A Tale Of Neverland

Four months ago, I decided to build a big tent for Utahburn's Spring Arts Festival.

I was hoping to host a concert in the tent, so I wanted the tent to be big enough to hold a big stage plus five hundred people.

I spent a lot of time looking at the big tents that already exist. They come in two flavors - pole tents and frame tents. Pole tents have a row of tall poles down the middle, which get in the way. Frame tents have stiff beams and fancy joints to hold the tent up instead of poles. But they're still kind of boxy and ugly.

I wanted to design a new sort of tent that was less boxy and more beautiful.

I remembered the red whale stage that Hope designed for SynOrgy2004. It was sort of a tent, but open at one end. Instead of the stiff straight poles used in pole and frame tents, it had graceful circular arcs. The more I played with that design, the more I liked it.

The whale used PVC pipe for the ribs that held up the tarp. For a bigger tent, I needed longer, stronger poles. I decided that steel would be cheaper and more reliable than PVC.

I also looked around at all of the tarp fabrics that are available. I eventually decided that I'd use what all the other big tent makers use - vinyl truck-tarp fabric. I looked at several manufacturers, and picked the one with the most interesting colors: bright yellow, bright orange, and bright red - fire colors!

My first design looked like a Quonset hut. It was kind of ugly, and had lousy aerodynamics.

My second design added conical vestibules at each end. It looked more interesting, and had a lot less wind resistance. I picked a color pattern for the tarps, printed the design on paper, and folded it up into a scale model, so I could see what it looked like. I liked it!

I needed to order a lot of parts. It took a while. If I couldn't find what I wanted, I changed the design. The tent went through a lot of revisions.

The next step was to sew the tarp.

I was a little worried. Lots of companies offer big tarps for sale. But no one made a tarp as big as 60' x 60'. It turned out there was a good reason for that.

It's actually pretty hard to make a really big tarp. There's quite a lot of sewing involved. And every seam requires that all of the fabric be moved past the sewing machine. Moving a 500-pound tarp past the sewing machine, without tugging the part that's under the needle, is a major challenge. I could never have done it without the cleverness and never-say-die commitment of Mio, my tarp project manager, and Meggio, my master seamstress.

Here's Meggio, looking pleased to be resting.

Since they only weigh 100 pounds each, sewing the two vestibules was pretty easy. The hard part was getting the shapes of the fabric triangles exactly right.

We finished the sewing about three weeks before the festival. I was getting nervous that we'd run out of time. I hadn't even started fabricating the steel parts.

Fortunately, Chris Coleman stepped up to the plate. Chris has a nice metal shop where he makes his amazing sculptures. He agreed to help me make my 60' steel poles and my anchor plates.

The poles hold up the tarps and give the tent its shape.

The anchor plates have an equally important job, but it's not so obvious. They keep the tent from blowing away. In a high wind, the tent has a wind load of 20,000 pounds. The anchors hold the tent on the ground, so it can't fly away. This is especially helpful when it’s full of people.

Here are the end-eyes that hold the poles to the anchor plates. They're about to be welded into the ends of some 20' pipe sections.

It turns out that all of the steel parts weighed about 4000 pounds. And once again, we discovered that moving big heavy things around took a lot of time, and made it difficult to do the precise fiddly things we needed to do. We did quite a lot of welding, cutting, and drilling. But three of us finished the job in just two weeks.

I still had some last minute gluing to do. It took up most of the remaining week. Thursday, the day before the event started, we were still doing some last-minute fiddling. I didn't get to the festival site until 9:00 PM.

The band arrived with a truck full of sound gear at midnight.

We worked until 4:00 AM, assembling the anchor plates.

I still didn't know how we were going to finish the tent in time. We had a nice paper design, but none of the parts had ever been set up or even tested. There were hundreds of things that could go wrong. Even a few missing parts could have made it impossible to finish.

Friday morning, we laid out the pattern of the tent on the salt flats. Then we set the anchor plates in place and anchored them with tee-posts.

Paul volunteered to do the hardest job. We needed 26 wire ropes fitted to the ends of the vestibules. Each one had to be adjusted to the exact proper length while under tension. The tensioning was provided by brute human force.

We were still nowhere near done by sunset on Friday. The festival had started, and here we were working our butts off to finish a tent that probably wouldn't even work. Every time I thought my team wanted to quit and go party, they got a new inspiration. If they could keep working, I could do it too. We worked until midnight.

Saturday morning, things looked a little better. We’d had a little time off. We'd even gotten some sleep.

We laid out the poles and got them pinned into the anchor plates. Then we laid out the tarps.

Brad rounded up about fifty volunteers from all the neighboring camps. First, I gave them a quick orientation. Then we unrolled the tarps, anchored their edges, and connected them together with Quick-Links.

We'd done everything we could on the ground. Now was the moment of truth.

Most of the volunteers crawled under the roof tarp. While some held it up, others raised the first pole. Oops! We need some really tall ladders. They appeared. People got up on the ladders and started tugging on the pole, got it into position, and linked it into the roof tarp.

Then the second pole was up. Soon all eleven poles were up. Within half an hour, the tent went from flat on the ground to finished! That’s me in the foreground, looking elated.

It was an amazing time. The crew was thunder-struck at what they'd just done.

I was doubly amazed. I'd just been doubting that the tent would even work. And we'd made up the erection procedure on the spot.

Here's me and Chris (my steel angel), looking surprised and delighted.

Here’s what the tent looked like from the outside.

I spent the next few hours fiddling with the tent, adding a floor tarp, straightening the poles, tensioning the tarp straps, helping with the lighting, making the doors pretty, adding caution tape, and whatever.

Meanwhile, Brad had kicked into high gear. He had a tent. His crew brought in the stage and started unloading the sound gear onto it. About three hours later, everything was in place. It all got wired up. The mixing board got hooked up. They did a sound check. Everything was working!

Obviously, if you don't even know whether you'll have a room, let alone a stage and a sound system, it's pretty hard to book musicians. We would have liked to have the tent set up at least a week ahead of time. Then we could tell all our friends we were ready to rock, and they would have been prepared to play on our stage. As it was, we didn't know until the last possible minute that we had succeeded. So the tent and the sound system didn't get used to their full potential.

The most important thing that happened for us was that we proved to ourselves that we could do it. I’d never built a tent before. Brad had never set up a concert system before. The tent was awesome. The sound system worked beautifully. The band rocked.

Now we know that we can put on a music festival together anytime anywhere.

We also proved another important thing. A dedicated team that believes in what they're doing can move mountains.

We learned one more useful thing on Sunday morning. It was getting increasingly windy as day broke. According to the weather station at the festival site, the wind peaked at 65 mph at 11:30 AM.

I wasn't at the big tent when the peak winds hit. I was folding up the family tent. When the gust hit, two of my tent poles snapped. No big deal.

Then I went back to the big tent. It was starting to fail. One tent pole had partly collapsed. The pole next to it was starting to droop.

I called the team together. We needed to take the tent down immediately, before someone got hurt.

It took 15 minutes to move everything outside. Then we let the anchor straps go. The entire tent collapsed slowly and gracefully to the ground.

There was some damage.

I haven't started repairing the tent yet. But I know that it will fly again. The damage wasn't really that bad.

I learned some useful things from the collapse. I learned that the tent was almost strong enough, even on its maiden voyage, to withstand the 70 mph winds that I'd designed it for. I also learned how it failed. I now have plans to beef it up, so it can withstand even higher winds next time.

The whole experience was beyond belief. Almost a hundred people worked on the tent, and at least twenty worked their butts off.

It was a joy and a privilege to work with y’all. I can’t imagine anything more fun in the world than working on that big tent together. It still makes my heart pound to think about what went down.

My gratitude to the Utahburn community knows no bounds. You people are beautiful!

THE TENT …

is 50’ wide, 100’ long, and 14’ high in the middle

is anchored by 88 tee-posts and 50 anchor plates

is held up by eleven 60’-long steel poles

has 4000 square feet of interior floor space

weighs 5000 pounds

has surprisingly good acoustics