Wood - part II
Last week, while building a bar for our garden, Adam got a splinter of Oregon pine in his finger. He picked it out with a needle, or so he thought. Over the course of the week, his finger grew large and hot, until it turned into a burning soccer ball that kept him awake at night. Adam never complains of pain, or anything actually, so I knew it must have been hurting him badly. He took himself off to the doctor and returned with a bandage around the top of his finger (which was now as big as a head), a dose of antibiotics and stories of scalpels, puss, cauliflower and blood.
This turn of events did not surprise me. The forrest in Oregon where much of this pine is grown is called the Malheur, from the French, meaning ‘misfortune’. However, just like Adam, the tree was also a survivor. Just underneath the forest floor of the Malheur, lives the largest known organism in the world – an 8.8 km2 tree killer! It is a fungal colony, whose filamentous fungal tissues branch out under the soil and colonise and decay the trees. The only sign of the monster lurking below are mushrooms that appear at the base of trees after the first rains in fall. This organism is known as ‘The Humongous Fungus’. The thought of it makes my skin crawl.
Luckily, Adam’s finger had healed by the time we were ready to cut my lovingly sanded plank to bar size. He pulled out the circular saw. It screamed as it spun and I watched how effortlessly it turned the millimetre of wood in front of the blade into sawdust. I imagined the saw taking my arm off with one razor sharp swipe, but then settled into watching closely, as Adam guided it calmly and exactly along the pencil line.
He handed the machine over to me with the casual air of giving back the car keys and told me I could do it. Just hours before, I had put two drops of Aqua Ear into my eye so I wasn’t feeling very confident. But if Adam believed that I could do it, then I could. So I did. I did leave a few splintery bits sticking out but that was a great opportunity for Adam to show me how to chisel wood into shape.
Then began the long process of clamping and fitting and drilling the bar into the cement and around the verandah’s supporting pole. Adam referred constantly to his spirit level to keep things straight. He says,
‘If the bubble is at one end then your spirit it fucked.’
Speaking of fucked, we originalIy came up with the idea of building this bar before we gave up smoking, so we always envisioned ourselves smoking at the bar when it was finally done. But as that moment drew closer, I started to mourn the fact that I would never be able to smoke at my bar. For now, that frustration sits just beneath the surface of everything I do, like The Humongous Fungus, colonising my thoughts. The only sign of the monster lurking below is my incessant need to walk the dog in active wear. And here’s the thing, because I have committed to making things out of wood until I don’t want to smoke anymore, I am essentially just creating a house full of furniture I can’t smoke at.
We finished the bar. It is beautiful. It is a beautiful piece of the Malheur, a survivor of that place, suspended over our food garden.
Adam and I sat on the day bed and looked at it for a while, wondering what to do with it. I remembered that there were two cold beers in the fridge so I put them on the bar. We rested our computers there too and read funny stories out loud to each other.
After we finished the beer, we needed another activity to keep ourselves from thoughts of smoking, so we went to a Sea Shanti workshop in the city. There was a surprisingly large crowd and I felt at home.
‘These are our people’ said Adam.
‘What do you mean?’ I said
‘People of a certain age and political persuasion who remain convinced that the underlying conditions of existence can be made less intolerable by ludicrous enterprise.’
We laughed hard and sang our hearts out and ate lots of snacks. I asked Adam to take his turn at going to the snack table as I had already been there four times.
I told Adam that my next wood project would be a coffee table. He agreed, this was a good idea.