Cabin

by Lou Ureneck

  I kicked a heel mark in the ground that represented the center of the cabin. This was the spot. “Only if we are capable of dwelling,” wrote the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, “only then can we build.” I felt that I had already begun to dwell on the hillside. I knew I would be back for a reconsideration and to become better acquainted with it, in all its rocks and folds, but for now this would be the cabin’s location. Of all the cabin decisions I would make, this would be the most important. I walked back to the big rock where Paul and the group waited for me. They were silent and resting in the sun.

  “So what do you think?” Paul said.

  “I like it,” I said. “Let’s put it there.”

  In June, I began my search for used windows and other salvaged building materials. Windows would be an expensive component of my project if I bought them new. A small double-hung window on the low end runs to two hundred dollars, and I needed at least sixteen of them, some of them big. It would be easy to spend ten thousand dollars on new windows. I didn’t have that kind of money. I needed to keep the cost of the project low, and I liked the look of old windows anyway. I went to the Internet and found this item among the old doors, kegs of nails, and odd lots of shingles and lumber that were for sale.

  Used Windows with Frames and Door—$5 (Westport Point, MA) Fourteen used wood windows and one door, with frames. Mullions 6x6 separate panes and larger. $5 each. Double hung. Lots of window sizes. Ideal for sheds and outbuildings. Good condition.

  I called the owner, encountered a diffident old voice that said they were still available, and drove down to have a look. They were stored at a house on a country road near the beach. They definitely were used, but I liked the old mullions and six-over-six and eight-over-six lights. They would be hard to match in a new window, and they would be way too expensive if I tried. The old windows also had screens. It was still early to take possession of them because I had nowhere to store them yet, but I was concerned that someone else might snap them up. Paul advised against getting them. “You don’t have anywhere to put them,” he said. I drove down a week later in a rented truck and took them anyway. I knew they would give the cabin a settled and traditional look. The owner had no other interested buyers. I could have them for nothing, he said.

  Back in Boston, I stacked them inside the rear courtyard of my apartment building. It was only a matter of time before everyone in my building got an e-mail from the building manager wanting to know whose windows were blocking the courtyard and warning that they would be put out with the trash if not removed immediately. I hit “reply all” to his message and confessed to everyone in my building that they belonged to me. I begged for a little more time before clearing them out. Over the next two weeks, I hauled them in three trips to Maine, on top of and inside my car. Paul looked them over. “I hope you didn’t pay anything for these,” he said. Of course, I left them in his backyard.

  By July, I had the town’s permission, an excavator and even windows. It was way past time to get started. I still had a chance to have the cabin closed in by winter if we pushed the work schedule. I wanted to use the next four months to get a lot of the building work done, but just as my excavator arrived at the hillside, it began to rain, and rain some more. We couldn’t begin, my excavator told me, until the rain stopped. The ground was soaked. We needed at least three or four days of no rain, or the hillside would turn into a field of mud. So we waited. The rain would stop for a day, then begin again for three or four days. We would get two dry days in a row; then it would rain for six days straight. I kept checking the reports: more rain ahead. It was destined to become the wettest summer on record. It rained fifteen inches; a normal summer in Maine gets about nine and a half. There were local flood warnings.

  Eventually the weather turned more favorable for building, at least briefly, but on the days of no rain my earnest young excavator had equipment problems—either the equipment was on the wrong end of town at another job or something was not functioning. (Why, I wondered, was it at another job?) I had been calling him every Friday through the summer to see if he had been able to snatch some time to get some work done when the sun made brief appearances. I usually reached his wife, who said she would be sure he got the message. At summer’s end, I still had no driveway even though the rains had mostly ceased. I was running out of time, and my young excavator was growing more difficult to reach and more diffuse in his commitment to a start date. I saw where this was going—nowhere—so I called him and said I would need to find someone else to do the work. He seemed relieved, but I had lost my summer. I went back to the excavator who I had initially rejected because he had given me the highest price. This time I was a supplicant. I explained my predicament—limited time, need to get started, wanted to have it closed in by winter. I didn’t touch my forehead to the floor, but only because he would not have seen my prostration over the telephone. I would have said ten Hail Marys and offered five readings of the Uniform Building Code if he’d asked for it as a condition for starting work. I’d really appreciate it, I told him, if he could get up there soon. After a long moment, he said he thought maybe he could get to it that month, September. His price came in a little higher. This, I guessed, was the premium I would pay for not having selected him the first time. I was willing to pay it. He turned out to be as good as his word. He got there rapidly, and I soon had a path to the cabin site.

  Hallelujah.

  It was late September by then, and I was back to teaching classes at the university, so I could not run right up to have a look as I wanted. Paul drove up, approved of the work and sent me some photos. By now the leaves on the hillside were just beginning to turn color, and his photos showed a sweeping path tunneling through the oaks and maples and climbing the hillside. It was just as I had pictured it. Double hallelujah. I broke free of university duties on a weekend in early October and drove to Paul’s house. We loaded the timbers we had sorted a few weeks earlier onto a flatbed trailer—the one Paulie used to transport his stock car to the track—hooked it to Paul’s pickup truck and hauled them to a landing near the cabin site. We were prepared to begin building, finally.

  But still we couldn’t get traction. Paul and I could not seem to find a weekend in October or early November when we were both free for cabin work. We would need to go up together to lay out the foundation and begin digging the holes for the piers. I was chair of my department at the university, which required me to be present for weekend events, and Paul had commitments at home and church.

  Paul’s involvement with the church had begun with my mother. She had moved to Portland to be near Paul and me in the early 1980s, when our children were small, and she had become an active member of the city’s Greek church. If a building issue arose at church—peeling paint, lack of air-conditioning, crumbling steps—she volunteered Paul. “My son is in that work,” she would say proudly, as if she were making a donation, which of course she was. Paul would get a call the next day from someone on the parish council. “Sure,” he would say. “I’ll have a look.” He solved problems and saved the church money. He knew contractors and inexpensive work-arounds, and he got discounts on materials.

  But my mother had operated in complex ways, and she rarely had a single agenda. She was also eager for Paul to baptize his children in the Greek church. Slowly and inexorably Paul was drawn into the church; in time his children were baptized there, and Paul became a member. My mother got her way, and Paul took to it without complaint. He was social and reliable, and soon he was on the building committee, the festival committee and then the parish council. He was also helping some of the old ladies in the church with their homes. He would drop by to examine a wet basement or to fix rickety stairs. The priest saw in Paul someone who had street sense, as well as someone with whom he could talk privately about the people and politics of the church. The priest was a theologian, more comfortable with ideas than with people, and he often grew frustrated with his flock. He and Paul would talk over a situation, and a solution w
ould emerge to whatever issue or conflict the priest had found intractable. And in this way, over the course of about fifteen years, my brother, who had evinced not a single religious sentiment that I can recall in all the years we were growing up, became a pillar of Holy Trinity Orthodox Church.

  Until we could get started, I found ways to slip away from campus for a day at a time. I threw jeans, old shoes and a jacket into the car. Faculty e-mails, lamentations and jeremiads would have to wait. The pull of the hillside was too strong to resist. I did not mind the three-hour drive. The prospect of a walk in the woods or around the pond made the time in the car worthwhile especially then, in autumn, the best of seasons. I listened to music on the radio and witnessed the reds and yellows of the leaves become more brilliant as I drove north. October is a lazy month, a kind of dreamy sleepiness falls over the woods. The sun is warm, the air is dry and the cicadas are buzzing in the tall grass. The spicy tincture of wild apples floats on the breeze. No one understood the time of year better than Keats.

  SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun . . .

  There is the sharp scent of wood smoke in the mornings as stoves take the chill off country houses, and the happy sight of leaves racing in crazy funnels in the wind across dry open fields. These were delicious sensations. Each time I arrived, I felt as drunk as a horse that has gorged on wild fruit. I was happy to be at the hillside even if there was no work I could do on my own. There is a lot of idle looking and learning that goes into cabin building, too, and I was absorbed in the surroundings and the season whether I had a tool in my hand or not. In a spiritual sense, the project was well under way.

  I was discovering something that I suspect I had known since that first winter walk in snowshoes. I wanted to make this hillside my own in the way that the landscape of my boyhood had been my own. The way toward possession, in the best sense of that word, was to learn it, and the best way to learn it was with lots of long walks. I traversed the hill up and down, and sometimes I followed what would be the natural contour lines of rounded hills. Other times I plotted and walked straight lines, from here to there on the map. I sat on stone walls, leaned against the trees, knelt for a closer look at the brooks. I even took the occasional short nap, by leaning against some soft and slightly rotten stump and stretching out my legs. I ran the soil of the hillside through my fingers—it was simultaneously gritty and smooth, a dark pudding of rotten leaves and glacial rock flour—and tasted its bitter twigs.

  I had grown up among marshes, sassafras, holly, and scrub pine. The South Jersey soil of my boyhood was gray beach sand—the bottom of an ancient sea. Rocks were so uncommon in that landscape that when people found them they painted them white and set them out as ornaments. By contrast, the Maine hillside was rugged and ledgy, and it coughed up a prodigious amount of rocks. The glaciated soil grows spruce, fir, white pine, beech, white oak and rock maple, trees almost entirely absent from my boyhood. These were two different landscapes, but they shared one powerful attribute: both were manifestations of the natural world—plants and animals and weather and soil and seasons working together to form a coherence of life, breath and natural beauty, and both spoke to me in a common language of metaphor and first principles. I never would be able to score the Maine hillside with the events of my boyhood—I would never be thirteen again and watch ducks come into a Barnegat marsh as the winter sun threw its first light of the day over the dark brackish water, nor would I be able to wade into the green briars and weed fields with my bird dog, Shadrach, to flush bobwhite quail. Those years and experiences were gone. But maybe I could come to know this little patch of hillside well enough to say I understood it. I wouldn’t know it as a boy can come to know the woods, because a boy gives himself to it completely, but I could learn it as an adult, by walking and watching and listening. There is no love like the first, and there is no landscape like the one we grow up in, but love has more than one life and I hoped I could possess this landscape with some of the feeling I had felt for the first. I could not go back and fix my family, make my father stay or find the money to stop the foreclosure of our house. Those things were done, and they would always be done, and the first landscape would always be gone. I would have to know this place differently, with more deliberation, experience and tempered hope. Yet there was a strong sense of return. I thought of the lines by T. S. Eliot:We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  One weekend in the late fall, I drove to the hills to soak in the pensive November atmosphere and reassure myself about the cabin site, which was still very much devoid of a cabin. I arrived in the afternoon and made my usual circuit up the path to the cabin site, and then higher still to the ridge below the knob, and then down an old logging road to the pond. As I walked around the pond toward the end of the day, I spotted what looked like a small bear swimming in the water, except that this bear seemed to have a canoe paddle lashed to his behind. I went in for a closer look. It was a beaver, a very big beaver, and when I approached, it swam three tight circles of exasperation, slapped the water’s surface with its long flat tail and disappeared. I scanned the water for its reappearance. It showed up a hundred yards farther off, near the mound of mud and sticks that was its lodge, and then it dipped below the surface again. I assumed it had entered its tunnel and was at the moment inside with its family, all of them wet and smelling very much like beavers and pushing and squeaking and finding a way to be warm and comfortable in their home. Here was a happy family with no thoughts other than a little food and a good long sleep. This was better even than following old bobcat tracks.

  I went down on my haunches, Gandhi-style, and took in the tableau of pond, beaver lodge, setting sun and serrated dark line of the treetops. November is a pleasantly melancholy month. The branches of the hardwood trees are bare, and only the beech leaves and clusters of a few stubborn papery oak leaves hang on. Underfoot, the red leaves of the maples are already purple and black and beginning to rot. The smell is pungent, fecund, nostalgic. There is always rain in November, lots of rain, though at that moment the sky was clear with a few high purple clouds. The alders rise from the muddy places as dark gnarled skeletons, their catkins dried up, and the woodcock have departed to the swamps of Louisiana. There is also a quickening in the woods as the animals prepare for winter. The bears range widely and forage for last meals before their long sleep, and the bucks are in their mating rut, lunatic in their pursuit of does. The broods of grouse have dispersed into singles and doubles, and the final flocks of blackbirds pepper the sky. The onset of winter is felt in the cold hardening ground and diminishing light of the afternoon.

  All of this was on my mind, as a kind of fugue of sensations, and it made me reluctant to leave the pond. At that moment, my hesitation was rewarded with an astonishing sight. The setting sun flooded the pond with golden light, making it steadily brighter as the surrounding woods seemed to grow darker. It was as if all the light that had been gathering through the day in the nearby mountains was now answering the call of gravity as it drained down to the pond—rills of light flowing into brooks of light that were pouring over glowing rocks, making waterfalls of light, all of which was pouring into the pond, which was now a glowing bowl of light. It seemed on the point of ignition. And suddenly the moment passed. The sun slid below the mountain behind me and the pond went as dark as the hills.

  Even though we hadn’t yet been able to schedule our first weekend of work at the cabin site, Paul and I were in close communication about the preliminaries, one of which was an important design question, involving the layout of the foundation piers. The piers needed to line up under the girders, which are the principal horizontal supports that run under the length of the floor. The spacing between the piers had to be right: too far apart and the girders would sag or break; too close together and we’d be wasting
material and creating extra work. I had three choices for pillars: prefabricated columns, stacks of cement block or Sonotubes, which are cardboard tubes into which cement is poured. Sonotubes were the cheapest and in this instance probably the best choice because we could set them deep, below the frost line. Paul sent me this e-mail as we considered the options:There are a couple of different ways to frame out the floor or how the framing relates to the Sonotubes. I will draw you a sketch and e-mail it to you tomorrow. We should decide on which method as it will determine the layout of the Sonotubes. I hope you don’t mind my thoughts on all of this. It’s the project manager in me. I’m used to breaking everything down into pieces. I think this camp and location is going to be a home run when it’s all said and done. I’m liking that area more and more.