Cabin

by Lou Ureneck

  These conversations, easy and natural, were as good for me as they were for him. It was clear that he was proud of his father, and disappointed in a lot of what he had done to upset him. When he got down on himself, I told him some of the hell-raising stories of his father growing up. He listened intently. He seemed not to know much about Paul’s past. I left nothing out because it was a history showing that, while Paul had been wild when he was young, the main elements of his character, then and now, were generosity, reliability and steadiness. “Your dad got in every bit as much trouble as you,” I told him. “And look at him now.” Kevin seemed to take heart from his father’s experience. He was quiet for a while. Then he told me he was worried about his father and that he seemed to be under a lot of stress. “Paulie and me haven’t helped, I know, getting in trouble and all,” he said. “But he seems to have a lot on his mind right now.” I told him I worried that I had put even more pressure on him by asking him to help with the cabin.

  “No way,” said Kevin. “It’s something he likes.” Kevin suggested there was more conflict at home, in Paul’s marriage, than I had been aware of. “Thank God he has the cabin,” Kevin added. “It’s a good escape for him.”

  I was glad to hear this from Kevin, because I had begun to think just the opposite—that the cabin was taking too much of his time and had set down one more burden on him, which might have accounted for his absence. Now I could see that those absences were due to the time he needed to deal with issues at home. It wasn’t all work or the church.

  One morning, soon after Christmas, Kevin and I arrived at the hillside to find twelve inches of new snow. It was light and fluffy, as if the heavens had dropped a load of dandelion puff on the deck and the beams. We didn’t need shovels, and it offered no resistance to our brooms; we could have almost blown it off the deck. We had sunshine and cold dry air when we worked in those days before the new year. It was an invigorating atmosphere: hard work, clean downy snow and icy air. Kevin lifted, climbed, sawed, drilled and always cleaned up when we were done—another characteristic of his father. He kept going when I had to rest. My body reminded me often that I was not twenty-four years old, as I had been when I had built the house. I felt stiff in my shoulders and the small of my back was sore. It wasn’t so easy to bend under a board or hoist myself onto the deck. I got in the habit of taking ibuprofen every morning before we got to the cabin.

  We finished the basic frame, without the rafters, by the end of January. It was another proud moment in the cabin’s construction, but we were going to need help to get the rafters in place, and to truly have a completed frame. The rafters were big and heavy, and the work was overhead. It would be clumsy and even dangerous for two men. Fortunately, Paul was ready to rejoin the project.

  If I were to make a list of lessons learned about cabin building, one of them would be: order your materials well in advance of when you need them and have them delivered in proximity to the building site.

  The late construction of the driveway and the problems of the foundation holes had thrown me off, and I did not follow the advice I would have given to others. The floor-frame lumber had been delivered to the top of the drive before the heavy snow, but now we needed lumber to fill in between the big timbers of the walls and roof. It would have to be dropped at the bottom of the driveway, which was a good two hundred yards from the cabin, and the snow was falling regularly now, piling ever higher. It was well over the deck, by at least a foot.

  With Paul back on the job, we began planning for a big day of work. We e-mailed between Boston and Portland. Paul was pushing me to make sure all the materials were at hand and to make my final decisions on the placement of the doors and windows and how I wanted to handle the framing of the roof. He did not want to begin the discussion at the job site. He wanted it settled so the work would fly when we were there.

  “Do we have a game plan for Saturday?” he wrote to me. “I want to make sure we have everything lined up so we can make good use of the time.”

  I assured him of the plan and explained the details right down to the number of pieces of lumber I had ordered for delivery before we would arrive. I called the lumberyard in nearby Oxford and ordered eighty-six two-by-fours and thirty sheets of plywood. The two-bys would frame the walls, and the sheathing would cover them. Paul suggested in a return e-mail that we frame the walls first for strength before installing the rafters overhead. He reminded me to add nails to the lumber order, which I did—two fifty-pound boxes, one of sixteen-penny common nails and another of eight-penny. “I’d have them also bring a bundle of shim shingles,” he wrote. “Those will allow us to frame all the exterior walls a standard height and shim to the horizontal bent just in case things aren’t level or square.” He told me that he was going to load the truck after he got home from work with tools, a generator, the staging and the window frames that were still in the backyard. He already had attached the trailer to bring a snowmobile up, and he was planning to build a sled in his garage that we could pull behind the snowmobile to get everything, including the lumber that had to be delivered at the bottom of the snowfilled drive, to the cabin site.

  I had worked on a summer ditch-digging crew when I was in high school, and the foreman would say to us, “Okay, boys, I don’t want to see nothing but assholes and elbows.”

  That foreman would have been blinded and pleased by the blur of men and materials had he been at the hillside on that Saturday in February. Paul arrived with two snowmobiles and a sled, which consisted of a piece of scrap plywood screwed to two old water skis. He also had Kevin and his friend Russell with him, and Russell’s bird dog Abby. So there were four of us, and Abby, all charged up for the work. Abby was charged up mostly for running up and down the hill behind the snowmobiles. We hustled the lumber up the hillside. It took all morning and a half dozen trips, with the heavy-duty snowmobile groaning against the loads and the homemade sled fishtailing behind it as we tried to keep the lumber from falling off. A couple of times it did fall off.

  A good three feet of snow covered the ground. The day was sunny and cold, with a stiff wind out of the northwest. I had noticed on many of my trips to the hillside that the wind seemed to blow harder and more often here than in coastal Portland and even other parts of Stoneham and nearby Lovell. I surmised some sort of tunneling effect from the nearby mountains and did not give the reason or implications much more thought, but it was apparent when the maple trees swayed and their frozen branches clicked against the winter sky that this was an unusually windy location. We were bundled against the cold, and even with the rigors of bringing the lumber up and down the hill, we needed hats and gloves. While the absolute temperature was around twenty degrees, the windchill was at zero or below. It kept us moving.

  By now, in the chronology of construction, I had settled on the positions of the windows in the cabin’s walls, and I knew the heights and widths of the used ones I had scrounged. For the few that remained for me to buy, I worked with standard sizes. The information was necessary to lay out and assemble the stud walls.

  Russell was a good carpenter. You could tell by looking at him: quality work boots, carpenter’s jeans, layered parka and shell, blue Polartec gloves, a nail apron tied smartly at his waist and a thick pencil pushed up into his wool cap. Polite and soft-spoken, Russell seemed always well groomed, even when he was cabin building. As a young man, he had worked with his father building post-and-beam homes down around Freeport and up the coast. He knew his way around a framing square. Russell had been a commercial real estate property manager when Paul had met him a half dozen years earlier, and now he had his own set of businesses: a two-person mortgage finance company (an office assistant and himself), a small restaurant and a couple of mobile home parks. Paul and Russell had an easy rapport, and I was struck by Paul’s ability to kid and quip with irreverence among his friends. I could see that Russell, like many others, enjoyed being around Paul—his confidence, his lack of anxiety, his humor and steadiness. It seemed like we a
ll leaned on him.

  “Why don’t you lay out walls, and call out what you want for cuts,” Paul said to Russell. “I’ll run the saw.”

  Kevin and I were going to be secondary actors on this day, gofers. Paul directed Kevin to do the nailing. My role was to answer Russell’s questions about the placement of the windows and doors and bring Paul the two-by-fours as he needed them. I also stepped the cut pieces to Kevin as they fell from Paul’s saw so Kevin could nail them without interruption. We built the two-by-four walls on the deck and then lifted them into place, fitting them between the posts and beams.

  As a formal matter, I was overseeing the job, but as a practical matter Paul had taken over and was directing the work, an important distinction. He had thought through the flow of tasks. I was happy to concede to him the role of skipper of the vessel. I noticed a subtle but important second shift: through the previous month, it had been Kevin and me working together and running the job. Now Kevin had moved to a lesser role—an assistant to the expert players, Paul and Russell. Kevin chafed at this, I could see, and he resented the directions he was being given. Paul was telling him how to nail the two-by-fours and correcting his errors. “That’s not how you pull a nail,” Paul said. Paul showed him—he laid the hammer flat and rolled the nail out. Kevin disputed some of the advice, but Paul’s experience and authority overruled Kevin’s objections. Kevin’s temper was beginning to rise. I saw that a quiet father-and-son drama was playing out: Kevin wanted to impress his father with his work, and even more deeply to have the work he was doing demonstrate that he had turned a corner in his life; Paul, for his part, was playing the skeptic, making it clear that one day’s work was not sufficient evidence of a new path. At the right moment, I caught Kevin’s eye, winked and smiled. I let him know that I was aware of his plight, and that my advice was to let it go. Russell also had picked up on the friction between the two of them and pushed back a bit on Paul by suggesting, with humor, that Paul’s cuts could be more accurate.

  “Hey, Paul, what are you drinking over there? This stud’s a full half inch short,” he said.

  I had planned to place windows in all of the cabin’s walls except for the one wall in the ell that faced the porch. The biggest windows, a full four feet by five feet with the eight-over-eight panes, would go in the front wall of the ell and the back wall of the main living area of the cabin. They would give maximum views to the outdoors. Then I spread tall but narrower windows in all the other walls with the exception of the short right-side wall, where we had left in the one midwall beam, the mistake we had discovered that had us rethink the carpenter’s original design. That wall got two smaller windows, on the high side of the beam. I also planned to put windows near the peak on the gable ends of the cabin.

  It was astonishing to see the difference that the stud walls with framed-in windows made to the appearance of the rising cabin. It was filling in and looking like shelter. I walked the deck, evaluated the space that would be enclosed by each room and counted the steps from room to room. It was ten steps from the room I’d designated as my writing room to where the door would eventually open from the kitchen to the porch. It was fourteen steps from end to end of the cabin. This was fun. The hammers pounded. At around four p.m., the sun made its descent behind the hemlock trees on the knoll at the rear of the cabin. Kevin and Russell had commitments, so we packed up for the day. I drove back to Portland with Kevin, and Paul and Russell left in Paul’s truck, hauling the snowmobiles. Later Paul and I picked up some dinner in Portland and went to bed early.

  I woke at six a.m. on Sunday, still full of the good feeling of the previous day’s achievement. I slipped out of Paul’s house just as it was getting light and drove back to the cabin. There was a thin layer of new snow. I brushed it from the deck and picked up board ends and nails that we had left during the previous day’s work. I stood in front of each roughed-out window opening and assessed the view. From the big window closest to where the woodstove would sit, I saw the rising knoll and its hemlocks behind the cabin. This would be the window that would catch the setting sun in winter. From the window of the room where I planned to put my desk, in the right rear of the cabin, I looked out on the big red pines and the slope toward the distant ridgeline. We had not framed in the ell, but I speculated anyway on the views through the big windows that I had planned for its front wall—an oblique line down the hillside through the oaks and maples to the crease where the small brook was now bubbling under the snowpack. The bathroom would have two windows: a view from the toilet to the ledge out back, and from the tub to a collection of small pines, a place where I often saw chipmunks darting in warmer months. They would provide good entertainment during a long soak. I walked to the space on the deck, to the front right, where I would put the kitchen. Its windows would pick up shards of light from the pond below, now just a snow pasture with the tops of reeds showing through the deep blanket of white.

  I drove back to Boston, feeling awfully good, and sent Paul an e-mail when I arrived. Me to Paul:I got up to the cabin early this morning. The work looked great. I covered the lumber with a tarp and picked up the site a bit. Just got home this minute.

  Paul to me:I think the place will really fly from here. I see two, maybe three more productive weekends of work before you can start closing it in. I don’t see any reason why it can’t be habitable this summer. It’s going to be a nice getaway.

  Me to Paul:I’ve relied on you a lot for this, and don’t let me rely too much and take advantage of your good nature. I know you’ve got a lot else on your mind. Probably more than I realized. Kevin and I had a nice talk on the way back—I enjoy these trips with him. He’s really looking forward to coming up in the summer and taking the boat out on Kezar Lake. I see so many good impulses in him, and brains.

  Paul to me:Kevin has a lot of potential; this project is a huge confidence builder for him and all of this is great for his psyche; Andrew just e-mailed me a picture of a boat he wants me to go halfs with him on. Will probably do it. It would be a good boat to haul up to Kezar Lake for a day of fishing out on the lake.

  I spent the next month filling in the two-by-four framing, mostly alone. My old solitary self was fully engaged on these weekend trips. It was a lifelong habit, being alone.

  Solo work has always appealed to me. My favorite activities have been solitary pursuits: fishing, walking, reading and writing. Each of these activities has offered me antiphonal moments of effort and ease, concentration and relaxation. They also accommodate my tendency to daydream, and occasionally I caught myself taking a long mental walk around some idea that had occurred to me as I was working. The experience was entirely pleasurable, if not always productive. Antisocial? Maybe a little. Misanthropic? Not at all. I brought a better self to my encounters with others after a period of sustained solo work. So to my list of pleasant solo occupations, I now added cabin building. Alone with myself, I took my time with each building task, thinking it through lightly, letting myself feel the materials, visualizing the conclusion.

  The other benefit of these periods alone is the erasure of time. While fishing, for example, an intense couple of hours spent approaching, studying and casting a fly to a single feeding trout might compress into the sensation of a few brilliant seconds. It is an experience not so much out of time as before time—before the careful ordering of tasks and responsibilities turned daily consciousness into a chronometer of looming responsibilities. I was discovering these same pleasures of undistracted and pure concentration in the carpentry the cabin required. These moments were temporary escapes, but they were powerfully cleansing and restorative. I was even adding a little muscle.

  Usually, I would go up on a Saturday morning, work along easily, and then drive five or six miles to Melby’s, a country restaurant at the top of the hill in North Waterford, where I’d sit at the Formica counter and order the world’s best fried haddock sandwich. I passed the end of February 2009 this way, and the beginning of March, too, and I witnessed the turning of
the season, from deep and implacable winter to a shallower collapsing winter that was struggling to let it be spring. The north country year does not have four seasons. It has more like twelve: winter, spring, summer and fall, each a triptych with a slow start, a glorious peak and an ambiguous conclusion.

  If you are attentive to the light, and the taste and feel of the air, it even is more like sixteen seasons. Winter is easily parsed into four seasons: cold and wet, cold and snowy, bitter cold, softening cold. These follow a sine curve not unlike the shallow course of the winter sun. I was in the phase of softening cold: the tips of the once long shadows of the trees were creeping back toward the tall trunks as the pale sun traveled higher in the sky; the snow was deep but it was gray and it was sunken around the bases of the dark hemlocks; and I could hear the hammering of male woodpeckers resounding through the woods around the cabin. They were banging their heads against hard surfaces to impress the females.

  The winter of deep snow, now ending, no doubt had been a blessing to the mice and other small mammals that had lived safely under the smooth white blanket and among the winterberry leaves, insulated from the cold and, more important, hidden from the famished owls that watched and listened from above. Of course, in the natural cycle of things, the temporary respite from overhead danger would mean a good year for the foxes and fisher cats come spring. Then it would be their turn to prosper.