Forestiere's Long Bet on a Life That Did Not Come

There is a room in the underground gardens beneath northwest Fresno that Baldassare Forestiere built for a wife he intended to marry. There is another room for the children he expected to have. He dug them by hand, shaped them, fitted skylights to admit the particular angle of afternoon light that the rooms would need to feel like rooms and not tunnels. He furnished them in his imagination. He never filled them with a family.

He died in nineteen forty-six, forty years after he first broke ground, still digging. The ten acres of excavated space he left behind is not a monument to failure. It is something harder to name. It is the physical record of a man who kept making something even after the thing he was making it for was clearly not coming, who treated the work itself as sufficient reason to continue.

Forestiere had come from Sicily in nineteen oh one expecting California to be something it was not. The land was hardpan. The heat was brutal. He could have cut his losses and moved on, and the standard reading of what he did next, he went underground, worked alone for four decades, built an elaborate world nobody asked him to build, is the eccentric-genius story that his gardens attract as a tourist attraction. The eccentric-genius framing makes the story smaller than it is.

The larger framing is this: he was an immigrant who arrived with plans that the land refused, and who responded by going deeper into the land rather than leaving it. The world he built underground was more elaborate, more considered, and more durable than the surface life he had originally intended. It outlasted him by eighty years as of this production and is still receiving visitors. The rooms built for the family he never had are still down there, still open to the light he cut for them, waiting for an occupancy that has been postponed now for a century.