Forestiere

Forestiere

"Not a wasteland -
but a great inverted forest
with all foliage
under the ground."

-Raymond Ford, The Cowardly Morning

Ray is a fictional poet made up by Salinger for his story, "The Inverted Forest," which appeared in Cosmopolitan in 1947, when writers still wrote stories to sell to glossy magazines just before the glossy magazines stopped needing writers and switched to running the same tired articles about how to shrink your womanly waist or please your manly man in bed. In the 1940s, readers were more concerned with fiction than fashion, I suppose, or perhaps it was that fiction was actually fashionable at one point. (Forgive the digression! Already snubbing the paragraph before it even gains any momentum, forgiveness forgiveness!) Ray has a hard childhood, is abused then orphaned, starts going blind (physically) just before finding his true sight (metaphysically) in poetry. He teaches at Columbia and eventually accepts the advances of Corinne, who had known Ray as a small boy and always felt a pang of vulnerability towards him that she would later confuse with love. She is given a copy of his book, recognizes the name from her past, falls in love with his words (mistaking the poet for the poetry) and seeks him out - though she admits to herself from the start that she "felt sorry for the poet for having her as a reader." Of course, as Salinger knew too well in his personal life, girls ruin poets and the more he might fall in love the girl the more he might fall out of it with his poetry - and this happens. Indifferently, carelessly, inhumanely, Corinne extricates a marriage from the poor man. Later, Ray's wife dances the pantomime and performs the customary rituals. She loves him, is impressed by him, and wants desperately to show him off, eventually driving the poor man to drinking and into the arms of a young girl ("Bunny") who knows nothing at all about poetry or poets. Story ends: Ray in shambles, drunk and staring at a blank wall in a room with an shadeless lamp's bare bulb burning his brain while he attempts to write something on a piece of paper, Corinne leaves, Bunny feeds Ray another Martini. Door closes, forest is inverted.

Yes, and what of this "Inverted Forest"? Aside from it being a wonderful metaphor for poetry and poets (empty on the surface with many roots and branches spreading out in all directions just undernearth what's visible) it is a wonderfully simple symbol as well for a lot of things: What might appear to be a wasteland could be hiding an entire forest below! Yes, a lesson on life with deep morals and tangly roots - emptiness could just be stowing away some sort of fullness buried beneath itself. Joan of Arc sings a song:

"our secret necessities insist every city
must be as deep underground as it is tall.
How high must the fire escapes climb when it comes time
for earth to get around to its one last chore?"

The inverse building of a building within a city. Structural integrity relies upon this digging - the taller the thing is, the deeper it must be sunk (if it wants to remain stationary and not crumble, of course.) We see these buildings and assume they grew out of the thin concrete soil when really there is a more real series of basements below which house the guts of the thing.  Unfocussing slightly, height relies upon depth whereas depth can be there without any height (not quite co-dependent).  The song is neat, it is about a pencil scratching on a paper's dent to see what was written on the page before and that, too, calls to mind this Inverted Forest of Salinger. There's hiding, and then there's hiding... Anything that can be seen can be ruined, that is the vulnerability of being outside and the sheer risk of living.

So, now, what of this "Forestiere"? Who? What? Inversion?

This is a wonderful story:

In 1906, Baldasare Forestiere found himself in removed from Sicily and dropped, lovingly or not, in F resno, California of all places (this man moving from Sicily to Fresno is about as hard to imagine today as it is to imagine Cosmopolitan Magazine printing prose of actual worth by actual authors at one point in its unillustrious publishing legacy!) and he purchased a 70 acre plot of land which he planned to farm much in the same way his family had been doing back home for their entirety of existence.  Fruit trees, sweet citrus, the beloved oval grape!  The surface was decent, but just below was hardpan that wouldn't yield more than a single sprout - Forestiere grew sad. Years before, he worked as a laborer on the East Coast and was primarily in charge of digging tunneling for early Subways; he decided to dig below the hardpan and investigate non-traditional options (so non-traditional, in fact, that they appear as ghostly and strange as what we now call a "dream".)

With the humblest of tools - pick axe, shovel, hands - Forestiere cracked the soil and began to rid himself of his unhappiness. Each shovelful of earth he removed seemed to be a physical embodiment of his unhappiness and he took great care in flinging it over one shoulder so that it spread into a puffy cloud, then dispersed into the clean nothingness of air. Smiling, he kept digging and within time he had a small chamber roughly 10 feet below the ground, complete with skylight. In this room he decided to place a single orange tree, which flourished! Below the earth just 10 or 12 feet was nutrient-rich soil, and his discovery made him even happier.

The small chamber with the single orange tree gave way to a short hallway with an impressively vaulted ceiling, an engineering feat unheard in underground construction at the time, and later to a kitchen, a pantry, a living room, a reading room, two (gasp!) bedrooms, and several unspecified spaces. His favorite, though, was a simple courtyard where he placed a bathtub which was warmed, as nature intended, by the sun from a small aperture above. In total, Forestiere's endeavor lasted a sweet 4 decades, which were spent digging and removing dirt from the earth and sculpting various rooms which eventually became superfluous and downright fantastic: a winery, a hothouse, a library, and an inverted aquarium which was basically a glass-bottomed lake built by hand which allowed people to view a pond from a very surreal vantage point below the water and little licking waves. His trees, though, were his real passion. He grew multiple fruit-bearing trees under the ground and cut small holes in the roof for them slowly grow outward into the world. In 1923 the Fresno Bee Newspaper ran a story on the place, and explained: "No plans were made. Every detail in the development of the underground gardens has originated in the brain of Forestiere and has never been set on paper." Improvisational, too!

Like all good men, he died. He was working on a 3,500 square foot ballroom. His most cherished piece is left growing in a small back patio-area: a tree of his own making. He somehow managed to intertwine a grapefruit tree with a kumquat tree with a lemon tree, effectively braiding the trunks. The limbs shoot out, offering surprises; one branch a little yellow dab, the next one filled with larger orange fruits, and a stray branch their with kumquats dangling. His niece, now the caretaker of the upside-down-compound, explains that the three trees represented for her uncle the Holy Trinity. I wonder, though, if he didn't outshine God with his three-fold creation.

I wonder, too, what the conversation would be like between old Raymond Ford and Mr. Forestiere; the two men would no doubt trade ample handshakes and hearty hugs. A ghost and a fictional character, impossible. Imagining's all we've got I guess. Thinking about them both and attempting to process their creations, one poet fictional and working in words and the other real but dead and working in dirt, I feel a bit like Corinne myself - unworthy, apologetic that they've got me as a reader. 

We can't read The Cowardly Morning, Salinger only gave us a few sparse lines from his poet's pen, but we can visit the farmer's dream deep in the earth: The Forestiere Under-ground Gardens are open to the public still, for anyone dumb enough to drive to Fresno, and only it costs an unremarkable $6 for a guided tour provided by a member of Forestiere's family. As dreamy as it all sounds, the reality may be a cool slap in the face to those hoping to experience this magic - heading down the road to the underground farm, you'll pass the usual hardware and office supply stores, chain restaurants, and other more modern conveniences created by suburban dispersion. Comically, or cosmically, the Forestiere Garden is still remains the only "vacant lot" of land in whole wide and expansive town.

More information about the Gardens can be found: here.