Mark and the Ark

Check out this piece by Cory Golden at the Davis Enterprise.

Unlike God, Janie Howard didn't give instructions in cubits.

She handed Mark McCarthy a toy ark that opened like a greeting card.

Janie Howard, the director of music ministry, knew Mark from church. He was quiet, but had blue eyes swimming with ideas, and he had helped Janie before.

Mark and his wife Sarah had kids of their own, 23-year-old Bryan and 18-year-old Katie, and over time Mark had made their classrooms a cardboard Mayflower, a log cabin, an Egyptian pyramid.

So Janie said to Mark, I am going to put on a musical so kids from Davis United Methodist Church and Congregation Bet Haverim will learn about Noah. Please make an ark of double-ply cardboard.

Mark did just as Janie asked.

An architect by training, a graphic designer by trade, he sketched and sketched, then he made three models.

The ark's parts had to squeeze through the synagogue's 3-foot wide door.

Then they had to be fitted together during the show by kids, like fourth-graders Noah Papagni, in his namesake's cottony beard, and Maya Jordan as Mrs. Noah, fussing after him.

The ark needed a working ramp. And it had to open to show a hull filled with two dozen kids dressed as pandas, lions, polka-dot pigs - all the creatures that move along the ground and birds of the air.

This is how Mark decided to build it: 12 feet long, 5 1/2 feet wide and 7 feet high.

He knelt in his office in dress pants and rolled-up sleeves, a pencil in his teeth. His X-acto knife sliced cardboard into strips that he fastened together with Scotch tape and a glue gun. It smelled like a Kinko's.

Noah marked 500 birthdays before starting his ark.

Mark was 58, blond and gray hair parted on one side. He enjoyed solving puzzles and creating things people looked at, like ingenious packaging for businesses. He liked making fun things, especially.

Mark told a high school art class about his newest project.

"If anybody wants to help build an ark, come on over."

Students Rachel Bruno, Deena Hashem and Minoo Shirmohanadali did. They taped and taped.

For Janie, Mark once crafted a singing whale. Fishing line moved its mouth.

When its belly lit up, the audience saw the silhouette of Jonah.

One of the boys who climbed into that whale, Jack Ritter, grew up to be a UC Davis student. He helped give the ark its shape and paper skin.

The boat sailed to the church in a pickup. Kids and parents clustered around, brushes in hand, painting it to look like wood.

Soon a fourth-grader named Sarah Cordano, pretty as a dove, will fly back to Mark's ark holding an olive branch.

And all the little animals will clamber out, to sing about a rainbow.