Cabin

by Lou Ureneck

  It was one of many conversations and glimpses I would have of the hard luck and hard work that were facts of life in this remote corner of New England. It set me thinking a good deal over the summer about the country in general. I could not help but connect the headlines in the newspaper to the lives and attitudes of people like Billy, the truck driver and others I would meet who were struggling outside the tightening circle of jobs that provided decent pay and a little security. The cabin was not only teaching me about the hillside; it was giving me an insight into America.

  It rained off and on that last week of May. Billy and I worked when we could, he being more insistent than I that we keep going even when the drizzle turned to light and steady rain. There was a big pile of rocks a few yards off from the cabin, overgrown with moss and small trees, and Billy was convinced it was an Indian burial mound. “Used to be a lot of Indians around here, long time ago,” he said. “That’s how they made their graves.” He said he knew of some places where there were Indian markings on the ledges of cliffs, and that he would take me there if I wanted. “I used to find arrowheads and Indian tools all the time when I was picking potatoes,” he said. “ ’Course, the owner made us give them to him. He’s got quite a collection. I’m sure he’ll show them to you if you want.”

  In this way, I began to learn the geography and lore of the area, through the prism of Billy’s experience. He told me of places to hunt deer and catch rainbow trout where the wardens were unlikely to find you fishing with worms, and about the roads and trails that cut through the mountains. He had lived his entire life in this landscape, in a square maybe twenty miles by twenty miles, and he knew all the trout ponds, smelt brooks, deer trails and hornpout holes.

  On the weekends, and some weekdays when he could get away, Paul arrived in his pickup truck and the work flew. More often than not, he had Kevin with him. Kevin was his usual agile, brave and hardworking self. When it came time for us to bring the sheathing to the roof, Paul set an aluminum ladder against the cabin near the stack of plywood. Kevin went to the rafters and, pulling a rope that had been threaded through a hole that Paul had drilled in each sheet of plywood, brought them aloft, along the rails of the ladder, and set them in place. It went as smooth as peeled ash. Paul had procured a nail gun from one of his vendors. It was an awesome machine, which used an electric spark to fire a blast of butane gas that drove a piston, sending the six-penny nails deep into the wood. Bam, bam, bam. Nailing had never been so easy.

  The cabin was now closing in, with covered exterior walls and a roof. There was an inside and an outside in a way that there had not been before. The timber frame, bare to weather, described the structure’s perimeter but had insinuated no distinctions about interior and exterior. Now we had an inside that was definitely distinct from the outside. I did another one of my admiring walk-arounds. The rough cuts on the windows now really seemed like windows, illuminated rectangles in the darker walls, and I felt the interior embrace of the cabin: the walls meeting at the corners and the vaulted ceiling created by the sheathing on the roof. The cabin was quickly becoming a shelter.

  It was about this time that a debate ensued among my building team about the layout of the inside. Framed Oxford-style, the proposition would have read something like this: “Resolved, a wall should be constructed creating a separate room at the right rear of the cabin that will be Lou’s writing room.” Almost from the beginning, I had decided on making a “writing room,” a private space inside the cabin to which I could retreat to put words down on paper (or a computer screen if the computer’s battery was sufficiently charged). I had decided on a desk, which would be a hardwood door set on sawhorses, and a spartan chair that I particularly liked for the support it gave my back as well as for the hard frame that would help keep me from drifting off to sleep. I had envisioned a built-in bookcase and a single rough bunk for napping when the words weren’t cooperating. I pictured a neat bed, with white sheets folded military-style under the thin mattress and a gray wool Hudson’s Bay blanket with a couple of yellow stripes. In my imagination, I had even begun to select the books for the bookcase. I would set a good dictionary on a stand, and I had an excellent collection of New England sporting books that would add a nice touch. Next to the bed, on a small Shaker table, would be a volume of Proust. It is my favorite nighttime reading, an experience never fully mastered. The density of his prose inevitably yields for me new subtleties of emotion and thought with each fresh entrance to the pages. I can read and reread it the way I can listen over and over again to Mozart’s music for clarinet. It is a plunge into sensation, heartache and rapture. As we sat on nail kegs and sawhorses in the cabin, I did not bring Proust into the debate over the wall, but I did argue that there were bound to be times when all of us would be up at the cabin, maybe playing poker deep into the night, and it would be a good thing to be able to retreat from the din to a room with a door that closed to allow some sleep.

  Paulie, home for a couple of weeks from motorcycle school, took the negative position. “Uncle Louie, every cabin we’ve ever been in has always been wide open. Cabins are supposed to be open. Remember Carroll Gerow’s cabins in Aroostook? Always open. You want space. This ain’t a house. It’s a cabin. It’s going to feel closed up and cramped if you put up a wall.” He was passionate. “Trust me on this one,” he said. He augmented his position with this: “You can put a desk in the bedroom. It’s plenty big enough if you want to write.”

  Paul and Kevin were with Paulie, but they counseled no decision. “Don’t put the wall up now,” Paul said. “See how you like it. It’s a hell of a lot easier to put one in later if you think you want it than to put one in now and then have to take it out.”

  I could see which way this tree was falling. I delayed making up my mind and after a couple of weeks came around to the nowall position. Paulie was right, and I realized that a writing room was really just one more bit of writerly superstition, not unlike insisting on exactly the right color paper before starting to work. The open space admitted more conviviality and elbow room. But I held my ground on the need for a closed-in first-floor storage closet, which I saw as necessary for outdoor gear. I wanted a locker where we could put rods, boots, snowshoes, fishing vests, ropes, wool coats and such out of sight and behind a locked door for the periods when I would be absent. The building team was fine with that.

  Paul was coming out regularly now to the cabin. I had him back and he was giving me a lot of time. In fact, he was giving me the summer. I looked forward to the appearance of his pickup truck at the top of the driveway. As he stepped from the truck I would meet him and update him on the progress I had made, either with Billy or by myself, and he would inspect the work and make suggestions on what to do next. He was more relaxed than he had been in the spring, when I sensed that he had been preoccupied, and he seemed to be enjoying himself again in the work. But it was clear to me that there was something turning in his life, and I was fairly certain it wasn’t good. I knew from Kevin’s comments that all was not well at home. I did not push him to talk about it. I remembered, too, Kevin’s comments about the cabin being an escape for Paul, and a source of enjoyment. I did not want to disturb his retreat, if that’s what the cabin work had become for him.

  Paul and I had not had the kind of relationship where we brought our problems or struggles immediately to the surface of our conversations, he even less than I—much less than I. But we had been close readers of each other’s lives, and we knew that we would get a sympathetic and thoughtful hearing if we wanted to talk something through with the other. We had a sense, too, I think, of when the right time was to ask deeply about what was happening in the life of the other. We knew each other down to the hurts and victories of childhood, and we had been fused by painful events: shouting matches between our parents, the foreclosure of the house down the shore, our stepfather’s sudden departure and the decision we had reached together to end our mother’s care when she had been on life support in a hospital bed. I tended to
be more of the talker and prober than Paul, who tended to quietly work things out himself.

  There was no doubt: he was emotionally tougher than I was—or maybe he was just more able to carry his pain and problems without expressing them. Our mother had valued this quality of emotional toughness, and encouraged it, and I knew her one concern with me was emotional weakness—my inability to hold up to disappointment in relationships in particular. “Louis, you see the world through rose-colored glasses.” Case in point: she had treated the absence of our real father from our lives as a nonevent. It was a fact, and the fact should be treated with indifference. This theme of being strong through tough times was an essential part of her mothering.

  I remember a night when I was in high school—I was probably seventeen years old; we had lost the house by then—and we were living in a minimally furnished apartment on the edge of town. There was the usual arguing between my mother and Johnny over his drinking and his inability to hold a job. On this night the shouting intensified, and I heard Johnny say something like, “The hell with this. I’m finished with this shit.” He was opening and closing drawers, and I guessed he was throwing clothes in a grocery bag to move out. Listening to their fight from my bedroom, and then hearing the finality of John’s statement, made me break down. I began to shake and sob. I went into the bedroom where they had been arguing, and for the first time ever I confronted him. “You can’t leave,” I said. “You’re part of this family.” I must have been a sorry sight, shaking and in tears, and they both looked at me with surprise. Their eyes seemed to say, Why are you so upset? My shaking left them both silent, and briefly chastened.

  My mother wanted her boys to be men. Men were strong. At seventeen I was a man in her eyes. She worried that I lacked the grit to get through the really tough times. Her attitude was rooted in her own experience. Life for her had been a succession of disappointments: being forced to quit high school to work; a first marriage that became almost immediately oppressive and then violent; a second marriage, to a man she deeply loved but who was dissolving in alcoholism; long days and weeks of work in the beauty shop. Life was about survival, and survival meant not giving in to sadness or loss. She kept me close, and I was always her confidant and principal adviser when trouble entered her life, which was often, yet at the same time she feared I would turn into a momma’s boy. This was one of the tensions that defined our relationship. Was I her father or son? As I grew up, I could see she was convinced I would be successful in some profession and bring her honor, and her certitude gave me a powerful confidence outside of our small family unit, but she also thought she was sending a son into the world with a handicap—something, in her mind, akin to a club foot or cleft lip. I lacked her ferocity, and ferocity was necessary to make one’s way in the world. As a consequence, I got the attention and praise that is often lavished on a sickly or sensitive child.

  Amid the trouble at home, I had escaped to two places—the woods and the library. The loss of the house meant the loss of easy access to the woods, which had been my privilege whenever I wanted it, right out the back door. Once we moved back into town, I spent my entire Saturdays at the Bishop Memorial Library in Toms River. This library, with its big wooden tables, stacks of books and a mezzanine with a milky glass floor, became a second home for me. I sat in a Windsor chair with a small seat pad and wooden arms, from which I read books and magazines as the light shifted sides in the library from morning to late afternoon. The chair itself struck me as representative of a literary life. We had nothing like it at home, and it was better made than anything at school. The library’s walls were hung with portraits, landscapes and maps, and its tall windows, which pleasantly framed berry-bearing bushes outdoors, had deep varnished wooden sills upon which I sometimes stacked the books I had gathered for that day’s reading. As the hours went by, I would work my way down a pile of six or eight.

  I even managed to transform these impulses—for being in the woods and for reading—into the prospect of a career. I decided to become a wildlife biologist and was eventually admitted to the University of New Hampshire’s school of forestry. I already had read all of Aldo Leopold and a lot of John Muir and Henry Thoreau and been through every copy of the town library’s collection of Scientific American magazine. I had a good working knowledge of cell biology.

  My commitment to forestry crumbled, however, when I took my first literature class. The English professor introduced me to Emerson, who proved the perfect bridge between my two favorite places, the woods and the library.

  I don’t know why, but Paul and I didn’t talk about the trouble at home when we were growing up. Maybe it was too big a subject for us, or we lacked the words and experience to put what was happening around us into language. We both knew that it was not good, though I suspect we also thought that most people lived this way. Paul seemed less affected by the tumult than I—at least until John left for good, and then it hit him harder. It wasn’t until much later, around the time that I separated from my wife and passed through a kind of nervous breakdown, that we began to talk openly about our childhood and what we had made of it. It was a conversation that grew more sustained after our mother died. We both realized, I think, that we had bags to unpack. As we talked, I discovered that we had to some extent experienced different childhoods. Paul had not felt it as a time of anxiety or worry, as I had, nor did he see our mother’s life as tragic, as I had viewed it. My guess is that he was closer to the view that she would have expressed herself, a view that would have been shaped by her pride and unwillingness to give in to a sad representation of her life.

  To some extent, Paul, I think, shared our mother’s view of me as vulnerable. At the same time, I was his older brother, and older brothers almost always come with admiration and standing. I had not been without achievement in the classroom, or courage in the schoolyard. I was not a coward among other boys. Paul looked up to me and was loyal to me in a way that went beyond friendship. These were thick and complicated family ties, and when we became adults the ligaments of mutual support were firmly in place.

  We had spent a lot of time together when we built the first house, and we had talked more than we ever had before in our lives. The reliance that I set down on him in the course of that project—he had become the better builder by then—was new to our relationship. Before, I had been the leader, the smart one and the know-it-all. Building the house brought with it challenges that I could not solve without Paul’s help, both problem-solving tasks and physical tasks. The shift evened things out between us, and the relationship grew stronger as a result.

  Paul’s constancy had offered me firm ground through my divorce. He never tired of my taking him through an analysis of the situation that had developed between my wife and me, and he always ended these sessions with the same advice: “Stop beating yourself up.” I had also been candid with him about my state of mind when I was first planning the cabin. I told him about the depression that was falling over me, and the visitations of panic and loneliness. “That’s not good,” he said, and after that he checked on me regularly with phone calls and included me in events at his home with the kids—birthdays, graduations. He had his children call me for advice on their school papers. It all helped.

  Now I wanted to help him if he needed it, though it was not clear whether he did or not. He seemed more relaxed on some days as we worked, but I sensed that he was quietly sorting through a difficult decision.

  “If you’re needing some money,” I told him, “I can help.” It was a shot in the dark.

  “No,” he answered. “I’m fine with money, but thanks.”

  As we worked on the cabin, I asked him about his job, which he said was going okay, and made small talk about life in general. He said everything was mostly okay but that he was feeling a need to make a change—he wasn’t sure what it should be, but there were days when he thought what he really wanted to do was take a year away from everything, get on his bike and drive around the country. “See what’s out the
re,” he said. “You know, this life, it isn’t a dress rehearsal.”

  These conversations occurred intermittently as we worked and were interrupted by the need to call out measurements, ask for tools, even make trips to the hardware store, but they unfolded with a steady unity through the day, and sometimes over several days. More than once I heard him use the phrase “not a dress rehearsal.”

  All through the summer, the hillside was working its magic on me. I was feeling much better. The gloom had lifted, and nature was offering me its cure. Of course, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I had counted on it because it had worked for me before.

  Where there is harmony there is likely to be health, and what is nature but the harmonious arrangement of air, water, sunshine and soil? I worked hard in the mornings when the day was cool and slowed in the afternoons in the heat. Sometimes, after lunch, I snoozed on the plywood deck, my hat pulled down over my eyes and my sweatshirt rolled under my head as a pillow, and now and again I took a break from my work and walked into the woods nearby to the place where I thought I might plant the orchard. I paced off about an acre, roughly in a square, and surveyed the sun and slope, which seemed to me just right for apple trees. Apple trees like a little slope to shed the cold air that threatens the late frosts of spring; valleys and depressions collect the cold air and are hostile to spring’s tender blossoms.