Got a Happy Story is a community gathering every Monday night where we share stories large and small that have put a smile on our face. The Happy Story diary exists as a way to anchor the community in hope and comfort while we do the hard work of maintaining a permanent Democratic majority. Everyone and all sorts of stories and pictures are welcome. Consider this an open thread.
From time to time I get orders to do repairs on Tansu (Japanese) furniture. The older high quality antique pieces are held together with bamboo pegs instead of the later era hand-forged nails.
Bamboo pegs aren't easy to come by, so I jumped at the opportunity when a contact, John, said that if I would harvest some fresh bamboo for him, he would repay me with half the gain, fully cured.
So off I went on my quest. It led me deeper into a world apart and yet adjacent than I'd ever wandered before. And the journey was both challenging and serenely beautiful.
There's a huge bamboo forest behind a used furniture business I used to do refinishing for. The area I live in has lots of bamboo that has seized huge tracts of land, planting itself in all locations. It grows in thin tall stalks, each culm barely an inch wide at the base. Yet these stands of thin bamboo easily reach twenty feet or higher.
The bamboo behind the used furniture shop, clearly of an entirely different species than the rest around here, is thick -- three or more inches in diameter, and easily rising fifty to sixty feet into the air.
I'd been in that forest once before, and knew it covered at least an acre, but didn't know my way around. And I confess I had some trepidation about wandering in there alone. So a friend and colleague who still works at the shop joined me. In her good-natured, always-ready-for-adventure way, she signed on as my Sherpa.
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We had to snake our way in through the stalks, stepping between crowded stands which are generally a foot or so apart, but occasionally grow in clusters of three to six culms right next to each other. It took quite some time to push and shoulder our way completely out of the world behind us.
As soon as we stood fully within the edge of the thicket, we had entered another world. When you stand inside a dense bamboo forest, the sky is gone. There's wonderfully muted, diffuse light everywhere. It's incredibly cool in there on the hottest of days -- nothing but shade without shadows.
You hear nothing of the outside world, yet it's never silent. Even without the slightest zephyr, the forest breathes to its own rhythm -- leaf against leaf, stalk against stalk making constant soft sounds: the leaves whispering against each other, and the thrilling resonance of the stalks knocking together: haunting, hollow, beautiful, unsettling, spooky, soothing. Each note a different tone from the varying thicknesses of growth.
The forest floor is is the consistent tan of the fallen leaves. Nothing else can grow there. Nothing at all. The only living creatures in the forest that day were a few insects I'd never seen before, crawling on the fallen stalks. Bamboo is not native here, so I wondered if they'd adapted their tastes to the prodigious feast, or been lucky enough to be inadvertent stowaways when the bamboo was first imported hundreds of years ago. I know there are larger beings in there: having seen them enter and emerge. Deer travel freely, and probably very safely, through there. Bamboo, at the end of each stalk's cycle, will collapse under its own weight, right at the base. The deer have left a few culms snapped off at about three feet, throughout the forest. Remarkably few, really, given the number that go through there, which speaks to their amazing agility in traveling through the narrow, winding interstices of the forest.
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Bamboo grows faster than any plant on earth. I have a couple of friends who have many species of bamboo on their property. They once sat on their back deck for a few days literally watching it grow several inches each day.
Wikipedia reports one astonishing recorded incidence of over 47 inches' growth in a single 24-hour period.
Unlike trees, all bamboos grow to full height and girth in a single growing season of 3–4 months. During this first year the young shoots strike skyward supported by photosynthesis from the rest of the clump with no time to sprout their own branches and leaves. Over the next year the pulpy wall of each culm slowly dries and hardens, sprouting branches and leaves during the second year from juvenile sheathes that form from each node. Over the following year the culm hardens still further shedding its juvenile sheaths and commencing its life as a fully mature culm. Over the next 2–5 years depending on species, fungus and mould begin to form on the outside of the culm, eventually penetrating and overcoming the culm so that by around 5 – 8 years depending on species and climate the culms begin to collapse and decay. This brief life means culms are ready for harvest and suitable for use in construction from 3 – 7 years.
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The culms in this stand of bamboo being tremendously thick in comparison to other growth around here (though nothing to the diameter of massive bamboos elsewhere in the world), John would only need one culm to work with. And because of the rapid hardening of the lowest nodes as the culm grows, he required no more than the first several nodes above the root ball.
I had gone in there that day empty-handed, without any of my excellent tools for working bamboo. It was a scouting mission. But as we looked around and began to select which culm's removal would seem least disruptive to the forest (a purely aesthetic decision, as the forest truly doesn't care), my Sherpa friend decided now was as good a time as any. She made her way out, leaving me alone to wonder at my surroundings.
Having a few moments to myself to look around, I was very surprised to discover that the young shoots making their way skyward -- only around two or three feet high at that time -- were the same diameter as those which had achieved their full height. I later learned that bamboo only grows upward: it comes out of the ground at the widest diameter it will ever reach, and narrows steadily toward its uppermost point.
My instructions were to cut just below the root ball, which sits just on the surface and wears a fringe of thin, down-pointing reeds.
My Sherpa returned with a couple of perfectly useless saws -- one dull hacksaw and an even duller keyhole saw. Good sense would have dictated that we come back with the proper tools another day... but it was too late: By then we were determined to take our culm on this visit.
I cleared the earth away to several inches below the root ball, surprised at how far down the roots actually go (reportedly several feet), only to discover that what grows below the root ball is even harder than what's above. Bamboo is most dense at the root ball, below it, and for several nodes above. After that, the fibers elongate to achieve the height it needs for sunlight, sacrificing strength for rapid growth.
The culm we'd selected was around sixty feet tall. And we hadn't yet thought about how we'd get it out once it was cut. We struggled with our sawing in the crowded space with poor blades, switching off until one of us was exhausted and the other took over, cutting the sixty-foot giant. Though our labors probably took no more than thirty minutes, it felt like hours of hard labor. It was awkward getting a good, steady stroke with the miserably dull saws, as the culm was one in a four or five culm stand. The stuff below the root ball is as hard and obstinate as some exotic woods I've worked with: Purpleheart comes to mind: it can dull saw blades as quickly as stone.
After much sweating, cursing, and laughing, we separated the giant from its root, and carefully worked it down from between the high branches and leaves, then cut it in half for easier transport out. The exodus proved as challenging as cutting it down, as we had to weave it between the stands and clusters. We each hoisted our piece onto a shoulder, and dragged, pushed, and wove them through the crowded stalks. The trip back out, hauling a thirty-foot pole, seemed ten times longer than the trip in. I got out first, lugging the longer but thinner (and therefore more flexible) piece. I laid it on the ground, and started to turn back to locate my trusty assistant. She had taken a longer route, it seemed, but was heading toward more or less the same area from which I had emerged. Yet when I looked back, I couldn't see her. I called her name, and when she spoke, she was audibly quite near -- not more than ten feet away, yet I couldn't see her at all. Even when she waved, I barely caught a glimpse of the motion. It wasn't so much the denseness of the bamboo as it was that the verticality of the forest obscured all other shapes. Finally I caught sight of the end of the cut stalk coming toward me, and pulled it out of the thicket, with her on the far end being drawn out like a fish on a line.
It was the first chance I had to look at our trophy, and I could see it was an excellent harvest, though I felt uncomfortably bad cutting down a living thing. Of course, bamboo is a grass, and what I cut was only one "blade" of the whole. Still, I couldn't help feeling sad about it.
Since John only needed the root ball and several nodes above (after that the fibers aren't compact enough to be useful), I was left with two gorgeous long pieces which I have been patiently drying as he instructed me: standing on end so the moisture and sap will drain out evenly. They've turned that lovely tannish brown, and it's just about time to bring them indoors.
I wish I could share with you something about the curing process, but in all my years of research, I've learned very little. John, fairly enough, wouldn't share his closely-guarded secret with me, but a week after I sent him the piece, he mailed me a number of bamboo samples he'd cured, as well as our gain -- pointing out that ours was, in spite of coming from a most non-native location, by far the most dense and strong of the lot. I could feel it as soon as I picked ours up: it far outweighed the other pieces, and I could see that the fibers were much more tightly knit.
So I have ample material for many, many Tansu repairs in the future. But far more than that, I had a trip into another world -- just a step through a vertical green curtain and into magic.
Do you have a happy story to share with us tonight? You know how we love to hear them.