About Barking
Up the Right Tree
(The Long Version)

It's all my sister Nina's fault, or maybe Mr. Buckner's.

"There's someone logging on Buckner's property. They're dragging the logs right up next to the road," Nina announces. "Big logs. Bark is falling off them."

She knows I'm signed up to take a workshop this summer exploring bark vessels with Dorothy Gill Barnes, the guru of bark in America. I already took one class earlier in January 2001 with Cass Schorsch. Cass likes to refine her bark into quarter-inch strips and even smaller. I like my bark more as it comes off the tree, as does Dorothy Barnes. In Cass's workshop we used bark she collected the summer before, as no tree is going to give up its bark in the middle of the winter. It must be high summer, sap flowing, water filling the inner cambian layers.

Cass brings sheets of birch bark which we dutifully cut into quarter-inch strips. Some birch will curl more than others and my birch strips look like Shirley Temple's hair. I've done enough weaving in my time and I'm not about to try and weave that tangled mess. What does interest me is a small bundle of foot-long red pine bark stripped off if one-inch diameter branches. It's rolled just as if it is still attached to the stick and has the most unusual and prominent lenticles or air holes, very pleasing horizontal dashes to compliment the narrow verticality of the bark. Now these inspire me and while everyone else tames the tangles, I set to sewing the pieces together.

This all reminds me of kindergarten when the teacher wanted us to make clay snowmen and I just had to make a squirrel. I stick a few acorns in gaps in the seams of the sewn bark. In the end the inner bark is on the outside of my water tower-like piece. The acorns keep popping out and I decide I like the little holes better.

But back to the logging operation. This is all too soon for me. While I know the theory of stripping bark off trees, I haven't actually done any, and Cass did not at all cover stripping of thick bark off huge trees. It must be summertime, which it is, and only certain trees will divest themselves of their bark . . . tulip poplar, pine, willow, hickory. Forget oak. It all seems too daunting, but I drive up my sister's road to the logging operation and get out and survey the scene, or should I say devastation.

Huge tulip poplar logs, some four feet in diameter and 20 feet long, lay side by side in mud smelling of hog yard. They lay next to a funky old crane and huge truck already stacked with logs. Panic. They've already loaded up the logs. What if this is the last of the logs and I'll miss out? This is all way too big for me. I look at those huge logs and chunks of bark laying everywhere. What do I want? How to get it? I do pick up a couple of pieces and put them in my car. Souvenirs, maybe all I will get.

I drive home. Will the loggers let me collect bark? Will Mr. Buckner, owner of the land, let me collect? All day I ponder, formulate, my mind doing its usual act of creating this and that over and over. I keep seeing those huge logs laying there. I want big pieces of bark. I want to make some kind of structure that I can get inside of. I am drawn to creating shelter, whether for me or for my imagination. The next morning I can hear the whine of a machine up the hollow and I know it's the loggers. Reminding myself that if I don't at least ask, the answer will definitely be no, I drive to the logging site.

Soon enough a man driving a skidder, a kind of huge tractor with gigantic wheels designed to drag logs, pulls into the muck with a 16-foot log. I gulp. Most of these guys don't want to be bothered, much less be understanding about the needs of an artist. It turns out that this is a one man logging operation and Bill Taylor is a very nice soft spoken man who nonetheless is a bit leery of allowing some woman around the logs. He doesn't want to be sued when I break a leg slipping off a log. I tell him I don't want to hurt myself either. If I can get permission from Mr. Buckner I can go up into the woods.

I drive to Mr. Buckner's and he chews my ear for about a half hour, but I always enjoy his tales of the area and permission is granted. Bill says he will use his crane to move any pieces of bark that come off the logs in the log yard. And he does, but I soon find out getting bark this way won't work. The bark is already scraped from dragging and the claws on the crane further mash and split the bark.

Thus begins my intimate adventure among the logs. Each afternoon after Bill leaves I come up and assess what I can scavenge. I've decided I want bark 10 feet long and in at least half rounds. It's hard to do this as the logs are all lined tight up next to each other, but the end ones I can usually get at. If the bark is not too damaged by dragging, I cut with a chain saw around the part I want to strip, but only through the bark trying not to damage the log. I then take two flat bladed pry bars and work my way around all the cut edges including the ends. I am learning that this helps prevent splitting of the bark. It's as hot as summer in Virginia, which it is. I'm wearing jeans and a long sleeved shirt and my hard hat for chain sawing. I am wet. I get my soggy gloved fingers under the edges of the bark and pull. The pry bars fall out at this point and if I'm in luck, my fingers will not be trapped between bark and log. I wonder if my husband Carl would come find me after dark or if I can yell at someone as they drive by to release me.

I pull some more and am rewarded by a gentle ripping sound as bark leaves log. If I'm able, I get a flat-bladed shovel under and pry, also gently. It takes all my finesse and all my strength to pull and not split the bark. Where is Carl, you ask? I have fired him from this part of the operation as he is too rough on the bark. He just wants this miserable experience to be done with as expeditiously as possible and I'm beginning to have grand visions of a palisade of standing bark, row after row of rounded tree trunks.

Sometimes I have to wedge my forearms between bark and tree to separate them. Both bark and tree are slimy wet. When the last little bit of recalcitrant bark is freed the whole piece wants to slide off. The light green inner bark is so alive at this moment. Touching it makes a bruise. It really is like skinning something alive. It is a painful moment for me, me the vegetarian who will not eat flesh, those poor animals in the killing yards. Here I am in the killing yard of ancient tulip poplars. Some of them must be over 100 years old.

My freed piece of bark now has a mind of it's own and it starts to slide down the sloping logs. If I can control this I can maneuver the bark closer to my truck and also avoid the stinking mud hole, so alive with runoff of the slime of the bark. Finally I drag the wet floppy bark to my truck and heave one end on the tailgate and then lift up the other end and push. Victory. I don't have to enlist my husband's help this time. My "honey-do" list is long with odd requests. I hang on the edge of the truck, totally sweat-soaked, wondering what in the world I am really doing, but this great opportunity to make something BIG pushes me on.

After the short drive home I drag the bark, it's kind of like a beached walrus, on our lawn and trim edges with the chain saw and scrub off embedded mud and debris. I cut spacers to hold open the bark as I've learned it will start curling in on itself unless restrained. I make trip after trip to Cliff Miller's horse barn where I lay out the bark, wrap rope around it, steal heavy stones from a nearby retaining wall and place them on all the split parts for these edges will also start curling. I want the look of solid tree. The whole side of the barn slowly fills with these barks in bondage going way beyond the space Cliff alotted me. Time to let them dry.

I haul some smaller bark pieces to the Dorothy Gill Barnes workshop at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, but we never get around to using them. I do have a great two weeks learning about stripping other barks and manipulating them. Dorothy is sorry we don't use the big bark, but I know my time is coming. I have convinced the McGuffy Art Center in Charlottesville, Va., to give me a show in their main gallery sometime in 2002. We have hashed out the fire liability problems and in the end, they just decide to not mention it to the fire marshall. The structure surely will not spontaneously ignite and I can't imaging any teenage arsonist wanting to touch off my structure inside the gallery.

Back home the bark dries. I order some rough-cut lumber to make frames for my bark. As I go through my days, in my mind I build my shrine. I have built my own handmade hippie house and have a lifetime of getting myself in jams and working out ways to solve problems. I pick up the lumber on the morning of Sept. 11.

The owner is not there so I back the truck up to the locked gates and haul the boards to the truck. Where in the world is he, but I am hot on this project. I stop at the Farmer's Coop and find out about the terrorist attacks. The enormity does not sink in easily. I stack my newly cut boards (they just happen to be tulip poplar) to dry in the barn. I drive home through our beautiful, sparsely settled Rappahannock County and feel all is safe here, but I think the earth does know of the disaster just 90 miles away at the Pentagon and in New York City.

Three weeks later I spend a couple of days making frames for the openings of each piece of bark. I drill three holes on each side of the bark and frames to be able to wire them together. I cut and hopefully square up the ragged ends and stand them up, stacking them down the middle of the barn. Now that they are upright, now that I can actually see the bark side, see them next to each other, I get an idea of what will come. But they seem a bit dingy and gray in this dark barn. Finally all are stacked upright and only take up about a 10-by-10-square-foot space. Cliff will be relieved to have them thus condensed.

My annual Christmas pottery sale takes up my fall and the bark is left behind in the barn. But it's alive in my mind. I build and tear down. I try and think of everything we will need to build this thing in the two days I will have to put it up in Charlottesville. I decide to prefabricate some of the pine needle stuffed in bird netting components for the portal to the shrine. I've done a few on-site pine needle installations before, but prefabing is an iffy situation since I don't really know what I need yet. I make two eight-foot -long tapered "tails" in hopes they will be useful. I've lined up helper elves and a huge trailer to haul the bark. New Year's Day morning finds me dumpster-diving at Early's Carpet for rug remnants. Carl gets the trailer and we stack the bark on it using the rug remnants as padding and all is strapped down. I pack our small truck with my more normal sized bark vessels and the big truck with bags of pine needles and sumac berries.

Early the next morning the entourage drives down to Charlottesville. Carl is worried that the truck and trailer won't make the corners in town, but we arrive safely and spend an hour or so schelpping bark and bags of pine needles and my precious smaller work up flights of stairs and into the gallery. Slowly the bark is stacked vertically next to each other against the high white walls. In this space they look massive, primal, just what I imagined. Maneuvering and wiring the bark into an outer circle and then an inner one is not difficult with four people. The curving forms helps them stand up. I just wish I had two more pieces as there is a seven-foot-wide gap in the inner circle where I want to make some kind of pine needle and sumac berry centerpiece. We stand on the do-not-stand-on top rungs of our ladders to add hidden supports. Friends arrive with our 2½-year-old godchild and video camera.

Madhouse. I finally tell them to take their child and leave. He has been running nonstop around the bark structure for hours. During the drive home my sister and I brainstorm how to deal with the huge gap inside the structure. I had wanted a three-foot gap with a row of the flame shaped, red sumac as focal point. Finally my brain lets go of the what I wanted and can't have and I envision a circle of sumac with radiating saplings and pine needles.

Next morning's bare light finds me gathering saplings, loading the rest of the pine needles and more tools for assembly.
I have a new crew of helpers for this day, all over 70 years of age. We are to meet at 10 am in the gallery. Unfortunately there is a tractor trailer wreck and I don't arrive until noon. I am also a wreck. This is too big a push. I want more time. This is supposed to be fun. I've already had a hissy fit in the truck.

But my crew is ready to work. One is a 78-year-old retired radiologist I have never met before. He had read in the paper of my on-site installation and called and offered his help. He is terrific and we all problem solve and construct during this long day. I set the two men to staple a stiff covering of Tyvek over the frames of the exposed area and then have them bend three-quarter-inch conduit into one big and one smaller circle to be attached onto the Tyvek.

Now comes the not-so-well-thought-out part. We staple bird netting at the bottom and then lash some saplings cut to length to fit over the netting, but tied onto the conduit in a radiating pattern. Easier said than done. Perhaps this should be the title of my next show. The bird netting catches on all buttons and rough boards and is nearly impossible to find the opening between the frame and inner part of the netting where we will stuff pine needles.

We manage. Time is short. I really would like more radiating sticks. Perhaps if I like this configuration, I can prefab this part in the future. But I really enjoy the on-site construction. It's a bird building its nest, a beaver its lodge. They don't prefabricate at a more conducive location, but they also have the time it takes. They also know where they are going, having done it before. We stuff pine needles between netting and Tyvek and work our way up the wall. At the end we are again standing on the do-not-stand-on top rung. Now for the treat. Something that I envisioned goes just as planned. I drag over three huge bags of sumac seed stalks I have collected this past December. In the winter they flame in the sun, as bright as a cardinal and I want some color to counteract the grays and browns.

We stick the ends of the stalks through the bird netting and into the pine needles underneath and create a three-foot mandala. But it all seems too dark until I get an even taller ladder and aim some lights on them. The whole thing lights up. Then I struggle with the arch over the portal and by 8 p.m. the gallery is cleared of all leftover bags of pine needles, boxes of tools. The floor is swept and vacuumed and I thank everyone profusely and ask them to go home. I sit in the quiet room with my creation.

As a child I used to make little houses in the woods, collecting dead branches and lashing them together. I made little tables of lashed twigs, bark plates, arrangements of moss and this and that gleaned from the forest. I'm not really doing anything that different now. I'm that child come full circle. I love making homes, niches for me and whatever spirits wish to inhabit them. My handmade pole house is built on 10 locust trees I cut down on our property. The trees soar up through my house, difficult to build around, but that's what I did. My front door has a carved oak frame. The dining and coffee tables are built of curving wild cherry. My closet handles are honeysuckle. I was born to make hobbit houses.

January 4. The day of the opening. I wish I could sleep late, but I'm up at the crack of dawn. There's been so much to do for so long, that I'm in permanent rev mode. My eyes ache, my head is fuzzy from too little sleep and too much thinking. At least today I can drive our cushy car down with no more than food for the opening, which I must make. Luckily a friend rides down with me to help at the opening and she takes some of my mind off this all-consuming project. I cannot get away from the thought of future installations, future portals in my conversations with nature.

The stage is set. Openings at McGuffy are always packed with hundreds of people. At the beginning almost everyone is out in the halls where more work is hung, where there is food and wine. I stand in the nearly empty gallery. People there don't even know I made the work. I should have worn a grass skirt or something. My self doubt kicks in for a few minutes. I am just a kid making a tree fort. But soon the room fills. People are confronted by the massiveness of my Bark Shrine and a look of kid-at-Disneyland comes over them. They are entering the enchanted forest of their childhood. Just the sheer size of the bark thrills them. The smell of the room is of forest floor and pine grove. I have used loblolly pine needles because they are longer than white pine and it was a loblolly grove that had the least debris from other trees. As I looked up how to spell loblolly in my tree book the guide said that loblolly needles are very aromatic.

So the sight and smell hit the gallery goers. It is delightful, a treat to be able to walk into a sculpture. A man comes up to me and says, "total score." An artist's 12-year-old daughter dreams of a whole village of round bark houses. I devour everyone's reactions. This is part of the reward for my long hours of work and sweat. Next morning as Carl and I laze in bed, Carl says,"Now I see what all the sheer drudgery was for. It really is cool." Even with my doubts, all along I knew where I was heading. A path in the forest opens on a little hilltop glen and there sits my Big Bark Temple.