The Man Who Went Down

Baldassare Forestiere came to California in 1906 to grow oranges. He had dug the Boston subway and the Hudson River tunnels, and he did not know that the ten acres he had bought sight unseen in Fresno sat on a slab of hardpan almost impervious to a shovel. It was 120 degrees on the surface. So he dug a cellar.

Then he kept digging. Over forty years, with a pick, a wheelbarrow, and no blueprints, he carved out sixty-five rooms on three levels: a summer bedroom, a winter bedroom, a chapel with a bell visitors could ring to summon him up. He planted an orchard twenty-two feet underground and cut conical skylights so a single tree, grafted with seven kinds of citrus, cedro and valencia and sour orange among them, could reach for the light and still bear fruit.

Then, because he liked fish, he built an aquarium. A tank stocked with catch from a nearby river, set into the ceiling of a chamber below, where he would sit and watch his dinner swim overhead.

He was still digging when the pneumonia took him in 1946.