Chasing carpentry and mortality in infinite courtyards.
Article by Will Garrett Art by Max Montague
Today I met a carpenter from my neighborhood who only builds with wood from his homegrown trees, their roots entangled over one another like a lattice crust on an apple pie. They continue building under the earth in his circular courtyard.
In the springtime, you can see the tips of cherry blossoms peaking out above the walls of his house. From down the street, their flowers look like clumps of pink-spotted cotton balls. I asked if I could see them up close.
He led me to the courtyard and onto a dirt path with four spiraling quadrants, a labyrinth of plant life. Traveling along one of the lower quadrants, we passed through rows of giant cacti and desert junipers. A gecko was climbing downwards on the trunk of a juniper. The gecko must have been shy because he scurried around to the other side as we approached. Shuffling sideways, I tried to spot him, when I realized that the carpenter was nowhere to be seen.
“Hello?” I realized I didn’t know his name. “Carpenter, sir?”
He emerged from behind a boulder far down the path.
“Hurry,” he said, waving me over. “I don’t have much time. My red cedar tree is dying.”
We breezed through his desert, zigzagging along sagebrush and shrubs with branches that sagged to the sand.
The sun barely reached us, but sweat still gathered on my shoulders.
We reached a light jog as the shrubs of sage grew sparse, leading into spring colors of witch alders and tart blackberries. I was tempted to stop, but I didn’t want to lose the carpenter again. I hesitated and then jogged past a patch of dandelions, their thin stalks swaying.
The carpenter was pointing in many different directions. First at a field of poppies, then at a valley oak with bulging green acorns. It seemed as if the more things he spotted, the faster he ran. I began to worry that I was going to forget all the different species of plants that I was seeing.
Poplars, daphnes, sugar cane, bamboo, rose bushes. I could barely keep the carpenter in sight. Suddenly, we emerged into a clearing amidst a circle of Douglas-firs. In the center were two cherry blossom trees. Their graying wood was tangled with moss that flaked off the undersides of their arms. The cherry blossoms were a duet, a pair of dancers, keeping each other stable as one tilted backward and let its arm lie loosely outward at a high angle. The second tree stood straight, holding up the sloped waist of the other trunk with its inside branch, the outside branch in a triumphant pose. White petals with pink filaments covered their arms.
I wondered how the blossoms were blooming, as it was January. The carpenter told me that the blossoms were transplanted from Japan last week. I watched a petal fall from the face of the tilted dancer.
I asked if all of the plant species were transplanted. Begrudgingly, he answered yes, that they would all probably die in a year due to the foreign conditions. However, the carpenter was sure that the deaths of all of his trees would not be put to waste.
I knew that the carpenter was anxious to attend to his dying cedar, so I let him know that I was ready to move along, on the condition that he showed me how he salvaged the trees in their afterlife. He nodded and took me down a fire road. We quickly arrived at the edge of his courtyard, at the deck below his kitchen. As we walked up the stairs, I gripped the railing. It was smooth to the touch. I was surprised to find that no matter how tightly I held it, there was no resistance. I could keep walking up the stairs at the same pace. My grip didn’t hold me back. It was as if the railing was covered in oil, but without the residue.
The carpenter was across the deck when I ascended the stairs. I saw him pointing first at the wooden planks under his feet, then the railing, the underside of his bedroom balcony, and the walls. I gasped. All of the wood was opaque, a light brown that showed no sign of knots or grains, containing no texture or depth in its appearance. I touched it and it felt warm, freshly cut.
From the other side of the deck, the carpenter said that it was inflammable. He lit a match and let the flame touch the wood’s surface. The flame crawled up three stories and into the sky.
When I looked back, the carpenter was next to me, saying that the wood could withstand a hundred thousand rains and never rot. That it was made from the trees in the courtyard, transplanted from every corner of the globe. That its use is eternal.
He said that if I looked closely, I could see a pattern. With my nose just inches away from the wall next to the kitchen door, I stared into a line of a hundred planets forming an eclipse.
He observed my wonder and asked what I saw. I told him that the universe was blocking its suns. Shaking his head, he disagreed, saying that I envisioned the wall incorrectly and that its pattern was actually a pinwheel of colors splattered on the cars of a moving ferris wheel, each receiving the sun at the apex of their orbit.
He said that to recognize the pattern requires absolute awareness, something which concurrently applies to the construction of his walls. The carpenter was an acute listener. He knew when his trees had only minutes to live, which is when he would deliver the final stroke. His trees would then be reduced to a fine sawdust and mixed together for weeks in a blend of a hundred species. Once a homogenous blend, the sawdust would be plastered onto the vinyl walls of his house. Every year, a new layer.
The carpenter told me to stand still as he went to check on his dying red cedar. Motionless on the deck, I watched him disappear into a grove of redwoods with orange spots on their bark, their ridges dried out and dying.
I remembered the two cherry blossoms, holding out against the foreign sky with their final motion of dance. They too would come to an end, unfolding into the alchemists' stronghold of accruing dust.
Afraid of staying any longer, I left his house from the side gate.
…
For a couple of months, I had no memories other than highway intersections, lampposts, and elevators, until one day, I found myself away from the city, staggering toward a house at the foot of a mountain. Passing along its front lawn, I fell to the ground in exhaustion, just short of the welcome mat, which was woven with sweetgrass and hickory.
I was awoken by a tall man, the sun behind his head as he looked down at me. He had curly long hair that grazed the top of his glasses. Offering a hand, he helped me up and introduced himself as Joseph. Without passing any judgment on my trespassing, he welcomed me inside.
Joseph’s house was thinner on the inside than the other carpenter’s. He led me from the foyer to the kitchen in three steps, an entrance as narrow as a bedroom, yet its halls seemed to stretch endlessly sideways. Opening the fridge, he offered to bring out some focaccia bread. Despite my hunger, I declined the offer, as I was distracted by what looked like a grove of giant trees that towered over the horizon of his backyard. Joseph caught my gaze and proclaimed that I was looking at a forest of red cedars, the first of them planted by his great-great-grandfather.
Approaching the window, my peripheral view expanded, and I noticed a wall that lined the sides of the backyard, running about a hundred feet along each side of the forest until it was hidden by the outline of cedars. The expansive wall was equipped with a slanted roof and windows. It was his house, thinly barricading the entirety of the forest. The forest was his courtyard.
Joseph laughed when he saw me marveling at his empire. He said that he always enjoyed showing it to people for the first time, but he made it clear that his house was not built with the purpose of enchanting its visitors. The surrounding walls were a place for the homeless and sick, and its courtyard for the natural dwellings of wild possums, deer, squirrels, hares and cottontails. Joseph told me that he was a carpenter and that the expansion of his walls was owed to the growth of his cedars. With that, Joseph opened the sliding door to the deck and led me into his forest.
There were hundreds of animal paths and no established trail in sight. We walked on a path wide enough to have been made by a deer. We followed it blindly amongst the red cedars, whose lowest branches were twenty feet high with trunks like stretched tendons. Joseph hooked his hand around a tree and swung sharply to the right. Above his head, a bird's nest rested between the trunk and branch like a shoulder joint.
Turning the corner after Joseph, an elderberry bush cast its shadow over me. I stopped and watched a robin jump onto a branch close to my face, cocking its head at me. It became comfortable with my lack of movement and bent down to peck at some berries, leaning its head back and exposing its orange chest as it swallowed them.
Joseph calmly waited for me. He smiled and took a deep breath, appreciating the sweet odor of pineapple and vanilla emitted by his cedars. I closed my eyes and let myself breathe their natural chemicals.
We continued on the deer path for a while until it became blocked by a giant fallen tree. The dead cedar's smell was strong, its body in the centuries-long process of decomposing and releasing nutrients into the soil. Joseph said that it was five hundred years old. It could have served as excellent building material based on its size and fibrous strength, likely suitable for 300 roofing shingles, 40 rocking chairs, and 2 fireplace awnings, except that by the time Joseph found it, it was too late for any productive conversion. Instead of having it cleared for the immediacy of space, Joseph figured it was healthy to leave it alone, as its dead body provided vital compounds to the rest of his forest. We sat on top of it and rested, sharing some apples that Joseph brought. I took a bite and as I chewed, each crunch of the apple was flavored by the sweet aroma of the tree’s disseminating nutrients. Joseph finished his apple and hopped off the log, placing its brown core on a bed of needles to decompose with the giant and its army.
Joseph calmly paced back and forth below me as I sat up high. His eyes searched for patches of sky in the canopy as his footsteps crunched in its fallen needles. Thinking about the material possibilities of the trillions of plant fibers I sat on, I asked the carpenter if he used the wood from his ancestral garden for his job. He responded that the trees I was seeing were not for any external projects and that they would never leave his house. Joseph only used them to sustain the life-years of his walls.
Red cedars sprouted. Walls were constructed around their presence, by their presence. The cedar was used in siding, shingles, door frames, decks, railings, and landings. The walls expanded outwards, but as the trees grew and spread at the core, the inside of the house was knocked down to make more room, a process repeated by generations of Joseph’s family. New walls emerged on the outside, the inexorable family ring covering more ground. The trees spread their seeds to the edges of the courtyard and kept growing, inflating the stomach of the house, stretching out its walls.
As he told me this, I was so concentrated that I bit my lip while eating my apple. Tart juices splayed and stung my mouth. I swallowed.
Joseph told me that at the heart of the forest was a clear cut void of humus where the first trees once stood.
I gazed over him and his cedar empire. A fog was forming at the end of my vision, which made me excited. Soon the trees would be replenished and my skin would feel clean. I felt the softening bark and upended a small strip of it, rolling it on my fingertips.
I wanted to find a tree with a low enough branch to hang from, to let my back crack as I rolled my neck and to let the fog take me. I scanned our area but could find no such tree. So we walked back along the same path, seeing the same trees backwards, wading into the growing fog. Its density began to deafen the trilling calls of swallows and their nests, concealing the higher foliage and the tiny cones drooping under green needles. I could hear a trace of Joseph's softened movements before I felt myself slowly leaning forward into a pillow of soil, a blanket of humus tucked above my arms.