by Lou Ureneck
I decided to call my reliable but expensive driveway excavator. He counseled sanity: wait until spring. I was unwilling. The start of the cabin had lifted my spirits; the work was taking me outside into the cold air, and I enjoyed my trips to Stoneham, even when I went alone and even when things didn’t go perfectly. This was why I wanted a cabin, to be outdoors and working with my brother and nephews, and all of that argued against suspending the work. Even if we stopped, I would still be up there walking in the woods and puttering around at the cabin site. I might as well be working on the cabin.
None of this made any sense to him, I think, and he asked what exactly it was I wanted him to do. I said I wanted him to dig twelve holes in the frozen ground and clean out four others while I pumped them dry enough to set down the precast piers. He more or less said, “Okay, it’s your money.” He charged $150 an hour for his big machine, and he would hire a man to come along at $25 an hour. I was looking at close to $1,500 to keep the project moving. I swallowed hard and said yes.
Kevin joined me the following Saturday. The excavator was there with his man, so that made four of us. The machine cracked the icy earth as if it were nothing more than crust on a burnt casserole, and the three of us on the ground set the concrete piers in the new holes and backfilled them with stone and clods of frozen soil. The excavator cleaned the existing holes of mud and we planted piers in them too. It sleeted the entire day, and at times poured down a heavy rain. We worked in rubber slickers and high boots. Kevin’s ungloved hands were wet, red and cold. He maintained a cheerful attitude and kept working even when I went to get all of us lunch and hot coffee at the Center Lovell Market. We stayed with it until dark, and by then we had all of the piers in the ground.
I took a deep breath. The foundation was in.
The top of the piers defined my work surface at two feet above the little bit of snow that covered the ground. So, unless a big storm blew through the hills, which was more than just a possibility, I knew I would be able to move rapidly to the next step, which was to set the girders on the piers and frame the floor. It was winter, but in this race to erect the cabin, I was leading by a neck. Paul said he was unavailable for the next few weeks, and I had student papers to mark up and grades to submit anyway. Work ceased. I watched the forecast for snow. It came down, an inch or two at a time almost every night, and soon it was more than a foot deep, but it remained below the tops of those piers.
In the two-week pause, I made a trip to the site to look things over and stroll the hillside and surrounding woods. I had been walking alone in the winter woods my entire life and never found them without surprise, joy or inspiration. I put on my snowshoes and made my way over the undisturbed snow to the cabin site and then pushed higher up the hillside, pausing among the stand of red pines, allowing myself to think again that this would make a good place for an orchard; then I moved farther to the top of the ridge, which gave me a view of Adams Mountain, brown and gray against the scudding clouds. I turned downhill on an old logging road that followed an ancient stone wall. The experience of the woods in winter is almost entirely visual: shadow and sunlight; tree trunks black, gray and white, some of them smooth as suede, others rough as oyster shells. The light is everything, turning ice-tipped branches into ornaments and the quartz caught in granite boulders into pink jewels. I stopped from time to time to absorb the silence. The winter woods are nearly always silent. There may be the muffled woof of snow falling from the burdened bough of a spruce tree or the isolated chatter of chickadees as they search among the softwood for seeds, but usually the only sound is the rasp of one’s own breathing. I walked for an hour, letting my mind empty itself into the frozen landscape.
Walking was one of the ways I marshaled my feelings and thoughts and brought my mind and body together into a union of well-being. I often take long walks to settle questions, quiet my mind or warm and regulate my muscles and breathing. If I find myself in a new city, I often walk well into the night down unknown streets to distant landmarks and near exhaustion. It sharpens my senses and brings me to a state of greater awareness of myself and my surroundings. At home in Boston, if my mind is a swarm of bees or if I am absorbing the power of some book I have just finished reading, I go to the streets and begin walking. Each step brings me closer to a feeling of clear comprehension and a sense of both pleasantly inhabiting but not being limited by my body. Maybe this was what the Greeks were aiming at when they spoke of eudaimonia, the sense of well-being that is the aspiration of right thinking. Walking was also part of cabin building, and there was no better walk than a walk in the woods.
It was always a wonder to me how quickly the woods returned me to a sense of beginning again—of a fresh start. It had always been this way with me. Walking an old woods trail and breathing cold air or sitting on a fallen tree trunk to watch an owl surveil the frozen woods for prey—these are talismanic experiences. Nature offers a direct and uncomplicated relationship to the world. It is free of the distorting complications of ambition, shame, disappointment or pride—all of which pollute the joy and beauty that is so freely given by nature.
Here in the woods, there was no spin, and nothing was false or insincere. Is it a coincidence that truth seems in short supply in those places that are bereft of nature? I wanted to tear sham and pretense from my throat—to rip out all the lies—and if that meant pulling out adhering flesh, that would be all right too. What would be left would be clean and honest. I turned back to the cabin, making a circle rather than retracing my steps. By the time I got back, the sun was about to set.
I was struck by the short arc the sun had traveled through the course of the day. I smiled: it had been a short transit for both of us. The sun had risen on the far side of the pond and now it was setting between the near side of the pond and Adams Mountain. If the circle of the horizon roundabout the cabin had been the face of a clock, with north at noon, the sun would have risen in the morning at the four o’clock position and set in the evening at the seven o’clock position—not much of a trip at all. It had been in the sky only eight and a half hours. Back in May, it would have risen around the two o’clock position and set at the eight o’clock position and spent thirteen and a half hours in the sky. The pinched arc did more than shorten the days. The winter tilt of the earth also kept the sun low in the sky. It was this low route and the trajectory of its light that flattened the ground late in the day. The pale sunlight had skimmed over the surface of this little piece of earth and had given the trees long shadows. Now even those long shadows were disappearing in the dusk. A little wind stirred in the cold air, but I stayed seated on the pile of lumber I had cleared of its pillow of snow. I could sit there all night, I thought.
The light was seeping from the woods, and the dark spaces among the trees were utterly silent. This had always been a sacred part of the day for me. The light was dying, and soon it would be night, a bright winter night. The night sky in winter is a marvelous thing. It gives capacity to the mind and dimension for thought and ideas and provides the clarity necessary to see the world as it is, and not as it has been delivered to us by the peddlers of cant and convention, which is nearly always a way of keeping us from our true selves. I sat there, pulled my light coat up to my chin and remembered back to my earlier life, the one in which I was the father of two young children. There had been a night, a powerfully cold night, as I recall, much colder than this one, and for some reason I had been drawn to go outside of the house to look at the stars. The house had been complete for five or six years by then, and my wife and I and our children were well settled into it. The night had been moonless and clear, and there was a profusion of stars. I found the North Star and turned in place to take in the entire sky. It had been a night in which the stars actually sparkled; they glittered, it seemed, for my benefit. The snow was deep and creaked under my boots. The temperature was well below zero and a pale wraith of smoke drifted up from the chimney as the woodstove inside pulsed with heat. I had stood there for a very long time,
letting the cold find its way into my woolen shirt, and I thought I would never be happier.
In the week before Christmas, I drove to Paul’s house for the night to break up the drive to the cabin. Now, with his house emptying itself of children as they grew up and moved out, he always had a spare bedroom for me. I slept in one of his girls’ rooms, with high school photos and posters of boy movie stars on the walls, and woke early. Andrew was still on leave, and he said he would join me for the day’s work. I knocked on his bedroom door at six a.m., and together we loaded Paul’s truck with tools and a generator for powering a saw. The sun was rising and it was cold—fourteen degrees in Portland. No doubt it was colder in the hills. Paul could not join us, but he was letting me use his truck; I left my car for him. Andrew called Kevin, who lived downtown with his girlfriend and her mother, to see if he wanted to come along for the day’s work. I hit the jackpot: Kevin said yes, and both one of his friends and Paulie wanted to come along too. That would make five of us to frame the floor. It gave me a good shot at getting it done.
I was especially glad to have Kevin along. He had demonstrated his willingness to work during the foundation fiasco. But I also saw in him an uncanny strategic sense. He liked to plan a job. He shared this trait with his father: he had a very well-developed sense of spatial relationships, and he was always looking ahead to the next step and around the corner for a hidden problem. Except that Kevin would look ahead three or four steps. He would say something like this: “You know, Uncle Louie, I think if we put this there first, and then follow it with that, we can avoid having to carry that as far, and we will be able to just lift that over there with a lot less effort.” Huh? I was astonished at these insights, and they proved more and more useful as the cabin took shape.
I also liked to have him with me because his mind was constantly turning things over. He chattered through the day about this and that—interesting programs he had seen on Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel, newspaper stories reporting government waste, as well as a stream of personal observations on the world’s ineptitude. The list was long: taxes, war, the prices of various products at the supermarket, certain motor vehicle laws, people who cut in line, pet owners who didn’t walk their dogs often enough, inaccurate weather forecasts, the cost of meals at some restaurants, global warming. He was constantly evaluating the scene around him and trying to fit the pieces together. The process seemed to require that he put all of his incipient thoughts into spoken language. I was his audience as we worked.
Kevin’s life had had a rough beginning. Less than twelve hours after his birth, a nurse noticed he was spitting up dark bile. She alerted the doctor, who quickly diagnosed the cause: his large intestine had ruptured. The doctor took Paul aside: “I can remove the ruptured intestine, but I don’t know if he can survive the operation. Without it, I’m certain he will die. The decision on what to do is yours.” Paul’s response: “There is no choice. Operate.” The doctor removed Kevin’s large intestine and some of his small intestine, and he spent the next six months in the hospital.
It was during this period that I had in a sense betrayed Paul. I had not gone to see Kevin in the hospital then and was only remotely aware at the time of the problems Kevin and Paul were facing. My mother, who had moved to Portland to be near her sons, was the intermediary. I was absorbed in my job and my own life and was seeing Paul only intermittently. Life was going well for me then: my children were young and happy, my marriage seemed to be sound and I was busy and rising fast at the newspaper. I was beginning to accumulate a few extra dollars. Paul was in Portland working construction at the time and coping with a very sick child. I should have been there at his side, but I was not. It was a failure I could not take back. This period of disconnection between us lasted nearly five years, the time during which Paul’s other children were born. One day, when we were alone and driving back from work at the cabin and talking about Kevin, I apologized to Paul for not coming through for him. It was a painful moment and I was not eager to explore my failure—I just wanted to get it off my chest and apologize.
“I should have been there for you then, and I wasn’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Paul said. “I don’t even remember.”
I think he did remember. He was giving me a pass.
Kevin was Paul’s second child and encountered the problems typical of a middle child—he’d felt that his older and younger brothers got more attention from his father, and that his two sisters got more attention than all of them. To confound the problem, turning it from something not unusual into something more troubling, Kevin had gone to live with his mother after Paul and she had broken up. He was about ten at the time, and the separation from his siblings increased his perception of being left out. He was a sensitive boy, aware of everyone’s feelings—sometimes more than his own—and he felt overlooked. Occasionally he brooded on the unfairness of it. Eventually, he moved back with Paul and his brothers and sisters, and a kind of unity was restored. But he carried an angry flame inside. Sometimes that anger surfaced with too much drinking, and when he drank he inevitably got into trouble. Kevin, who was otherwise bright and often intensely logical, had a way of putting himself exactly in the wrong place at the wrong time—like on one night of July Fourth fireworks when he got into a fight with a group of boys and ended up hitting a Portland policeman who was trying to break it up. It was assault on a police officer, and it landed him in jail. More recently, with counseling and honest self-appraisal, he had worked through his anger and was showing a more grown-up self. He had gotten a job as a mason; he liked the work, excelled at it and, though he’d recently been laid off, intended to return to it. In our long afternoon talks, I suggested he might want to open his own masonry business. His father and I would help him get started, I said.
Andrew, of course, was now a hero in the family. He had served two tours of duty in Iraq as a navy corpsman assigned to a marine combat unit. In his first deployment to Iraq, in 2006, he served with the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines in Diyala Province; in his second deployment, in 2007, he served with the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines in Anbar Province. His job on both tours was emergency medicine in combat. Andrew had always set himself apart as an individual and a bit of a loner—he was an outstanding long-distance runner, and (I’m willing to bet) one of the best deer hunters in the state of Maine. You could hardly put him in the woods when he was growing up without him finding and shooting a deer. He moved through the woods as quietly as smoke. After high school, he enrolled in a vocational school to study boat building and engine repair, and went to work at a marina in South Portland. He grew bored with the work and joined the navy to shake up his life, which he did with distinction. He had been recognized with leadership awards through his period of training and had made it a point of personal pride to attain an elite level of physical fitness. He defeated his marine brothers in push-up contests. In Iraq, he had experienced combat and had been thrown from a Humvee by a roadside explosive device.
At the hillside, I put Paul’s truck into four-wheel drive and took it partway up the driveway, which was covered with snow. Below the snow there was ice. The five of us shuffled through the powder from the truck to the cabin and hauled the generator with us. The sky was mostly blue with a few drifting gray clouds. It was cold and dry, a good day to work.
The battle plan was to first build four girders that would span the length of the cabin and rest on the concrete piers. The boys stood ready and awaited my directions. I explained the tasks, the materials and the sequence of construction. Of course Kevin had suggestions on how to arrange the materials to lay up the girders more efficiently. I took his suggestions and we pushed forward, each with our own duties. Andrew pulled the two-by-eights from under the tarp and snow. Kevin’s friend followed and soon we were working together smoothly as a team. Paulie built a fire and moved between it and the work. We matched, staggered and nailed the two-by-eights together to form the girders, and then lifted eac
h into place atop the concrete pillars. Soon we were marking and cutting the joists and installing the joist hangers to the girders. We slipped the joists into place, forming a latticework that looked like the inside of a piano.