by Lou Ureneck
The loggers who had cut over the hillside before I bought my piece of land had brought their equipment up an old logging trail that followed the line of the ridge behind the cabin. Theirs may have been the fourth, fifth or sixth cutting since the first settlers’ axes felled the stands of virgin timber on these hills. I often walked the trail because of the view it afforded at its highest point to the hardwoods covering other hillsides to the north and Kezar Lake to the east, and because it nearly always showed the tracks of moose and coyotes. The logging crew had done its work selectively and with care, taking out most but not all of the biggest trees and leaving the medium and small trees standing, including oaks and maples that eventually would grow into valuable timber. The woods looked opened up but not ravaged. It was not a clear-cut. It had been responsibly done.
I was curious about what the harvest had yielded and drove to nearby Greenwood, a small town between Stoneham and Norway, to talk with the owner of the logging company that had done the work. His name was Wayne Field, and he had been Rick Rhea’s partner in the enterprise of buying, dividing and selling the land. Field, forty-nine, is a tall lean man with smooth muscled arms, wide shoulders, fine straight hair, a goatee and wide glasses. I had no trouble believing he could boss a logging crew. He lived in a log home with a stunning view across a broad valley with a distant meandering stream down its keel. He met me at the door and offered a chair at his kitchen table. I sat down. He gave me a long stare. It would be an understatement to call him intense. He fixed his eyes on me; his face was expressionless; the seconds passed.
“Are you a liberal?” he asked.
There was nothing for me to do but answer honestly that I was a liberal, at least in some respects.
“Teachers are often liberals,” he said. Another stare. “Liberals are wrecking this country,” he said. “They encourage people to sit on their fat asses, eat potato chips, watch television, get obese and take handouts.” He paused. “Hardworking people have to pay for this.”
I said I wasn’t in favor of handouts.
He had to work hard for everything he had, he said. “Liberals are idealists. It doesn’t work.”
It was my turn to pause. I thought of the high-quality way he had cut over the hillside. “Liberals,” I said, “can be idealists. So can others. In a way, you’re an idealist.”
“You’re giving me smoke and mirrors,” he said.
And so it went for about a half hour. He was dead serious and his intensity did not waver. Eventually, I asked him about the hillside. He lightened a little.
“Your land over there wasn’t quite ready to be cut,” he said.
“We did an improvement cut. We removed the lower-grade trees. That’s how you grow a nice forest. I don’t want to be known as a liquidator, taking everything that you can and putting it on the market to get what you can for it. I believe there is a balance to be had.”
Field’s company is Central Maine Logging, one of the largest in the state south of Bangor. He employs twenty men and cuts one hundred tons of wood a year. He owns ten cable skidders, five grapple skidders, three chippers, three slashers, one feller buncher and seven pulp trucks. This is about six million dollars worth of heavy equipment. To make payments on the equipment and meet his payroll, he needs to haul about twenty pulp-truck loads of wood a day to mills, logging yards and lumber companies.
“I grew up in a logging family,” he said. “My stepfather and brothers were loggers.” He said he hoped his sons would take over his business when he retired. “I get out in the morning and look across the frost-covered hills, and I ask myself, ‘How lucky am I?’ I love what I do.”
I asked what he had cut from the hillside where I was building. He said his crew had cut twelve species of trees: red oak, white pine, yellow birch, white birch, spruce, hemlock, beech, red maple, rock maple, ash, black cherry, hornbeam, butternut and aspen. He named them off the top of his head. I was impressed, and I told him that I had always had some difficulty distinguishing between red and white oak. He responded that the difference was in the leaf. The red oak leaf has pointy lobes, the white oak rounded lobes. For him, this obviously was elementary.
Each species of tree they cut had been sorted by grade, he said, and sold for its highest use. The high-grade red oak went for veneer and saw logs, nearly all of it to Canada, but some of it for furniture at the Ethan Allen mill in Vermont. The low-grade wood went for pallets. The good pine went for lumber. Same with the spruce. The lower-grade softwood went to pulp and chips. The pulp was turned into paper; the chips were burned to generate electricity at a biomass plant in Livermore Falls. The beech went for pallets and chips. The ash was shipped to a furniture mill in Canada. The black cherry also was a lumber tree, for furniture, and again it went to Canada. The hornbeam and butternut were chipped. The aspen went to a pulp mill in Jay to be made into glossy paper. (The paper, I later learned, was used in Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Redbook, Forbes and the New York Times magazines and for fast-food wraps and microwave popcorn bags.)
I remarked that the high-grade wood seemed mostly to be going to Canada for furniture production. Yes, he said, the buyers of wood in the area had greatly diminished. Nearly all of the mills had closed down. He could remember being able to sell to woodturning mills in nearby Bethel and West Paris. Those mills had been shuttered. I did some checking and learned that Norway and South Paris, the nearby commercial center for the region, had once hummed with mills making all sorts of wood products; South Paris had once had a national reputation as “Toy Town,” with the country’s largest concentration of toy makers. Children’s sleds were a specialty. These towns—emblematic of others in Maine, the state where the mass-produced wooden toothpick had been invented—had once been thriving manufacturers of wood products. Maine mills made dowels, clothespins, tongue depressors, golf tees, packing crates and thousands of other products from its abundant trees. Nearly all of those small mills have closed down since the 1950s. The loss of that small-scale manufacturing had a devastating impact on the economy of the region—jobs were lost, wages fell, money for local schools diminished and young people moved away.
Field blamed the loss of the mills on Canadian government subsidies and liberal employment laws in the United States. He is partly right, but the picture is more complex. The world changed while Maine mostly stayed the same: low-wage and wood-rich parts of the world took the business; the buying patterns of giant international retailers favored huge producers over small local ones; and new materials, mostly plastic, became a substitute for wood.
But the land has continued to grow trees in abundance, and some men, who inherited the skills and took naturally to the work, have continued to cut them.
Wayne Field’s crew of five men had spent three weeks at the hillside in October and November of 2007 felling, limbing and yarding the trees, and they had hauled fifty loads of logs and chips worth about $75,000 at the mill, log yard and biomass plant.
I asked him if he would come out to the cabin one day and walk the hillside with me. I needed to improve my tree-identification skills. He said he would be happy to. I gathered my coat and notebook to leave, and he showed me some photos of himself and his sons and the deer they had shot. They were impressive, big bucks all of them. We talked some more—he was a coyote trapper. I told him of my muskrat-trapping days. I thought I detected a smile. He brought some more photos. Finally, we shook hands and said good-bye and I drove back to Boston.
Paul, Kevin and I regrouped in the middle of March, with one week, by the calendar, left in winter. We completed the framing and moved to the rafters, which was hard and serious work. Kevin was still unemployed, so he remained engaged in the project, to my good fortune but not his. He had been picking up occasional part-time work on a maintenance crew at Portland City Hall. As usual, Paul had given the work a lot of thought. His judgment was that we should first build and then position the lighter rafter assemblies, the two-by-six trusses, which we were adding for strength and reliability to the roof
between the massive timber rafters. The plan was to assemble them on the deck, and three of us, with Kevin up in the high staging, would raise them to the top plate of the wall. First one end of the rafter assembly went up to the plate, then the other end, and then with a rope we (Kevin) hauled the peak upward. Once the assembly was in place and plumb, we nailed it to the plate; after the first one went up, we nailed boards across the surface of them for bracing. Our plan was to bring the big rafters up into place once all the lighter rafters had been secured. At the end of the first day we had eight light trusses in place.
On the following Saturday, Paul and I returned to assemble the rest of the trusses. Paul wasn’t feeling well. He had the beginnings of a cold, a headache and a sore throat. He decided to come anyway. I had tried to reach Kevin, but he was not answering his phone. I guessed he had had a rough night; Paul said that was most certainly the case. The day brought several snow squalls—the snow came down so rapidly at times and in such big flakes that we could barely see the frame from one end to the other; other times the sun was out and the day sparkled like a palace chandelier. The wind blew with hardly a pause, but we pulled our hoods over our heads and turned our faces away from the weather and continued to work. I stopped only to wipe the snow from my glasses. It was sticky wet snow, like the cottony puffs of windborne seeds, and the flakes attached to whatever they touched. It was a joy to be out in it, but I worried about Paul and his cold. He said he was fine and worked right along. We needed to be careful not to slip on the slick surface of wet snow the intermittent squalls were laying down on the deck. At day’s end, all of the trusses were assembled and neatly stacked, ready for hoisting atop the walls.
There is a curved line of mountains west and north of the cabin. The closest ones, to the west, are about a half mile distant—Joe McKeen, Stiles, Adams, Rattlesnake and Palmer mountains. They are named for early settlers, except for Rattlesnake. To the west and north, in the bend, are Speckled, Durgin and Butters mountains. Durgin and Butters were men who came into this country early too, and one of the later Durgin boys, a sergeant in the Union Army, helped carry the coffin of Abraham Lincoln. His grave is about two miles from the cabin. These mountains share a rugged fifteen-mile ridgeline, like the spine of some skinny and curled-up cat. It may be the ladlelike shape of the hills that captures the wind as it comes down from the north and then bends it, either speeding it up or spinning it into high-speed eddies that barrel past the cabin on the way toward Kezar Lake. Stoneham residents have told me about brief powerful windstorms in and around the west shore of Kezar Lake, sometimes accompanied by thunder, that have laid a hillside of trees as flat as the spines on a porcupine’s back.
I knew none of this weather history when we made our next trip to the cabin to resume work on the rafters. I was aware only that I was building in a windy spot and that we had been sure to brace the rafters when we had left the previous Saturday. I distinctly remembered nailing scrap two-by-fours across their tops for added rigidity. I walked up to the cabin ahead of Paul and Kevin, shuffling through the snow. From the path, the cabin does not come into view until the second turn, and then only barely through the trees. At the second turn, the cabin is back fifty yards into the trees and a full ten feet above the head of someone walking up the path. It is in the third turn that the cabin presents itself in full view, and it was there that I looked up to assay the work we had accomplished.
At first, I was confused by the sight of it, sensing only that something was wrong, and then I focused on what was wrong and saw the disaster that had occurred. All of the rafters we had erected had been knocked down. Some of them lay flat across the tops of the walls, and others had dropped all the way to the deck. One of the beams, at the far end of the cabin, had blown out and was lying in the snow. Apparently the trusses, which were big heavy triangles, had acted as wedges as they collapsed, forcing apart the timbers.
I was taking this in when Paul came up behind me.
“Catastrophe,” I said.
“What?”
“Have a look.”
We walked up together.
“Son of a bitch,” I said. I walked among the welter of twisted lumber.
Paul looked at me and smiled. “Well, what’s a construction job without at least one disaster?” He was oddly upbeat. “We can fix it.”
Kevin, who had been lugging the generator up the hill, now joined us on the deck. “What happened?” he asked.
“It must have been one hell of a wind,” I said.
The sky was gray and threatening rain, which might come down as sleet or cold drizzle at any moment, and here I was confronted with the loss of all our overhead work and damage to the frame. I had been worrying all week about the harm that rain—rather than snow—might do to the deck if the roof didn’t soon go up. If the deck’s plywood were to get wet, and stay wet, it would begin to delaminate. It would have to be torn up and replaced with new plywood—more time and money. I had a diminishing supply of both. It had been dicey but acceptable in the coldest part of the winter to leave the deck uncovered. Snow would not damage it, but now we were moving into a season when it was likely to get wet from melting snow or rain. I had wanted to hurry the roof along in the next couple of days—and now this event, which would delay the completion of the roof even further. How much time would the fallen rafters cost me—a week, two weeks, more?
I told Paul I remembered nailing scrap two-by-fours across the tops of them to prevent them from racking in the wind.
“Yeah, we did,” Paul said, “but it wasn’t enough for whatever blew through here.”
Paul and Kevin seemed not at all set back, and Kevin began working out a way to untangle the mess. He offered his ideas to Paul, who listened and offered some of his own, and the two of them were in deep conference, buoyed by the challenge of it. It was as if they were two mathematicians standing in front of a chalkboard examining a long equation for the errant variable. This is what they liked: problem solving. Finally Paul put forward a rescue plan. We would leave the fallen rafters where they were for the time being, and first we would brace the walls against any further splaying. Then we would go to the opposite end of the cabin and bring into place, atop the wall, the other rafter assemblies we had constructed the previous week, the ones we had yet to set up. Once they were well secured and braced, we would return to the damaged end of the cabin, swing the fallen rafters that had not been twisted too badly back up into position and pull down those that had gotten too mangled. We would build new ones where necessary.
To my astonishment, we had the new rafters in place before noon, and by midafternoon we had repositioned the fallen ones. Kevin was the day’s hero. He climbed the staging, walked the top plates and hoisted the fallen rafters with a rope from above with a disdain for height that is the possession only of young men.
“Put a rope on your waist,” I told him.
“Nah. I’m alright, Uncle Louie.”
“No, Kevin. I’m demanding it.” I threw him the rope.
I followed his path on the deck below, reasoning I could break his fall with my body if he came down.
With the rafters back up, Paul insisted that we clean up the job site and cover the deck with a tarp to protect it against the weather. Before we left, we put extra bracing on the rafters, front and back, and we replaced the beam that had blown out. It was a good day’s work. We celebrated at Melby’s with dinner.
Despite my urgency to get the big timbered rafters in place so the roof could go up as quickly as possible, Paul said no. We needed to sheathe the exterior walls first. The sheathing would stiffen the walls, he said. Even more important, to put the roof on first, ahead of sheathing the exterior walls, would be to turn the cabin into a giant umbrella that would catch the wind and lift the frame off the foundation. “I’ve seen it happen,” Paul said. I pictured the cabin rising over the trees on the wind like a dirigible and then crashing down when the wind stopped. No argument from me—we were building a cabin, not a kite. We would
apply the wall sheathing first. In the meantime, I would keep the deck covered with a tarp and do my best to keep water off the subfloor, which was already beginning to show some swelling from moisture around the nail heads.
We used the next few weeks to frame the ell and cut and assemble its rafters—yet more work ahead of the roof. I tried to reach Kevin one Saturday, but Paul told me he had gotten into a scrape overnight and had ended up in the emergency room, where a doctor put twenty stitches in his head. So it was Paul and I, and then Paul and I and Andrew, who were home on leave for a week. I was thrilled with the progress we were making now. The spring that was emerging filled me with enthusiasm for the work and the hillside. All would be well—even if we were racing the season and the thaw.
I chose a Friday in April to spend my first night in the cabin. There was still no roof cover, and the walls remained unsheathed. In other words, it was a frame, open to the weather. I drove up from Boston, arrived an hour before dark and spread my sleeping bag on the deck. I heard a commotion of splashing on the pond below. It sounded like slap, splash—slap, splash—slap, splash! I had to have a look. I walked down the path to the pond and saw one Canada goose madly chasing another. Neither was fully lifting from the water—they were sort of running and flapping over the surface, one clearly in pursuit, the other making his retreat. The splashes looked like machine-gun fire hitting the water. I was witnessing two males in combat over an unseen female. In the mating season, a female goose selects the male based on his ability to protect her, and what was probably occurring in front of me was a powerful male demonstrating his prowess to a keenly observing female. Once geese are paired, the mating is an elaborate ballet. It begins with the male and female facing each other, undulating their long necks and making soft goose sounds, which is like dry wood being rubbed against slate. It is a sound that seems to contain both effort and pleasure. When the moment comes for the act of mating, they go off by themselves, at night and on the water, in a kind of private tryst. The male and female extend their necks horizontally to the water, dipping their beaks. The female spreads her wings over the surface of the water and slightly submerges. Upon completion of copulation, the female bathes herself with the male watching, and then the male bathes himself as she observes. The watery ruckus unfolding in front of me was a prelude to the courtship and promised that I would have fluffy goslings in the pond in another month.