posts, five inches in diameter, set three feet deep, so that the thatch starts about nine feet up.  There are four more intermediate support posts, four inches in diameter.  Salvatore builds a ladder out of poles and starts putting rafters on these supports. Some of the supports have a fork on top, and some get a fork made of five inch nails. No prebuilt trusses here; Salvatore dances along the rafters, building arches and then a lattice of lighter poles that will hold the fronds.  He nails, using an old (indestructible) Estwing steel-shafted hammer with either hand.  He lashes, using bailing wire, at all the critical junctures.  And then he starts placing fronds.

He brings his wife, and a couple of the kids to help.  Using a forked stick, they pass fronds up to him.  He inserts each frond in the fabric of the roof, splitting out a part of the middle of the frond and slipping it down on the cross poles of the lattice.  One after another, each frond split and inserted exactly the same, each layer covers the top of the layer below.  He does the west side first (the veranda) so that his workers can stand in the shade as they pass fronds up to him. 

It takes him (and his family) two days to finish the thatch.  Everyday, I fix lunch for the family, rice and beans and chicken, and they sit in the trailer and wolf it down, leaving nothing but empty plates and a few clean chicken bones.  I think maybe he will take Saturday off for church and work Sunday, but he works until sundown Saturday, explaining that their church service is in the evening.  He is exhausted and takes Sunday to rest. 

I survey the palapa, rising sixteen feet in our back yard, hiding the roof of the trailer. The thatch, bright green, is done, but not trimmed. I tell Charlotte I want an uneven edge along the bottom (I called it a “hairy thatch”) but Monday, using his machete (of course) he trims it pretty square.  From the outside it looks square, but on the inside it looks “hairy.”  I love it.

 Most of Salvatore’s jobs are small ones; a little palapa like Ed’s, or a patchup on the roof at the Bayview Lounge.  Our job is real big money for him, and he takes 200 dollah and pays the amnesty fee that will legalize his Guatemalan wife, illegal even tho she has borne nine Belizean children.  He is very grateful for the money.  When he comes to finish the job, he brings four exquisite orchid plants which have been living at his house, and he and Charlotte put them up in the palapa.  He brings me a set of horns on a piece of skull; smaller than a water buffalo, but what the heck.  He puts them up, high on a center post, and we both grin and shake hands. 

 Salvatore and his family live in a 20x20 pole house with a corrugated cardboard roof.  The roof is supposed to look like “zinc” – galvanized corrugated steel – but after a year in the rain, it begins to deteriorate.  His roof is several years old.

  “Why don’t you build yourself a palapa roof?” we ask, thinking about the shoemaker and his barefoot children.

  “No time,” Salvatore grins sheepishly, and shuffles a little.

We give him all the leftover nails and wire, and urge him to use them to put a decent roof on his hut.  He says he will.  We volunteer the truck and the scout to help him gather materials, but, ironically, he is getting more work because Ed’s palapa (on the north side) and ours (on the south side) are good advertising. 

 As the fronds dry, they shrink, and daylight appears at the corners.  The fronds are turning a golden brown, and the thatch looks beautiful in the setting sun.  But it might leak, and so, yesterday, Salvatore and his family show up to investigate, and to take us to see wildflowers. By flowers he meant orchids.  A mile south of us is the Ranchito Lagoon.  The road in looks pretty good to begin with but rapidly deteriorates to a dirt track. Our destination is a small mangrove-lined clearing at the edge of the lagoon. Salvador, his wife and three of the younger children lead the way through tall, tall trees filled with different kinds of orchids.  Salvador climbs up and, using his trusty machete, cuts down entire branches which bear orchids. His wife directs. As the orchids come down they are handed off to us to take back to the truck. Ants – Charlotte’s nemesis – cover the branches.  The family doesn’t notice. The children are barefoot, but they blithely walk through, suffering whatever lives there.  Some of the trees grow out of the water, so Salvatore jumps in, shoes and all, to get to the best orchids!

We’re all carrying orchids, and it doesn’t take long to fill most of the pickup bed.  We have a total of 17 orchids in our palapa and Mr. Ed has some for his. Placing the orchids is another production.  Salvador’s wife directs, and we hang them from the rafters and wire them to the support posts.  Bottom line: we brought the lagoon home to the palapa!

 However, daylight is still leaking into the palapa so Ed and Salvatore go to the bush and come back with a 100 more fronds.  Salvatore works his magic, stuffing fronds where I would have thought there was no room, and now the roof has a mottled look, cammy-colored, indescribable.  It is wilder and hairier, but it rained about an inch last night, and this morning, the area beneath the roof is bone dry.  To paraphrase the Nerds, “we have achieved thatch.”**  

 Sr. ric & Sra. Carlotta

** Later Explanation. In the very funny movie Revenge of the Nerds, the nerds rig up a periscope so that they can look into a girl's dressing room.  When it finally works, one of them says "We have achieved BUSH!"