by Lou Ureneck
I skimmed the note and lingered on the final sentence and especially the phrase “home run.” This was good. I was worried that I had put him in a position where he might feel trapped by the work and the extent to which I was leaning on him. The last few times I had talked to him he had seemed to be in a funk—more than the usual cantankerousness that came over him from time to time.
As a next step, Paul developed two sets of drawings for the positioning of the piers. He sent an e-mail to an engineer with whom he worked on some big commercial projects and asked him to review the pier, girder and joist options for the cabin. He copied me on all of these e-mail exchanges, and I enjoyed reading the back-and-forth with its professional jargon and banter. It gave me an insight into his manner at work and his competence. “This is a camp so it doesn’t need to be a perfect analysis,” he wrote to the engineer. “No special inspections here.”
Near the end of November, we finally found a weekend when we could get to the hillside together. With the engineer’s input, we had settled on a pier design and marked it on the bare ground. My excavator had scraped the ground clear of bushes and trees. We snapped chalk lines and drove stakes. There it was: the size and shape of the cabin, as a living blueprint stamped on the dirt and fallen leaves in blue carpenter’s chalk. I stepped inside, walked around a bit, testing out the rooms. I pronounced myself satisfied. We were ready to set the foundation.
Somewhere along the way, Paul had developed an aversion to using a power auger to dig the holes for the foundation piers, which had been my preference and plan. He predicted it would hit rocks in the ground and be unable to achieve the four feet of depth we would need to sink the piers below the frost line. He suggested I rent a small backhoe. “If you hit rocks,” he said, “you will end up having to get one anyway to dig them out.” I favored the auger, reasoning that the job would go faster. If we hit a rock, I would simply move the position of the pier and dig a different hole. He was adamant in his opposition to the auger. “You can’t do that,” he said. The piers needed to be in the right places to bear the weight of the cabin, he explained. I was prepared to risk the small possibility that an offset pier might stretch the span specifications of the cabin’s girders. When I said this, he looked at me as if I had suggested we hire monkeys to pack our parachutes.
One of the stories that had been told and retold about Paul sums up his attitude toward shortcuts. He was on his first big construction management job, as the owner’s representative at a major office building project in Portland. He was about twentyeight years old. The day had arrived for a major concrete pour—for the building’s footings and foundation to be constructed. A long line of concrete trucks arrived to make their deliveries. Paul decided to check the wet concrete in the trucks for its soundness before accepting it. It was his discretion, and he was going by the book. The quality of the wet concrete is checked with a slump test—a concrete sample is poured into a cone, the cone is inverted and removed, a steel rod is inserted and then the degree to which the concrete slumps is measured against specifications. The sample that Paul had taken from a truck failed the test. It contained too much water, and since all the trucks were carrying concrete from the same mixing plant, he told them he was rejecting all of their concrete. There was nothing for them to do but take it back and dump it, he said. Hell broke loose among the drivers, and the concrete company called the project’s owners, furious. Who was the new kid pulling this shit? Paul’s decision stood, and the trucks departed and returned with fresh concrete that could pass the slump test.
So I should have known when I suggested a shortcut that his answer would be firm. I rented the backhoe.
We turned up the first ground in November. Late fall is not the usual time to start a building project in the north country, but I was craving this cabin and unwilling to delay it any longer. I hoped we could get a lot done before the first snow. In the meantime, I continued to wonder what was distracting Paul. He seemed a little distant.
CHAPTER 3
LOST LANDSCAPE
By the time you hit your sixth decade, life’s losses begin to pile up. If you have been lucky or resourceful—luck being by far the more determinant of the two—the pain of the losses has been reduced somewhat by the satisfaction of the things you have gained along the way, principal among these being children. Another is the freedom that comes with age. It is the freedom that allows you to know and be yourself.
There is one loss that I think I will never overcome, and that is the loss of the landscape of my childhood. My relationship with nature is woven into my earliest memories, the first being the very distant image of myself seated on a branch in the elbow of a cherry tree full of white blossoms. How I came to be looking at myself in the memory—rather than out at others—is a conundrum, but there I am in the tree, peering through the blossoms at other children and far more interested in the flowers than in them. It seems to me significant now that I remember having set myself apart from the other children and that I’d already placed myself in the role of observer, including the observation of myself. The memory is vivid; the location of the tree was Monroe Township, New Jersey, near the house we’d lived in when I was born. That would have made me about three years old. So the engagement with nature was there from the beginning, and it grew as I moved through my boyhood, living an unsupervised youth made up mostly of fishing for catfish and pickerel, paying close attention to frogs and turtles, catching and examining minnows and shiners and otherwise making my own natural-history survey of central New Jersey’s slow brooks and ponds.
When I was about thirteen, after a three-year interlude of urban life, which I had coped with by joining the Boy Scouts and teaching myself to fly-cast on the city grass, we moved to the Jersey shore, and it was there that I made the natural landscape my own, and brought it into my life so firmly and intimately that it became part of who I was, and who I am. It remains there today, embedded in my consciousness and sensibility, but unfortunately that is the only place where it remains, at least in the abundant way in which it once existed. The South Jersey littoral was a landscape destroyed by development, and while pockets of it remain as parks and preserves between housing tracts and marinas, the great expanse of it has disappeared. A sandy spit and scrub oak upland where I once had set up a duck blind each November to greet the lines of bluebills that would arrive from the north is now a small park with an environmental center for children. There visitors can see photos and dioramas of an ecosystem that once was rich and so common as to be taken for granted. This is true of most treasures until they are lost.
Until the beginning of the last century, the east coast of the United States was a thriving and interconnected string of bays, inlets and estuaries that were nurseries for the ocean’s fishes and wintering shelters for ducks and shorebirds beyond counting. The marshes and broad mucky fields of rushes and reeds were home to mink, muskrat, raccoon, fox and deer. I remember an old Piney (as the longtime locals are known) telling the story of a swamp buck that hid in tidal lagoons during the gunning season with only his nose out of the water. The tides in these marshes rose and fell like a yogi’s calm breathing and bathed the cordgrass in their gentle saline waters to feed countless tiny creatures that were the fecund foundation for a rich and mysterious web of life. My little piece of this miracle was the upper end of Barnegat Bay, a shallow stretch of fresh and salt water behind the barrier beaches that stretched from Point Pleasant to Little Egg Harbor. It was a place of cedar-stained estuaries and warm-water lagoons. The bay was inhabited by blowfish, blackfish, bluefish, striped bass, fluke, mummychogs, minnows, spearing, flounder, herring and garfish—all of which were a focus of my predatory impulses as a boy. I hunted quail and rabbits in the uplands, shot ducks from the shoreline in the fall and fished almost constantly from March through the end of October. Squeezed in there somewhere, I also dug clams and cut punks (cattails) from the bulrushes to burn as a weak mosquito repellant.
Maybe it was the age at which I encountered
it—twelve going on thirteen, a time not just when a boy begins to stir sexually, but also when he begins to engage the world with an intellectual and moral consciousness—that caused this briny landscape to leave such a deep impression on me. At that age, we are trying out ideas, observing the ways in which the big world works in the little worlds we inhabit and evaluating concepts of right and wrong. All this was happening in me as I walked through marshes, watched sunrises, swam in the brackish bay and netted crabs on sandbars.
Of course, I did not encounter this landscape in its original and pristine form. (The unspoiled Mid-Atlantic coast, in the time of the Lenni-Lenape, its bays, tidal rivers, broad marshes and the blue sea breaking on its barrier beaches, is an idea almost too beautiful to grasp.) By the time I arrived, it already was under siege, and had been for a very long time. My family was in fact part of the beginning of the final assault. Our home (“Waterfront Living, No Money Down”) was in a development of modest homes going up in the piney woods and filled-in marshes as a result of the opening of the Garden State Parkway, which drew working people from the state’s industrial north to its rural south. The air was cleaner, the housing cheaper.
As a boy, I saw the marshes teeming with ducks and muskrats, as well as the red surveyor flags that marked house lots and future roads. The conflict was clear. I had already developed a melancholic side, and I felt nostalgic for the natural world that preceded my birth. The sense of something being lost was already strong in me and no doubt put a darker turn on my consciousness.
I knew the men who drove the bulldozers, built the houses and sank the pilings for the docks—working-class men, many of them hard-luck cases living from paycheck to paycheck—and I was aware that they were only trying to earn a living and caught up in the machinery of something much bigger than themselves. I did not have enough experience in the world to trace back to its maleficent source the money and the mechanisms that made all this destruction possible, but I sensed that the forces that were slicing, dredging and filling the marshes were powerful, distant and not at all concerned with the fate of alligator snapper turtles, sandpipers or blue-claw crabs.
The eventual outcome was clear. It was only a matter of time. There was nothing for me to do except to spend as much time in the marshes, woods and water as possible and to acquaint myself with as much of it as I could before it was gone. And that is what I did.
When I was thirteen, fourteen and fifteen years old, I walked the curving sand and spartina of my piece of the Barnegat Bay in the early summer with a crab net, which was a five-foot broom handle at the end of which was a loop of wire and mesh net. I also carried a metal bucket that I strapped to my waist. My prey was the blue-claw crab and especially the shedder crab. The blue-claw crab increases its size by shedding its hard shell, green as rusted copper, and growing into a new and soggy parchmentlike shell. The softshell crab is a delicacy, of course. In my youth, you could buy them at bars and roadside restaurants where they were breaded and fried whole in flour and egg and served between pieces of white bread. There was a good market for softshell crabs—I could get a dollar a crab. So in June I would walk barefoot down to the bay, wearing only a pair of cutoff jeans, and wade into the water, slowly making my way through the shallows, looking on the sandy bottom or the edges of docks and bulkheads in search of the dark spots that were crabs. Catching crabs with a net took stealth and speed. At the slightest sign of danger, they skittered and swam like rockets in their sideways propulsion, or they simply dropped like stones from pilings into deep, dark water. Often at the end of a morning, though, I would have a bucket of clicking, hissing and spitting crabs, the big males defiantly waving their knuckled turquoise claws.
These tidal adventures filled my early teens. In the spring, I pursued spawning herring, shooting like silver darts into streams above the swamps and into the vast tracts of the pinelands. The cedar-stained creek water swarmed with these chromium fish. Once, camped on a swamp road in the back of a friend’s woodpaneled station wagon and waiting for the sun to rise on the opening of the hunting season, I listened all through the night to the sound of lapping waves and the crank and squawk of migrating geese in the moonlit sky. In the morning, under lowering clouds, we watched rafts of ducks—thousands of ducks—skim the blue-gray chop. Some of them dropped into our wood decoys with outspread wings and lowered yellow legs. The pursuit that brought me deepest into the marshes, and closest to their secrets, was fur trapping.
I was a trapper as a boy. I caught muskrats and raccoons, skinned them in the backyard, stretched and dried their pelts on wood forms and sent the pelts off to fur buyers in New York. Today, this seems wildly anachronistic, but there was a market for wild fur in those days, and it wasn’t so unusual for country boys forty or fifty years ago to earn money with a trapline. It was like having a paper route, except you got up earlier and carried a smallcaliber rifle or shotgun (to shoot the occasional duck on the way home). A muskrat fetched two dollars, a raccoon three and a half. A wild mink went for upward of twenty dollars. But it wasn’t the money that took me into the swamps. It was the swamps themselves that fascinated me. In late December, January and February, I got up early in the morning to make my rounds, at five a.m., well before the school bus made its grinding way down our road to pick up the children in our far-flung part of town. When I stepped from my bed, the house was quiet except for the lungs of the forced-air furnace, which blew a pleasant warmth through the grates in the floor. The windows were dark against the night. Paul was asleep in his room, my mother in hers, though I sometimes heard her stir. My mother talked in her sleep, though I could never make out what she said. If Johnny was with us, he would be with my mother or asleep on the couch, fully dressed and without a blanket. My mother was a light sleeper and aware, in a distant way, of my movement through the house. I felt it even though she didn’t call out my name. The few minutes I spent getting dressed and preparing to go out into the cold and dark were a peaceful time, and I savored the anticipation of walking the route of my trapline.
I pulled on my hip waders, which I kept near the side door of the house along with my single-shot 12-gauge shotgun and a trapper’s basket; I dressed in dungarees, flannel shirt, wool coat and an insulated hunter’s cap with flaps that could pull down over my ears on bitter mornings; and I set off on my trapline route. I especially liked that first gulp of icy air when I stepped outside the door and felt the cold night almost immediately creep down around my neck and catch the edges of my ears. I trapped in two big marshes, one to the north on the way to Green Island, which was about a half mile from our house over two dirt roads and a patch of pine and scrub oak, and another to the south, in the direction of Snug Harbor, which took me through a more settled part of our borough.
Both marshes were a few hundred acres of muck, marsh grass, tall reeds and tidal ponds, which were fed by cedar-stained freshwater streams that came out of the piney woods. In those days, our little borough, which was called Silverton, renamed by developers from Mosquito Cove, still had unbroken wedges of scrub pine, oak and holly forest, made impenetrable in some places by swelling waves of briar patches, sometimes much taller than a man. Usually, the marsh would be black as ink when I reached it, but I knew its contours, paths and streams, which unfolded in the funnel of the flashlight I carried, and often—especially if the streams had frozen and the ice skim tinkled under my boots—I would startle a black duck or a mallard into flight. The marsh gave off a complicated mix of dark and musky smells that were dank and pleasant at the same time—tidal mud, rotting vegetation and swamp gas—and these odors mixed with the light tincture of the oil I had wiped my gun with the night before. It was a familiar smell, a reassuring and agreeable concoction, and it appealed to me possibly in the way that the pencil-lead-and-chalk smell of the classroom might appeal to a good student. I heard, and even felt, wing beats in the night—I was that close sometimes when the ducks exploded off the water. Their startled squawks traced their ascent. Now and again I would see them cross th
e light circle of the moon.
Sometimes, too, I heard ducks coming into the marsh, dropping out of the pool of black sky, especially when the great flocks were migrating south. Their wings whistled by and seemed to brush my head, though I knew the birds weren’t really that close. They only seemed to be as their wings, either propelling them forward or turned down to brake them for a landing, beat the cold air into turbulence. Otherwise it would be quiet enough for me to hear them touch the water with a small splash and glide on the ponds where they set about their contented chucking. Once in a while, I heard animals that I could not see break through the marsh, splashing and snorting (maybe a deer) or scampering through the reeds (maybe a mink or a coon). Sometimes my flashlight momentarily illumined the yellow eyes of a creature that I had caught unawares as I moved quietly through the corridors of bulrushes. The eyes would blink and be gone as if the animal had made itself invisible by the action of closing its eyes.
At the center of the northern marsh, there was a hummock of cedar and sassafras, a small dry island that was surrounded by a savanna of marsh grasses the flatness of which was broken only by the rounded mounds of the muskrat lodges. If I had time, I sat there across a log, my gun in my lap, and watched the ducks gather into a line, scatter and regroup on the waters of the bay as the sky lightened from black to purple. The other, southerly marsh had a pond at its center, more accurately the widening of a stream, since the water in it flowed ever so slowly toward the bay. The bay I’m speaking of is the great Barnegat, or what was then my corner of it. The southerly marsh had a few muskrat lodges, but there the marsh blended more with the lowland and woods, a transitional place of ankle-high bushes, mossy hummocks and sassafras, and the muskrats lived mostly in dens that were dug into the banks of the stream. Some mornings I caught a muskrat or two in my traps, sometimes none at all. I had to be home before the sun rose to change into clothes for school and be ready for the bus. So all of my work was done in the dark or the magical half-light of a winter morning. Sometimes it snowed, which seemed to me a miracle. On those mornings, it was hard to leave the marsh for school.