Cabin

by Lou Ureneck

  Now even in those days, which is going on forty-five years ago, it was a little unusual for a thirteen-year-old boy to be seen walking along the road carrying a shotgun at five in the morning. Given the hour, my witnesses were few and far between, and they were mostly people forced by a long commute to be in their stillcold and sputtering Fords and Chevys, maybe to Trenton or New Brunswick. They must have lived thereabouts, because there would have been no other reason for them to be in this nook of the town. Of course, there must have been those, too, who were actually just getting home at that hour, returning from the graveyard shift at some factory to the north or a night of local debauch and drink. I don’t know and never considered it. I was submerged in my own thoughts and pleasures, happy to be warm in my clothes and feeling the straps of the pack basket on my shoulders. But people did see me, and since my trapping was no secret among my friends on the school bus, it was only natural that I developed a reputation as the boy who was a muskrat trapper. It probably added to my standing that I also caught and sold snapping turtles and shedder crabs in the summer, and I could almost always be found in the months of July and August on the bay fishing for blackfish, blues or fluke.

  All of which is to say it should have come to me as no surprise when one day a neighbor told me that there was a man who lived near the swamp, the one on the way to Green Island, who wanted me to come by for a job. She described him as an older man who had recently moved down from “the city,” which is the way nearly everyone there referred to North Jersey. This was in the summer, July, in the best part of the gardening season, when the lettuces were coming up in big green leaves in the dark sandy soil and under the hot Jersey sun. The man had gotten my name while sitting in Silverton’s only tavern, Toby’s. The owner of the bar, Toby, was a malevolent character. The bar had made him prosperous—he owned a new Buick and traveled to Florida for a few weeks in the winter. He also owned hunting dogs, mostly rabbit hounds, and had a reputation for cruel training methods. If a dog didn’t meet his standards, it was cast off or shot. Johnny drank there, and sometimes he brought me inside the bar. I sat on a bar stool with him and drank birch beer. Toby let Johnny run a tab, and this appeared to give him power over Johnny. He was deferential to Toby in a way I had not seen him with anyone else. I owned one of Toby’s cast-off dogs, a gun-shy English Pointer named Joe. Toby’s bar opened in the morning for men who couldn’t wait until noon for a drink and was a place to drop off and pick up information—the availability of part-time work, local squabbles, where fish were being caught and the like. One day the man who had moved to the place near the swamp had come into Toby’s and complained over his beer that the muskrats were cleaning out his garden. Toby told him that he knew a boy who could rid him of the muskrats. My neighbor’s husband had been present for the exchange, and she related it to me. “He will pay you,” she said.

  It was July, certainly not trapping season. Motivated less by lucre and more by ego and the flattery of having had my name spoken in Toby’s as a trapper, I knocked on the man’s door. It was a sweltering day—nothing like my winter mornings in the swamp. He was a small dark man, and a television was mumbling somewhere in the house. He came out and took me to his garden. He showed me the garden damage and offered me a price. I came back the next day with a half dozen traps, and over the next days began catching the muskrats that were slipping into his garden at night. The man was pleased. “You really know how to catch those bastards,” he said. But each day as I stood in the summer sun I felt worse and worse about taking the dead muskrats from the traps—the pelts of the muskrats I was catching were useless in summer. They lacked the deep loft of fur and the black-and-brown sheen of the animals I caught in the winter. And there was nothing to do with the carcasses, so I buried them in a corner of his garden.

  This trapping brought me none of the pleasure that I got from my winter rounds in the marsh. It seemed more than a waste; what I was doing seemed a sacrilege. I even stopped lifting my eyes to the marsh when I was in the man’s garden. I felt ashamed. On about the fourth day, I gathered up my traps, and without saying a word to the man, I walked away from his house with no intention of going back. I didn’t ask for the money I was owed. The money would have made me feel even worse. A couple of weeks after I had put the episode out of my mind, my neighbor told me the man with the garden was awfully pleased with the work I had done since the muskrats were no longer eating his garden. “He wants to pay you,” she said. I went back to feeling bad and that winter didn’t return to the marsh as a trapper. I had done something terribly wrong, and I was sure the marsh was aware of it, and if it wasn’t, I surely was.

  This memory—of killing muskrats out of season so a man who had a summer house down the shore could put his garden too close to a marsh—remained buried for forty years. An essay by Václav Havel brought it back to mind, and in reading it I reexperienced the disappointment in myself for having agreed to eliminate those creatures for money.

  In the essay, “Politics and Conscience,” Havel remembers a disturbing sight from his boyhood, of a factory smokestack polluting the sky:Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling the heavens. I have no idea whether there was something like a science of ecology in those days; if there was, I certainly knew nothing of it. Still that “soiling of the heavens” offended me spontaneously. It seemed to me that, in it, humans are guilty of something, that they destroy something important, arbitrarily disrupting the natural order of things, and that such things cannot go unpunished. To be sure, my revulsion was largely aesthetic; I knew nothing then of the noxious emissions which would one day devastate our forests, exterminate game, and endanger the health of people.

  Havel speculates that a medieval peasant would have had the same reaction as he, a boy—a shared intuition of something terribly wrong, of some natural, higher law being violated.

  What is it, actually, that the world of the medieval peasant and that of a small boy have in common? Something substantive, I think. Both the boy and the peasant are far more intensely rooted in what some philosophers call “the natural world,” or Lebenswelt , than most modern adults. They have not yet grown alienated from the world of their actual personal experience, the world which has its morning and its evening, its down (the earth) and its up (the heavens), where the sun rises daily in the east, traverses the sky and sets in the west, and where concepts like “at home” and “in foreign parts,” good and evil, beauty and ugliness, near and far, duty and rights, still mean something living and definite. They are still rooted in a world which knows the dividing line between all that is intimately familiar and appropriately a subject of our concern, and that which lies beyond its horizon, that before which we should bow down humbly because of the mystery about it.

  Few boys now are trappers, and most of us live in cities. Technology has separated us from farms, fields and woods. So the question that nags me is this: Has the departure of nature from our lives impaired our ability to make moral decisions? And by extension, does this account for the way we treat the earth?

  CHAPTER 4

  FOUNDATION

  Our immediate objective on the hillside was sixteen holes, five feet deep and eighteen inches across. Into each hole, we would place a heavy-duty cardboard tube twelve inches in diameter, then surround it with dirt to ground level before filling it with wet concrete to the grade of the cabin. The concrete would dry into hard permanent piers that would reach below the frost line of the hillside’s soil. Such was the plan to create the foundation.

  It was a marvelous conception, so easily executed in the abstract.

  I rented a small backhoe from a tool and equipment store outside of Portland the night before the work was to begin, and we drove up to the cabin with it on a trailer behind Paul’s truck. We spent the night at a nearby inn that was a vestige of the old ski area—a long articulated building with two levels of simple and inexpensive rooms and a center lodgelike space at the knuckle with a big fireplace.
We wanted to get an early start. Our room had a kitchenette, Murphy bed and pullout couch. Paul crashed on the couch without pulling out its bed, the back of his head resting against one arm of the couch and his legs slung over the other arm. He had always been able to sleep anywhere with ease. I remember him once as a teenager, after a three-day disappearance, putting down an unbroken thirty-six-hour sleep on the living room carpet. My brother was no insomniac. I asked him if he wanted to share the Murphy bed, and he was already asleep. That night he had not seemed in the mood to talk anyway. I put a blanket over him. I read for a while, then dozed off.

  In the morning, Paul climbed onto the backhoe and started the engine. It fired up with loud popping sounds as if firecrackers had been dropped into the upright exhaust pipe. It roared when he put it into gear and moved it to the position of the first hole. But then he shut it down, got off the machine and handed me the key.

  “Go for it,” he said.

  Me?

  I was not ready for this. There was a subtle shift in the hierarchy of the work, or workers. I thought he would dig the holes. He was better at this work. The man on the backhoe was going to be the one shouldering the work for the day. I had just assumed he would operate the backhoe and I would assist with a shovel. No, he was handing the project back to me. Was he telling me that he would help with this project but he wasn’t going to let me, slyly as the smart big brother, set it down on him? Or was the message, maybe unconsciously, even more profound? Was he telling me to give up on the role of older and more sensitive brother, which insinuated him into his old childhood role of bad and irresponsible boy, and to recognize him as an adult? In other words, was he telling me to acknowledge that he had grown up? I looked into his eyes, and I could see that he wasn’t climbing onto the backhoe.

  I climbed up to the seat, started the engine and tried out the hydraulic levers that moved the bucket up and down and right and left. They jerked madly like some spasmodic insect, and I was unable to get the smooth swing of a professional operator. I dropped the teeth of the bucket into the ground and opened the first hole, on the front left side of the cabin, under what eventually would be the porch. Paul set about lining up grade stakes and strings and marking the positions of each of the holes with a can of red spray paint. He was doing the brain work; I was doing the grunt work.

  There is no month in Maine worse for work than November. It is the rainy season, and the rain mixes with below-freezing temperatures to make sleet, slush and frozen mud. Even the loggers wait until December before they take their equipment into the woods. The day was cold and overcast, but so far we were lucky—it had not yet snowed, and we felt only the occasional bit of drizzle through the day. Now and again, I heard the report of a rifle in the distance. It was the last Saturday of the deer season.

  The hardest part of the backhoe work was dropping the dirt that came out of the holes in the right place and moving the machine from hole to hole. All the digging was inside the footprint of the cabin, and I was fast running out of room. It was difficult to both pile the dirt and keep enough space open for the machine to change its position for the next hole. To make matters worse, I was making no progress on smoothing the swing of the bucket. Occasionally, a bucket spasm knocked dirt back onto the hole I had just dug. I had to start over. I began to wish that I had insisted on the auger. It would have yielded sixteen clean and easily dug holes. Who cared if one was off a bit? I should have stood my ground against Paul’s objection. I sat on the backhoe, fumbled with the controls and nursed my failure to insist on the auger approach. I held my anger and stayed silent.

  A more serious problem soon developed. Water began to collect at the bottom of the holes I was digging, lots of water, and it began oozing into the holes at just two feet of depth. We were contending with a seriously shallow water table. Given the altitude of the cabin and the positive drainage down the hillside, this took me by surprise. It was as if we were trying to dig holes at the beach. The sides of some of the wettest holes began to collapse, and pretty soon they were three feet across and full of mud and water. The wider holes made it even more difficult to move the machine. The job was fast becoming hopeless.

  Our water problem had a long history. The great Laurentide glacier had crept down from the north about ninety thousand years ago and covered the northern tier of what is now the United States. Thousands of feet thick and enormously heavy, the burden of its weight depressed the surface of the earth. Ice reached from the Pacific to the Atlantic oceans, and in the east as far out as Georges Bank. Eventually, as the earth’s climate warmed a few degrees, the monster glacier began to retreat and, about twelve thousand years ago, melted its way out of Maine. In its exit, water flowed from the glacier’s base and spread sediment of varying textures, from fine clay to bony gravel, over the landscape. The result was a kind of geologic layer cake of soils that rested atop the earth’s crust. The hillside was a good representation of the layer cake. Its bottom layer was a fine dense clay, the next layer was sand and gravel, and the shallow top layer, which began to form after the glacier’s departure and while giant mammals still roamed the region, was a mat of organic material, black soil made from the decomposition of the forest and webbed together with the roots of small plants. The layer cake was strewn with big rocks that floated freely in the clay and gravel. These rocks had been scraped from the earth’s crust to the north and carried south by the wall of ice during its advance and then held in its belly until it began its crawl back to the north. In its retreat, the glacier dropped its rocky baggage here, around my cabin site, and of course, the rest of New England. Those rocks had then slept deep in the ground for millennia, but once the land had been cleared of its trees and cultivated by the first European settlers, frost was able to reach farther down into the ground, and slowly the freezing and thawing of moisture in the soil worked the stones to the surface. The early farmers found themselves with a new crop of stones each year. They lifted them from the fronts of their plows and piled them into stone walls. The stones are still working their way up and out of the ground as any New England gardener knows.

  A close look at the mountains to the north and west of the cabin elaborates on the glacier’s story. The northern slopes of the mountains are relatively smooth. The ice sheet simply rode up and over them as it moved along. But the opposite, southerly slopes are ragged and sometimes sheered off. The ice sheet had grabbed these leeward slopes in its frozen underside and ripped off the faces as it inched forward, grinding the bare rock into pebbles. The contours of the land around about the cabin could nearly all be explained by the descent and retreat of the giant ice sheet.

  At the cabin site, what was happening as I dug the holes was this: the water that had fallen on the hillside through the fall and summer had collected in the soil and percolated into the gravel. Some of it stayed there; some of it ran down the slope over the smooth dense surface of the clay. There had been plenty of rain, of course, so the hillside was saturated like sponge. When we opened the holes, we gave all that water in the gravel a place to run to and collect. Each hole had become an inground cistern, a muddy, sloppy mess of gravel, clay and soupy water.

  There was no way we could set cardboard tubes into the holes. In an hour, the paper would be as limp as a wet slice of bread. So here on the first day of construction, we had a big problem. For builders, there is no problem like a water problem. I watched the holes fill with water and wondered when I would get cut a break. There had been the driveway problem, the ledge problem, the rain problem, the excavator problem and now the water table problem.

  We talked it over. Paul suggested we come back with a mud-sucking pump, a device that is half gasoline engine, half lamprey eel, to empty the holes of water and substitute precast piers for the cardboard tubes. We would forego pouring the concrete ourselves. The precast piers would not reach below the frost line since they were only four feet long and needed to extend at least a foot out of the ground, and sometimes more where the grade of the ground declined, b
ut we saw no alternative. Paul thought we also needed a load of stone delivered to the site to firm up the muddy bottoms of the holes. I concurred and silently did the math on the mounting cost of the foundation. I would have to rent the pump, buy the precast piers and the stone and pay the trucking charge to get it to the site. We called it a day as a half dozen luckless hunters fired their guns into the air to mark sunset and the end of the deer season, without having shot a deer. It seemed an appropriately futile salute to a miserable day.

  The next weekend we returned with reinforcements. In addition to renting the backhoe again, Paul’s three sons joined us: Paulie, Kevin, a mason who had been laid off from his job, and Andrew, the oldest son and recently back from Iraq, where he had served as a corpsman in a marine combat unit. They were strong young men and good workers. Well, maybe Paulie did more joshing and joking than working, but he was good company. I was elated to have them with me.

  The holes were full of water, clear at the top and muddy at the bottom, with icy rims. To make matters worse, it had rained and then snowed just enough during the week to cover the ground and make it slick. The ground was frozen to a depth of a couple inches. Paul started the pump and dropped the big hose into the water. Andrew climbed on the backhoe. He was far more adept at swinging the bucket than I and began cleaning the old holes and digging new ones. Kevin helped Andrew from the ground, using a shovel inside the holes to clear mud and straighten the walls. Wearing boots, he climbed down into the water, scooped the mud and lifted it out. It was cold and dirty work, but he went at it with enthusiasm. He paused only to goad Paulie, who was building a fire to stay warm and playing with his dog, Koda. “Hey, Paulie,” Kevin hollered over the roar of the pump. “Don’t strain yourself over there while the rest of us are working.” I pushed wheelbarrow loads of stone and poured them into the holes. Kevin climbed out of the hole each time and filled the wheelbarrow from the pile at the top of the driveway. In no time, Koda got tangled in the foundation lines Paul had set, and in his struggle pulled up two of the grade stakes. “For Chrissake, Paulie, get a hold on that dog!” Kevin shouted. I was prepared to shoot the dog. Fortunately for Koda, I was unarmed. Paulie chased Koda down and leashed him to a tree, where he spent the next hour barking disconsolately at nothing in particular. We worked furiously into the afternoon, barely making progress against the constant flow of water. The pump was sucking, gorging on muddy water and spewing it through a pipe about twenty yards from the cabin site. We paused around one o’clock, and over the campfire heated a big tin of rigatoni Paul had cooked the night before and had brought along. We considered the situation. The rigatoni disappeared quickly but the situation did not improve with discussion. We had worked like mules and set only four of the sixteen piers. It was now two p.m., and the sun was just over the treetops and soon to be behind the mountain. It was December 6. Tomorrow would be colder than today, and the day after that colder still. The days were getting shorter. Soon the ground would freeze too deep for the small backhoe to break it. We knocked off at sunset, discouraged and silent.