by Lou Ureneck
I went off to college at seventeen; Paul was then thirteen, entering his first year of high school. When I left, in September 1968, Paul was small, with light brown hair and little hands. When I returned three months later for Thanksgiving, he was bigger, his hair was darker and he was showing signs of a mustache. At college I had been worried about what was happening at home, but Paul was there and experiencing Johnny’s descent firsthand. Then one day Johnny was gone. That’s it—he disappeared. He had been at home to sleep off a bender. It was New Year’s Eve, and my mother had argued with him before she went off to work, a busy day for her as other women prepared for holiday parties. By early evening, when she got home, he had left. No note, no explanation. Just gone.
My mother had by then been near an emotional collapse from worry about money and the conflict with Johnny, and his departure brought her a combination of sadness and relief, setting in motion a long melancholic emptiness that went on for years. It broke her. She experienced his departure as a kind of death after a long illness. But Paul’s reaction was angry and violent; he was devastated. He was a junior in high school by then, and he and Johnny had continued to be close, despite the boozing. It was right around this time that Paul got his first motorcycle. It was a 90-cubic-centimeter dirt bike, which is a lot of power for a boy tearing through the woods on sandy paths and between trees. Johnny loved motorcycles—he had owned an Indian as a young man—and he put his big frame on Paul’s tiny dirt bike to try it out. Motorcycles were one more way that they related to each other. Johnny’s departure—no good-bye, nothing—clobbered Paul. I remember coming home from college and discovering him intent on finding Johnny. He said he would track him down in whatever beer joint he had disappeared into and (he said) beat the shit out of him. It was love turned overnight to rage. How could Johnny have done this to him?
Paul’s life pivoted in another way too. As a child, he had been mischievous and unruly. As a teenager, he became politicized, which made his rebellion dangerous. In his sophomore year of high school, a friend handed him a flyer in the school hallway that had been produced by the Students for a Democratic Society. The flyer attacked the Vietnam War. There was a meeting, and Paul attended it with his friend. He found it interesting. In 1969, a half million American troops were in Vietnam, and nearly a thousand were being killed a month. A quarter of a million people marched on Washington to protest the war.
Paul was taking an economics class at the time. He asked the teacher challenging questions about capitalism. This was not part of the day’s lesson, the teacher said. Paul persisted. The teacher fumed. “This is an economics class, right?” Paul said out loud. He was sent to the principal’s office.
He let his hair grow long. In the summer, he went to rock concerts, mainly in Philadelphia, to see the Rolling Stones, Ten Years After, Procol Harum, Alice Cooper, James Taylor and Bob Dylan. He smoked marijuana and, to the complete consternation of the local police, began dating the daughter of the town’s deputy police chief.
I was aware only vaguely of the life he was living. I came home in the summer from college and worked long hot days at a construction job that typically left me so exhausted that I showered and went right to sleep when I got home. Sometimes I didn’t even have the energy to shower and I fell asleep in my work clothes.
Then, in the fall of Paul’s senior year of high school, there came an event that landed him in serious trouble. A bomb threat was called into the high school while he was in class. Students were evacuated to the gym while the police searched the school. The hundreds of students in the gym were restless and noisy, as they are when they are in a big group and loosely supervised, and the teachers there, too, were talking among themselves and kibitzing. An assistant principal went to a microphone and scolded the students for being noisy. He demanded silence. Paul stood up in the crowded room and said something like, “Why don’t you say something to the teachers? They’re talking too.” The students cheered. A back-and-forth ensued between Paul and the assistant principal. Paul walked out. Incredibly, several hundred students followed. The next day, he was expelled from high school.
My mother called me at college. “They’re throwing Paul out of high school. Can you come home?” I came back from New Hampshire, a sophisticated college senior (or so I thought) and English literature major, and made an appointment with the school principal. I brought my mother along. My goal was Paul’s reinstatement with a pledge that he would cause no further trouble. This brought weak smiles from the administrators in the room. They countered with a proposition: Paul could finish school but not at Toms River. They offered a GED program in North Dakota where he would also work with Indians to satisfy his desire to work with the oppressed. (Yes, they wanted him on a reservation!) The adventure completely appealed to Paul, and a compromise was worked out. The program would begin in the summer, several months away. They also wanted him away, out of town, in the interim. So he came back with me to college and slept in my room. He found college life amenable and especially enjoyed the parties.
After a month, the high school decided against the Indian program—because of the expense, I think—and he was readmitted to finish his senior year. By then, with encouragement from the school administration, he had come under the surveillance of the township police. He had gotten under their skins too. They waited patiently for him to make the wrong move. Weeks before he was going to graduate, he was approached by an older guy at Seaside Heights—the nearby boardwalk resort town where Paul and his friends often hung out. The guy was a Vietnam vet and a local hippie who had a reputation, literally, for having gone to pot. He wanted to buy some grass. Could Paul help him out? Paul said yes and made a contact for him, and the grass was delivered by an intermediary. A couple of months later, in a sweep through Ocean County, dozens of arrests were made and a warrant was issued for Paul’s arrest. The hippie had been a narcotics agent. This was a new order of seriousness. Paul turned himself in to the police.
The cops, of course, were gleeful. He was booked at the Dover Township police station and taken through the various stations of the cross—mug shot, fingerprinting, holding cell. While there and waiting, he saw the mother of one of his friends who worked in the courthouse. Paul said hello. She wanted to know what he was doing at the police station. He told her.
“Oh my,” she said.
Paul and her son were close friends. She was one of those nononsense and capable women who as secretaries run courthouses, school district offices and probably the offices of congressmen. (I had known many from my mother’s beauty shop, where they had their hair done religiously every Thursday. Shampoo and set.) She said she would see what could be done. Two days passed. She got back to him: the police would be willing to file the charges with no prosecution but without dismissal if he left Toms River for at least a year and enrolled in college. This was a deal even a DA would have had trouble arranging.
So off he went to Monmouth College, majoring in sociology and discovering Marcuse, Marx and the Grateful Dead. He lived with a group of guys in a big house in Long Branch, just around the corner from the Stone Pony bar in Asbury Park, where a singer and guitar player named Springsteen was getting started. It was there that he met the dark-eyed beauty from Philadelphia, and the two of them organized demonstrations against the war at Fort Monmouth down the road from the college. My mother sent me the clippings from the Asbury Park Press. One of her sons was in the newspaper, which was not nothing.
CHAPTER 6
THE FRAME
I had been stubborn about salvaging the timbers because I knew that no part of this cabin would give me more pleasure than assembling its frame. In an odd way, the urge to raise those timbers was rooted in my need to put my life back together, or at least the pieces of it that had felt broken. I don’t know how I had connected these two impulses, to build and to reorder my life, or how a spark was made to arc between them, but there was no mistaking the satisfying inner hum I felt the moment I brought the work of the cabin, and espec
ially the assembly of the frame, into my thoughts.
It surely was not because I was a born carpenter. Not even close. Neither did I grow up with barns or timber frames. I was a boy who had grown up in coastal South Jersey where there were farm stands and chicken coops, but not barns, and certainly not the stands of big-circumference trees in which were packed the beams to build them. My boyhood timber was scrub pine, swamp cedar and spindly sassafras. I can’t even recall precisely, down to the actual barn, the first time I saw a timber-frame structure. It must have been in a book or magazine, which is not surprising when I think 130 of the extent to which I had taken from books the ideas about how I might live my life. Books had been my surrogate parents.
My first recollection of an encounter with an authentic timber frame coincided with several crucial vectors in my life: the attempt to make a start as a husband and father, a yearning for a life in the country and a deepening appreciation of an aesthetic whose principal virtue was simplicity. I suspect, too, that my response was wrapped up in some spiritual way with my life then as a reader and the discovery of Tolstoy and his projected self, Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin. I was about twenty when I first read Tolstoy, and each time I finished reading one his stories, I felt as if I needed to recover from the stun of an electric shock. Never had literature spoken so directly to me or had life so fully opened up on the page. The beauty and intimacy of the land, the mix of the vast landscape and the Christianity of the gospels, the mysticism of Mother Russia and the wonder of it all—the sunshine, the rain, the snow, the grass bending before the breeze and of course the Great Man’s ability to put all of this into language (at least as it was conveyed to me in those Victorian translations by Constance Garnett)—was a crucial part of me trying to form myself as a young man. I was looking for a code, and his books provided it. For about two years, as I read my way through his novels and stories, I was drunk on Tolstoy.
There was Levin pulling on his big boots to survey the countryside around his farm, or Levin, back bent, in the hot sun with scythe in hand:Another row, and yet another row, followed—long rows and short rows, with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him.
I was impressionable, and as I say, I had built an awful lot of my life out of books. My other hero out of Tolstoy at the time was Father Sergius, the dashing military officer who forswore a brilliant career at court to become a monk, and who after retreating into asceticism fell again to pride and temptation. I sometimes wonder if a different reading list would have made me a different person. In any event, the Russian with the big boots, tunic and long beard had prepared the ground for a lot of my decisions that followed. What was happening on that hillside was the continuation of something that had begun when I was a young man looking for a way to lead my life.
All of which is to say that for me a timber frame is nothing so much as an aspiration toward an idea—in the same way that a Japanese teahouse is an idea or the Parthenon is an idea or even a well-constructed bait shack at the end of a pier is an idea. It is a conception with both aesthetic and practical implications for the people who use it or live in it. In the case of my cabin, the idea was humble, but it had the benefit of being built on a hillside in Maine with wood sawn from Maine trees. Surely there was some virtue in its origins. Didn’t Tolstoy put simplicity in the same company as goodness and truth?
My nephews and I had stacked the timbers near the cabin before the snow had fallen. So while the stack had to be shoveled off each weekend, at least it was handy to the job. The timbers weighed between fifty and two hundred fifty pounds each, depending on the dimensions, the density of the wood and the amount of water they had absorbed. The posts and beams were six inches square and up to sixteen feet long; the rafters were six inches by ten inches and fourteen feet long.
The first task for Kevin and me was to take stock of our materials. The timbers had been cut in different ways to serve a variety of structural purposes, and the differences were in the dimensions and the idiosyncrasies of the joinery. We had corner posts with shouldered mortises on adjacent surfaces and running posts with mortises on opposite surfaces. We had beams with tenons that would fit these mortises, and beams that did not. Then we had rafters with tongues and others with forks so that they would fit together right and left at the roof’s peak.
Post-and-beam carpentry owns a vocabulary every bit as rich and arcane as that of nineteenth-century seamanship. There are scarf joints, dovetail joints, housed dovetail joints, laps and half laps, knee-brace joints and bird’s mouths. Each serves a distinct purpose. In Japan, where timber-frame carpentry is a thousand-year-old craft, master framers have developed four hundred different ways of joining timbers for strength and beauty. One simulates the neck of a goose. The Japanese have a term, kodama, “the spirit of the tree,” to describe this art; their timber framers make roofs that look like hands in prayer or an emperor’s hat floating in the air. In New England, which drew on its European roots for building methods and adapted old-world practices to the abundance of virgin forests, housewrights adhered to a half dozen joints, building sturdy capes, saltboxes, barns and churches from native pine and oak. And just as every sail on a Yankee clipper ship had a name for the practical purpose of efficient seamanship, so it is with every timber in a timber frame: there are girts, girders, struts, beams, summer beams, purlins, collar purlins, crown posts, king posts, queen posts, collar ties and ridgepoles.
All this complexity and craft immediately appealed to Kevin. He was never happier than when he was sorting something: tools, materials, techniques. Now he was also learning a new vocabularly to match the work. We pulled timbers from the pile and arranged them on the deck. The deck also had to be shoveled off and swept, and while the snow was piling higher, it still had not yet topped thirty-two inches, the distance between the ground and our raised work surface. But it was getting close.
Nearly all the joinery work for the cabin had been done for us by that long-ago carpenter. Our challenge was to lay his conception of the cabin over my more recent intentions. This would require some new joinery to accommodate the discrepancies of vision, but mostly our work was to sort the pieces, connect them into bents and raise them into place to make our box. It was plenty of work for two men, both brain work and back work, especially since one of the men was not as strong and limber as he used to be. We fitted the tenons into the mortises, tightened the pieces together with a ratchet and pulley and pegged the joints with oak dowels when we had the angles at square. We raised the first bent at the far end of the cabin, and after taking a suitable amount of time to admire our achievement, realized the need for the first major adjustment. The long-ago carpenter had designed beams that ran from bent to bent at midwall height. Those horizontal beams would make it impossible to put in my tall windows. I wanted tall windows, nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, for lots of light. I had stayed in a nearly windowless trapper’s cabin once, and it was like living in an old shoe. I had no desire to be a shoe dweller. I wanted cascades of sunshine falling on my buttery pine floors and lots of fresh air and balsam scent pouring in through the windows.
“We don’t need them,” Kevin declared, having already grasped the way in which this framing worked. “We’ve got plenty of rigidity with the top plate and the siding. I say we ditch them.”
I agreed.
Neither had the carpenter’s original conception anticipated an ell to the structure. As we had discovered when we audited our materials and examined the joinery, he had designed one big cabin and two smaller cabins. He had been true to my “family compound” exhortation. We modified his big cabin, making it longer, and reconceived one of the smaller boxes as the ell. We decided to fit them together at the front of the cabin, to the right (facing the front). We measured and cut the beams
for the ell, then chiseled and shaved our own mortises and tenons to connect the ell, at a right angle, to the main part of the cabin. This reconception, excluding one of the smaller boxes, would mean lots of leftover beams, and already the prospect of a small barn was planted in my mind.
Kevin and I did this work in the weeks before and after Christmas. We drove up from Portland, and sometimes we stayed at the inn. It was an enjoyable time for me. I liked his company and conversation, and I was getting to know him better. We imagined summer weekends at the cabin, filling it with family, and cooking outdoors, fishing in the nearby streams and swimming in the lake. The talk appealed to both of us, especially after an exhausting day when our muscles were sore and the conversation kept us engaged in the cabin without having to lift one more heavy beam. The conversations ranged wider, though mostly I was listening and giving Kevin the space to open up. I had been away from him nearly seven years, when I was in Philadelphia, and he had done a lot of growing up in that time. He described the trouble he had been in and the heartache he had caused his father. “My dad has done a lot for us kids,” he said. “I think it’s time for us to show our appreciation better.” As he itemized his scrapes with school and the law, I realized that I had been an absent uncle as he had moved through a difficult period of his life. I felt another stab of regret. It had been selfish of me to be so involved in my own problems that I had not gotten involved in my nephew’s. But it also occurred to me that the cabin, even before it was built, was helping me to know him better and giving me a chance, even at this late date, to offer some counsel and support.