The Solitary Cedar, 1907
(Oil on canvas, 200 × 206 cm)
BY Csontváry Kosztka Tivadar
Hungarian National Gallery

The cedar roots ran along the trails like mountains on a relief map, emphasizing the verticality of the landscape. The trees themselves, or at least the ancient ones the park was known for, were heavily buttressed at the base. Their trunks were fluted and ridged, the bark coming away in places. It was not difficult to imagine oneself in a cathedral, one hung over with a ceiling of blue or cloudy grey, punctuated with birds. In the high canopy, waxwings and evening grosbeaks fed on seed cones and insects; fall and winter, scores of bald eagles feasted on salmon and surveyed the world from the tallest cedars.

Some of the cedars were more than five hundred years old. Older than the city I lived in, older than my country in the name given it by late-comers. In the infancy of these trees, explorers measured the altitude of the sun and other celestial bodies with their astrolabes as the oceans carried them to North America, John Dowland’s First Book of Songs and Ayres was the most often reprinted music book of its time, and native people on the islands off the western continent had been building houses of their broad planks stitched at the corners with their plaited branches for thousands of years.

We began to build a house with only a hammer and a few chisels. Maybe a multi-headed screwdriver — I can’t remember; it might have come later. Of course we bought tools as soon as we knew we needed them. A Black and Decker 5¼ inch circular saw. An Estwing hammer. A line level and a carpenter’s level and a brass plumb bob. There was so much measuring and leveling that it’s all a blur now though I remember how hard John worked. We’d come to our land for three or four days a week at first, loading up tools and food in our car, along with our newborn baby and everything we needed for him — diapers, clothes, blankets. The first night we camped with him in the tent we’d set up on a platform of plywood, tarps over it, tied to small cedars on each side, he was the only one who slept. He was two weeks old. We were worried he’d be cold or, well, we didn’t know what exactly. We hadn’t been parents for long. We had a foamie for our bed, sheets and a down sleeping bag for a comforter, and it was warm. But it was also April so I remember it rained more than not. I’d lie awake, waiting for him to cry. John was waiting for the tent walls to let in water. The baby, who was Forrest, slept between us, his head warm in a little knitted toque. When it began to get light, loons warbled down on Sakinaw Lake and once something screamed nearby, uncannily like a baby, and our large English sheep dog cross, who was sleeping under the tarp on her rug, struggled to get under the tent platform. Later, I realized it must have been a cougar.

First we built an outhouse. This was a requirement; and in fact we realized that if we could build four walls with a shed roof over them, if we could hang a door with the obligatory quarter-moon screened for ventilation, then we could probably build anything. And what luxury, to sit on a toilet seat with literary magazines at hand, instead of crouching in the woods, the dog sniffing at our butts as we did so, and then discreetly burning used paper in the fire.

We scraped our building site clean of salal and Oregon grape, and measured. Then we made batter boards — each corner of the house-site framed with two horizontal boards at 90˚ angles, attached to stakes, and perfectly level. We used the carpenter’s level for this, setting it on the boards until the small bubble in the glass vial holding ethanol balanced in the centre of the tube, telling us we had horizontal level. When the baby cried, I’d run to the tent to nurse him, wrapping us both in a blanket as I pulled my shirt aside. The tent was cosy but cramped. Everything had to be kept from the sides so we wouldn’t have rain seeping in.