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.

The 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.

Harry never asked any of us to visit his home. And it was hard to be friendly with him because he protected himself with a fence made of silence and sarcasm. But, one afternoon in the lunchroom when I asked him whether his father really carved faces in the woods, he sensed that I was genuinely interested in his father’s unusual artwork. That’s when Harry opened up a bit and talked about them. And the more interested I became, the more details he provided: they were life-size, shallow-relief caricatures of people his father knew or knew about—friends, relatives, politicians, and historical figures. He said there were about a dozen faces around their house, all carved shoulder high on live white birch trees.

The next day, unasked, he brought in a small Kodak Brownie print that showed him standing next to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln that Milos had carved into the side of a white birch tree. As I remember the photo, the carving looked very much like the president—beard, long face, stovepipe hat and all. So I said something about his father being a pretty good artist.

That lunchroom incident was the closest I ever came to direct contact with Harry’s father or with his artwork. Most of us—there were only fifteen seniors left by graduation day—simply dismissed his family as poor people who lived in the woods and Milos as a strange artist-guy who did strange artist-guy stuff, like carving faces in trees.

And that was it with the faces—until some twenty-odd years later when my brother and I bought a 35-acre hilltop farm in the Schoharie Valley. The farm contained a small pond, a six-room Civil War era farmhouse, a falling-down chicken coop, a fallen-down barn, and a mile or two of stone walls. Although there was a large hillside meadow alongside the house, most of the farm had reverted to new growth forest consisting of oak, maple, pine, hickory, and—white birch. Lots and lots of mature white birch, eight to ten inches in diameter. White birch, just like those that Milos had carved in Amenia.

Yeah, you guessed it. I carve faces in trees. My faces are not quite as good as that one he did of Lincoln but, hey, they aren’t half bad either.

Each October, for sixteen years, I have carved a life-sized face, shoulder-high, on one of the white birch trees. I usually leave the house just after breakfast, when the dew has dried on the meadow, carrying a roll of carving tools and a mallet, a thermos, a sandwich, and a couple of our crisp Schoharie Valley apples. I walk about 300 yards into the woods and pick my tree. (The dog usually comes along but she gets bored after an hour or so and returns home.) Following an old West African custom, I pour a small libation from the thermos and I ask forgiveness from the tree before I make my opening cut.

My subjects vary. The first was George Washington, copied from a dollar bill portrait that I tacked to the tree. But others have been more whimsical—a sea captain, a Russian Cossack, a Keystone cop. In 1977, I even carved a smiling Jimmy Carter.

The whole process takes about five to six hours—including a long lunch break when I just lie quiet on the forest floor and soak in the sounds, the smells, and the scenery. However, the experience itself is timeless. I love the quiet and the solitude. Just me, the woods, the falling and fallen leaves, the tree and a face where there had earlier been only some grayish-white bark.

As I lie there, all sorts of strange thoughts run through my mind. Sometimes I even wonder what that strange artist-guy was thinking on the day he carved Abraham Lincoln.

Epilogue: When we sold the farm some twenty years later, I ignored Arlene’s heartfelt protests about leaving the faces for the new owner and took a chain saw up to my white birch pantheon. After walking around a while, breathing in the forest air and admiring my remarkable artistic accomplishments, I made my selection, set my saw on Jimmy Carter’s tree and cut out his two-foot long portrait. So today, the President from Plains continues to smile down at me from his tree-trunk home on my workshop wall, appropriately framed by the natural protective curl that the bark creates to heal its wounds. And, like so many of Holzman’s Holzmans that I’ve kept for myself, that old peanut farmer brings back a lovely memory of a special moment in life’s grand adventure.