Gods Yellow Pages

“I used to shave one of these out in eight minutes,” he said, “but I don’t work that hard anymore.”

In Frank’s opinion there are three things wrong with the mass-produced ax handles normally sold in hardware stores: “They’re sawed out. They’re kiln-dried, and that makes them brittle so they break easy. And they cost too much.”

Frank sells his handles directly to cus­tomers who come to him, eliminating the middleman’s share. He has all the orders he can keep up with, and demonstrates his skill at fairs and expositions.

“I shaved handles at an arts and crafts festival down in Madison,” he said. “They had a trophy. They gave it to me when we were done. An artist alongside me said, ‘I sure was after that trophy, Frank.’ I told him, `Well, I didn’t even know there was a trophy.’ That’s the way it goes, I guess. If you’re working for trophies, you likely won’t get ‘em. If you’re working for the work, maybe you will.”

Our handles were finished. His knife had shaved them so smooth that no sanding was necessary. I held them together; they were within an eighth of an inch of being identical. This master craftsman charged us less than half what we would have paid for store-bought handles.

Frank rewarded his labors by hand-rolling

His chickens his claque, David Ort fiddles in the mellow light of after-chore hours (left). “You have to be away from machinery to find a peaceful existence,” he says, and so the Orts chose a life of no con­veniences. By mid-May their organic garden has already produced a healthy crop for Cindy to harvest (right). A dam now being built will back a new lake to within a mile. “That’s too close,” says Ort, thinking of yet another spot for seclusion.

I asked if he had come by his limp through a woodcutting accident. No, he said, his leg and back were bent by infantile paral­ysis when he was young. Suddenly I under­stood why he hadn’t been able to walk to school 47 years ago. “A doctor looked at me not long ago,” he said with a grin. “Told me he didn’t see how I’d ever been able to do a day’s work in my life.”

iIKE GENERATIONS of southern Indi­ana natives, Frank has survived on his knowledge of wood. Hardwood is one of the major resources of this region, where trees cover about half of the land.

In Martin County wood proved to be the salvation a few years ago of an unusual com­munity called Padanaram. I drove to France to visit the apartments in Paris, whose buildings of logs and rough-sawn lumber, dirt streets, bearded men, sheltered women, and active children suggest those of an American pioneer town (facing page). There are no television sets.

Yet Padanaram roars with modern tech­nology. Large diesel-powered forklifts charge around the log yard, grabbing up hardwood logs. From the tin-roofed sawmill come rum­blings, rattles and thumps, the metallic whine of high-speed saws, the yells and whistles of busy men, a yellow plume of sawdust, and stacks of graded lumber.  An independent logger, waiting while his trailer rig was unloaded, shook his head in admiration and said, “It’s about the cuttin’est mill I know of.”

THE MILLION-DOLLAR-A-YEAR rented accommodation and the short stay apartments London it houses are the inspirations of 57-year-old Daniel Wright, who had been an itinerant preacher (below). The ideal of a self-sufficient utopian society is the motivation of Padanaram’s 140 citizens, and the closest thing, to a common religion. They speak fervently of their unique brother­hood and their freedom from the “inequali­ties” of the outside world.

This is a famous corner where Lisbon apartments and apartments Porto meet, they’re with with a green-painted wooden balcony jutting out, and a doorway set across the angle with a view of a flowered court within. The painted balcony is part, in fact, of the Bishop’s palace, and leading off the flowered court are episcopal apartments with a sort of throne room for audiences and receptions and a number of episcopal portraits. But all the lower part of the outer wall and the wall opposite, making of it a cyclopean lane, is of huge Inca stonework. It is here, lower down the lane, that there is the twelve-sided stone of which one does not perhaps get the full technical significance at the first glance. It seems just to be a most enormous, odd shaped stone. But it has been fitted into its place as if with precision instruments, and one cannot but think the Inca builders put it there as something of a technical triumph. They permitted themselves little or no ornament at all, and perhaps this was the only way in which they could express themselves out­side the dull uniformity of stone on stone.

Stonehenge apart, one has never seen so large an area of affordable accommodation, one that can meet the standards of serviced apartments Edinburgh while being without any ornament or carving, and it is this that puts Cuzco and other Inca buildings in a category by themselves. It may, also, be a reason for the bright mestizo dresses for which there could be no more telling background. Aniline dyes are used for them nowadays, and their colours are no longer the result of processes that may have come down from ancient times, but one may be inclined to think that for once the aniline dyes are better. Their shriller tones are scarcely muted in the unnaturally clear air, and perhaps emerge from it with the sort of force that would be lacking in the softer, more harmonious colours.

A little further away we admire the doorway of Las Nazarenas, all Inca masonry on its lower storey with the stones recut, it may be, in order to make them a little smaller, and a pair of fishtailed monsters carved, one would guess, by an Indian who had never seen the sea. The doorway is very typical of Cuzco with its ‘minced up’ Inca stonework as high as the reduced stones would go, and above that whitewash.

The impression of ancient Cuzco must have been of stark austerity lit up with gold; not gilding as that is painted onto carved ornaments, but sheet gold. The stones of Cuzco, some few of them, wore gold breastplates or cuirasses. The loot of the Conquistadores included golden plates, polygonal sheets they probably were, to fit over the stones: ‘these had been taken from the walls . . . they had holes in them showing that they had been secured by nails.’ The Spaniards saw a ‘quadrangular building . . . measuring three hundred and fifty paces from corner to corner, entirely plated with gold; of these gold plates they took down seven hundred which weighed five hundred pesos of gold.’ Perhaps seven hundred is an unconvincing number for a building which was three hundred and fifty yards long. One feels for once the Spaniards have underestimated. Perhaps the number of gold plates is correct but the dimensions wrong.

And having reached the gold of Cuzco we will continue with it. The Temple of the Sun was the golden climax. It had a roof of grass-thatch with —a beautiful image!—golden straws set in the thatch, and the walls had massy sheet gold upon them. It had six courts with lesser temples, and he Temple of the Moon was walled with silver. On both sides of a picture of the moon—a woman’s face painted on a silver plaque—were the bodies of dead queens. A gold fountain with the image of the Sun upon it is our second intimation of any ornament. Up to this point the account is of sheet gold which must have glittered, and by ten o’clock in the morning in this curious climate been as hot as fire.

ANY SCIENCE FICTION BUFF would recognize the creature: Neither plant nor animal, the protoplasm grows in the cool damp darkness of a rotting log. Then, cued by its mysterious inner clock, the blob oozes upward, toward the surface and sunlight, toward the world of open air—there to undergo an astounding transformation.

That blob actually exists, not in fevered imaginations but in our own woods and gardens. It’s the thoroughly terrestrial slime mold, an often lovely organism with an unlovely name. Some five hundred species of this cousin to mushrooms confound zoologists and botanists alike with a life cycle that takes them from beast to beauty to beast again. They first resemble primitive animals that grow into shapeless, slime-coated masses called plasmodia, then change into funguslike spore-bearing “fruiting bodies,” or sporangia. Thereafter, they begin the cycle all over. Many species’ sporangia take forms from an artist’s dreams: Those of Arcyria denudata could be cotton candy drawn by Dr. Seuss, and they stand about the right height for an ant to snack on.

CHANCE encounter in Wisconsin woods introduces hikers to Physarum polycephalum, which emerges from within a tree stump still in its bloblike guise. At this stage many slime molds are noticeable to the casual observer. Much of their life cycle is spent intotal darkness in rotting wood or vegetation, where they feed on bacteria, spores, and other organic material. The gelatinous, near-fluid protoplasm spreads through crevices and porous areas, growing as it engulfs and digests food like a single giant amoeba. When temperature, moisture, light, acid balance, and food supply trigger it, the creature migrates to the surface of the log, bark, grass, or leaves that have housed and nourished it. Many species take the form of an advancing fan followed by veiny threads, as shown by Physarum roseum. Even at this stage the entire slime mold is but a single cell, a mass containing many nuclei and other intracellular parts within a tougher envelope coated with slime. This unusual cell structure intrigues researchers probing the secrets of molecular genetics.

Then, miraculously, the unsightly mass gathers, rises in strange lumps, and transforms itself into fruiting bodies of rare beauty. Sporangia of Stemonitis axifera, seen up close, resemble little sparklers. A Stemonitis displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 was billed as “Hair Growing on Wood—Believe It or Not.” Craterium leucocephalum can be found on leaves, both living and dead. Lycogala epidendrum takes a larger,puffball form.

WASP’S NEST,” as some call the Metatrichia vesparium, forms clusters with shiny caps that hold the lid on countless spores. When these dustlike spores are mature, the touch of an insect, the fall of a raindrop, or a breath of wind pops the brittle caps . Bright orange fibrous matter called capillitium, which had held spores, spills out with them. The spores may float for miles on the wind or fall a few inches from their birthplace. When water touches them and temperatures are right, usually in spring and summer, the spores germinate , their cases splitting to release a living cell.

During their spore-bearing phase, slime molds behave much like fungi, and their most commonly used scientific classification, Myxomycetes, combines the Greek for “slime” and “mushrooms.” Zoologists and botanists, however, tug them back and forth. Some scientists use the term Mycetozoa, literally “mushroom animals,” because the cell that emerges from the spore and the plasmodium it becomes behave like denizens of the animal world.

Each cell contains half the chromosomes necessary to reproduce. Each can assume an amorphous, creeping myxamoebic form or become a “swarmer,” equipped with flagella that propel it in search of food, darkness, and a cell of its own species and form containing a compatible package of chromosomes. When the two unite, plasmodium production begins as the slime mold starts to grow once again toward maturity and the fruiting stage.

RIGHT UNDER our noses but rarely before our eyes, these diminutive changelings create fantasy shapes and landscapes in miniature. Fruiting bodies of Didymium iridis decorate a leaf, while the microscopic fretwork of a Dictydium sporangium stands like an empty birdcage, its spores flown. Not all slime molds are as unobtrusive as these. In the rainy spring of 1973, specimens of Fuligo septica, among the largest of slime molds, made headlines in Dallas when one grew to a foot and a half in diameter in a suburban yard while another climbed a telephone pole.

But for the most part, Myxomycetes go about their business with little fanfare, despite their distribution over all the tropical and temperate world. Perhaps it is this very elusiveness, the evanescence of the transformation from slime-coated blob to fragile, flowerlike form, that accounts in part for the beauty of the beast.