A Face in the Woods I created my first woodcarving—that three-inch-long sugar pine deer— nearly fifty years ago when I was thirty-nine years old. But I knew a little bit about woodcarvings much earlier. When I was just fourteen years old I heard a story about a strange man who carved faces into the sides of white birch trees.
T
he Cunasek family lived in a simple rustic house by a dirt road on the side of a small mountain just outside of Amenia, the tiny village in upstate New York where I grew up. Today, we might be politically correct and say they were locavores who were living off the grid, but back then we simply thought they were poor people who couldn’t afford to live in town. The father, Milos, was an artist who painted on canvas, sculpted with metal—and sometimes carved faces on trees. I never saw any of his work; in fact I never even saw Milos or his house on the mountainside but I knew about him because I went to high school with his son. Harry, although understandably unwilling to talk about his home situation, would sometimes cater to our insatiable teen-age curiosity by reluctantly responding to embarrassingly direct questions about his unusual life style. Consequently, over the four years of high school, we were able to piece together a patchwork story of their lives. As I recall the little we knew, it was not a happy story. Apparently, Milos Cunasek had some sort of job and sold a piece of art in New York City and other art centers often enough to sustain their meager lifestyle but not often enough to improve it.
