feedback on UMBRELLA DOMES
A feedback on Crazy Mike Turcot's $6.00 Three-Hour Dome from across the Pacific in New Zealand.
July/August 1974
By Elinor and Emery Jones
A warm "hello" to MOTHER from across the Pacific in New Zealand. We're writing about Crazy Horse Mike Turcot's "$6.00, three-hour dome" featured in THE MOTHER EARTH NEWS, NO. 22. Mike and his co-conspiratorial Umbrella partners got us so fired up with enthusiasm that we decided to build a "down under" version of his brainchild. Now that our model is constructed—even though we didn't set aside the 81¢ for beer, and granting that we may have been pounding and sawing to a different drummer—we've christened our bubble "the $60.00, Three-day Dome". Of course, plastic and lumber are more expensive over here . . . and certainly never free!
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Mike's philosophy that a shelter should "respond to the whims of its makers" was readily endorsed by the Elinor and Emery branch of the Umbrella Conspiracy (that's us). We used 10/1,000-inch thickness of plastic, 6 feet wide (as opposed to Mike's 9-foot width) and dug our posts 18 inches down into the ground for more stability. Then we sticky-taped the laps because we wanted a more permanent structure that might last a couple of years or more. Instead of nails, El used fencing staples . . . first pushed through 1" X 1"square pieces of leather or thin wood before "nailing" the plastic to the umbrella ribs.
Our dome is every bit as successful as we'd hoped, arid we're having a fine ole time living in it. Rainproof, 24 feet in diameter and 12 feet high, the finished bubble has a smoke flap in the ceiling and a 12-inch, air-conditioning crosscurrent lift-up bottom flap around the lower edge (as Mike suggested). The top smoke flap is held down during windy days by a string or small clothesline-sized rope tied around a rock enveloped in one corner of the plastic flap—as in securing a tipi—and tied to a nearby tree. And—by the by—a substantial drainage ditch circling the bubble gives us cause for celebration when the heavy New Zealand rains start thundering down on us. For cooling in the summertime, we depend on the lush perimeter of trees surrounding our "moat".
