I spent the next day working in the Galleria area. I was stressed and tired and I didn’t do anything fun. I worked late and didn’t get back to the hotel until late. The next day I got to do some sight seeing. I found this amazing shrine in the neighborhood near Rice. Hundreds of designs and motifs and figures were carved in golden wood against a deep mahogany back drop. The back wall was carved into a broad, scalloped curve to look like the inside of an enormous tree.
The images were all old, wild, and pagan. There were trees and vines and Green Men. There were nymphs of the woods and water and mountains. There were stags with spreading antlers, fairies wearing mushroom caps and dancing in rings. It was all beautiful, and gleamingly polished, but a little scary, all the same. It had a haunted forest feel, even though we were in the middle of Houston.
I spent my last night at the hotel and left early to check into the Air BnB room I’d be staying in the rest of my visit. I had lock codes to the outside gates and doors and a key box already, in my email, so I just showed up and let myself in.
There was a swimming pool that guests could use, so I decided to change into my swimsuit and have a swim. Just then, two small boys with white-blond hair came running in, laughing and shouting. They jumped up onto the patchwork quilted bed and down on the other side, dashing into an alcove hung with laundry and little flags and colorful streamers. They dashed through and around all this, playing tag or something. They barely noticed me.
I asked them if they lived here, and they stopped long enough to tell me they were Rusty and Devon, and they did live here, and their mom sent them up to find the cat. It occurred to me that I might be too early for check in, and what if previous guests hadn’t left yet??? But the woman of the house came in then and said it was fine. The boys ran out and I could hear them clomping down the stairs.
I asked if I could go swim, and if maybe the kiddos would like to join me, and she said that would be nice. She called down to the boys to put on their swimsuits, and she began to clear up the things hanging in the alcove. She was taking down laundry and winding up streamers as we talked. She told me they had another person staying up on the seventh floor, in the White Room, and more expected later in the week who would be up on the 43rd floor. Her husband would be busy all weekend working in the yard, so she hoped things would be quiet enough.
She had taken down enough of the hangings to reveal a platter of smoke-cured pork loin airing out on a little table, and behind another set of streamers I could see sausages hanging. She said the alcove was a smoking room, and she was glad they’d gotten it aired out in time for my stay. I assured her I didn’t smell smoke at all. She and her husband made hand-crafted, artisanal smoked meats, and I was welcome to try a slice. It would be $2, and I could start a tab. So she sliced off some of the pork loin for me, and I wandered out of my room chewing on it and exploring the house.
I walked down a tower staircase that spiraled against curved walls. The distance between the walls widened slightly as I got nearer and nearer the ground floor. To my left was a doorway leading to the family part of the house. I could see timber beams and a vaulted ceiling, and huge sloping windows looking out onto a green forest. I turned and looked up the stairway and saw it winding up and up within the bole of a tree.
I went outside and saw what looked like an empty but ordinary office building and parking garage behind the tree. There was an elevator going up the side of the garage, and a skyway from the top level to a room built onto the side of the tree. Suddenly I recognized it. I had taken that elevator and skyway to the white room the night I had arrived, but I hadn’t see the tree at all.
I went back into the entrance hall, that was within the huge hollow tree trunk, and I came face to face with the golden wood shrine. It wasn’t just carved to look like it was inside a tree. It was actually carved out of the inside of an absolutely gigantic tree. The whole house had been carved out of the tree, or built from wood removed to hollow the trunk. The tree must have been 30 feet wide at the base and hundreds of feet tall. And since trees grow outward, it was still completely alive, growing slowly all around me. The shrine was added to every year. The walls were stained to look like paneling, alternating cherry red and pale beech and old oak. Everything outside was green and growing. The swimming pool was cupped in a hollow among the tangle of enormous roots.
The sounds of the city had silenced, smothered in the undergrowth of forest that had sprung up. The parking garage and offices were growing over with vines and fern and moss. There were wires high overhead for the people higher up to reach their rooms, but as I strained to see how that worked, they were lost in the canopy of jade and emerald leaves that spread between me and the sky. There were no sounds except the high, soft piping of the birds and the lazy hum of bees. Dragon flies flashed like jewels as they started in and out of sunbeams. I went back in to look for my swimsuit, and then I woke up.
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