Cabin

by Lou Ureneck

  Toward the end of June 1863, a rumor reached the Confederate Army that there were shoes to be had in the town of Gettysburg, in south central Pennsylvania. The Southern army had been fighting in bare feet; a Confederate general sent troops to get the shoes. At the same time, two brigades of Union cavalry had been sent to secure the town. There were other Union troops coming up behind those two cavalry brigades, and among them was the 16th Maine. Neither side expected an encounter, and despite orders from Lee not to engage the enemy before he had pulled together his spread-out army, the Confederate general who had sent for the shoes engaged the Union cavalry. In hours, the most consequential battle of the Civil War was under way. Hosea was in the middle of it.

  The Union generals decided to hold their ground at a Lutheran seminary on a small hill west of the town. The Maine boys were positioned behind a rail fence near the seminary, in full view of the enemy two hundred yards away. There was furious firing between the lines, and the Maine regiment was ordered to make a bayonet charge. It drove the Southerners into the woods. The spread-out Confederate Army began to converge on Gettysburg, and it bore down on Seminary Ridge from the north and east. The Union Army retreated, its lines crumbling. The Union command saw that it might save its army if it could slow the Confederate force. The 16th Maine was ordered to remain at the ridge and “hold it at any cost.” The mass of Confederate troops fell on the 16th Maine, and soon it was surrounded. The Maine commander broke his sword in the ground, and the men who had not fallen gathered around their regimental flag, refusing to relinquish it to a rebel officer. They tore it and shoved the pieces in their shirts. The men, including Hosea, were taken prisoner. Wounded again, Hosea was held at a Richmond prison and placed in its hospital. He died there on November 5 of typhus.

  The war changed the hill country of western Maine. The boys who left to fight saw new lands and places that were easier to farm, with less cruel climates and fewer rocks, and the countryside began to empty out. Farms were abandoned; fields were slowly reclaimed by the forest. In 1860, Stoneham’s population was 460. Today it is 255.

  The New England landscape that remains a lockbox of America’s idea of a virtuous and ideal past—of skating ponds, village churches and flinty but provident family farms—had in fact been in a state of constant change since the arrival of the first Europeans. The end of the great rebellion brought one more change, though it was one from which the region never fully recovered. Gone were the multitude of farms, the small manufacturers, the lively commerce with Europe and the Caribbean, the village life and the steady stream of national leaders.

  The question that I pondered as I walked back and forth to the cabin was this: Does the decline of this corner of New England, or at least the disappearance of the old symbols of austerity, selfsustenance and ingenuity that it so firmly embodied, prefigure a decline of the best part of the nation’s character? Could I read some warning to America from this little piece of intervale that had so freely given its blood to maintain the Union but had lost its future? Here was the arc: from Eden, to frontier folk, to settled farms, to industrialization and war—and, finally, to long economic decline. Even the wood in the furniture for sale in the bigbox stores where local residents pushed their shopping carts was now cut, turned, shaped and glued in Asia. The wood! What happens, I wondered, when a nation loses its work and it becomes a discount shopping mall stuffed with goods manufactured in China?

  Sylvester Adams, in whose home Hosea and Albion had grown up before going off to war, eventually married, and he had three sons: Perly, Winfield Scott and John Quincy. John Quincy had a son, Albert, and Albert was the last Adams to live in the intervale. One of my neighbors remembers him sitting on the porch of the house that occupied the knoll. The house and land were sold in 1930 to a rich eccentric from New Jersey, Roy C. Wilhelm, who bought up all the land in and around the intervale during the Depression for a song and raised goats as a hobby. He had been a coffee importer. Wilhelm died in 1951 and left his estate to the National Spiritual Assembly of Baha’i. It was eventually sold off in pieces, the biggest of which went to the developers of the shortlived ski area on Adams Mountain. The hillside piece on which the cabin was rising had three owners between the Baha’i ownership and my purchase, the last before me being R.F. Land Partners, which was Rick Rhea and Wayne Field.

  The rain came often in the last two weeks of June, and the mist hovered and moved among the mountains, making them look like steaming teapots. The fields were full of dandelions and yellow and orange Indian paintbrush. The locust trees bloomed, and their pendulous puffy white clusters of fibrous duff made my eyes itch. The pond was swelling with weeds.

  I went to the cabin from the inn even when it was raining. I puttered under the plywood roof. I picked up nails and odd board ends on the deck and swept up or straightened out the tools in the toolbox. There was always some little task waiting to be done. I was dry and happy and enjoyed my shelter out of the downpours. Now and again I just stood by the door’s rough opening and watched the water come down from the roof and fall from the eaves. Sometimes it came down as drops, one drop following another to form a series of thin watery lines pouring from the roof’s edge; other times it was a cascade, something like standing under a paper-thin waterfall. At the roof’s valley, where the two roofs met to make an inward crease, the water came down as a spout and sailed into the air as if a cherub were pissing a clear stream from above. Italian Renaissance plazas had nothing on me. So pleasing were these interludes, as the rain fell out of the sky and I stood there shivering with the cold damp air stirring inside my light shirt, that I was convinced they were touching me in some atavistic place. I was in my cave or teepee or hut: like a fox in his den or a raccoon pulled inside a hole in a tree, I was safe and dry. By then, I had a chair in the cabin, and I would just sit and watch the rain come down, tapping the leaves, splattering on the ground or blowing this way and that as the wind shifted.

  There are these moments that occur in nature that can stay with a man for a lifetime. Like love, they are almost beyond language. I remember one such experience that was exquisitely distilled into a single spoken word. It taught me that there are subtle pleasures that should not be hurried, and that pleasure itself could bring a man to a higher level of consciousness and leave him with a fuller appreciation of the world he has been born into.

  I had traveled to southern Greece years earlier, to the farthest tip of the Peloponnese, and I was staying with a man, deep into his seventies, who was a resident of a mountaintop village there and a relative of mine through my grandmother. He was a gentle and philosophical person, who had lived a life of labor, and now he spent his days gathering herbs, roots and wild vegetables from the hills. His evenings were spent at kafenios or quiet tavernas, where he talked with his friends long past midnight over water glasses of red wine. He brought me with him on these nights, and afterward we would return to his home—an ancient stone house of one room that looked over the mountains and the sea. One night, he set up two stiff wooden chairs on a small flat space inside the little compound that was his home. It was a precipitous drop to the valley of olive trees below; to the right was the Laconic Gulf and somewhere out there was Kythira, the island to which Paris had carried Helen on that infamous first night. Straight ahead of us, as we were seated, were mountains, with a few sparse trees, and at the ridge of the mountains the moon was rising. It was a big silvery disc. We had swallowed plenty of wine through the night, but we were not drunk, and we had eaten well, fresh tomatoes, feta cheese, crusty bread, olives, fried potatoes, grilled lamb. Stelios, my friend and relative, brought out two cool glasses of water for us, water he had drawn from his well with a bucket. We watched the moon ascend and sipped the water. We said nothing. Stelios spoke no English; I spoke only a little Greek. Slowly, after several minutes, the big moon cleared the ridge and it was fully surrounded by the dark Mediterranean sky.

  “Oreia,” Stelios said in Greek. “It’s a fine thing.”

  Yes, I th
ought, that is the word for this moment: “Oreia.”

  Eventually the rain stopped on the hillside long enough for serious work to resume, and the traffic was heavy, by hillside standards, for the better part of a week. I had hired an excavator to put in a septic system, having decided that an indoor toilet was necessary if the cabin were to be a place for family to gather. My new excavator was Bill Parmenter, from nearby Fryeburg, a neighbor of Billy’s. He was seventy-six years old and six feet of sunburned sinew—a farmer, builder, excavator and, as I soon learned, a water diviner. He worked by himself and stopped only at noon for a few minutes to eat a lunch that was a cellophane packet of peanut butter crackers. During one of these quick lunches, he asked me about my well plans, and I told him I hoped to save money by putting in a dug well. I figured on a hole maybe ten to twenty feet deep and lined with a wide cement pipe or stones. I could drop an electric pump to the bottom or rough it with an old-fashioned hand pump. It was standard technology in Stoneham.

  “I can help you with that,” he said. “I can find the water for you.”

  “How?” I asked. He was chewing his crackers.

  “With a metal rod,” he said.

  I made my disbelief clear—and showed no deference, as I might have done to local knowledge in other circumstances.

  “You’re putting me on, right?” I said.

  “No. Done it many times,” he said.

  The next day he was back with a length of steel wire, which he had bent so he could hold the ends lightly in his hands and have it stick out in front of him. He walked through the woods, and sure enough the wire turned and pointed down.

  “Water’s here,” he said.

  Yeah, sure, I thought.

  “Okay,” I said, calling his bluff. “Why don’t you dig the well there.”

  He brought his backhoe into the woods and hit water at five feet, but it was brownish, as if minerals had leached into it.

  “I wouldn’t use it,” he said. “But I knew it was there.”

  I asked if we should try digging somewhere else. No, he said, this was the only place where his steel wire had told him water was accessible enough for a surface well. So I hired a well driller to give me an artesian well. He arrived in a big truck with a drilling rig that reached nearly to the treetops. For three days the truck roared as the drill rig pounded and turned a bit into the bedrock. It was followed by a pipe casing that eventually would bring water to the surface. At 330 feet deep, the bit found a bedrock fissure with water—two gallons a minute, not a lot but enough to supply the cabin. The bill: $3,400, which was about $3,000 more than I had planned to spend on the dug well.

  “Too bad about that,” Bill said.

  As I considered the siding I wanted for the cabin, I drove around to look at the variety of siding materials and styles on the houses scattered along the town’s half dozen roads. I encountered the typical range of housing stock of rural Maine: farmhouses, camps, cottages, log cabins, house trailers, shacks, modular ranches that had been delivered on trucks, chalets, teepees and even a yurt. I paid close attention to the barns, my long-standing fascination, and old public buildings such as the Odd Fellows Hall, the Grange and a wood-framed structure in North Lovell that had been converted into a library. I spent the better part of an hour one morning looking over a vacant wood building that had once been a dry goods store, examining its exterior trim, cornices and lintels. I also found a house, down near Great Brook, that had once been Stoneham’s schoolhouse. It had been moved there decades ago from another location in town to be closer to where most of the children lived.

  This moving of buildings was common in town in the nineteenth century—people moved houses and barns rather than build new ones, a testament to both their frugality and their skills as builders. The buildings—barns, houses, churches, schools—were moved in winter, typically, when they could be pulled on runners over the snow. Sometimes they were moved for miles. A house or barn moving was a big event, and lots of people turned out for the fun. Long strings of oxen were employed—both ahead of and behind the structure. The animals in front pulled it forward; the animals behind kept it from rushing down the snowy hill. During one move in nearby Lovell, a barn got hung up and blocked the road. The farmer simply opened the doors front and back and let the traffic pass through. There were so many of these movings that I have to wonder if it ever happened that a line of oxen pulling a barn had to stop at an intersection to let another line hauling a house pass by.

  My drive-around made it clear that the oldest houses in town were built with the most craftsmanship, and they also seemed to best fit their settings. Of course, this made sense: the best home sites were the first ones taken. I could not help but also notice the decline, over time, in the appearance of the town’s housing stock. The successors to the people who had built sturdy, pleasing homes of oak and pine on granite foundations—the same people who had evolved the connected architecture of big house, little house, backhouse and barn—now often occupied factory-built boxes of plastic, vinyl and aluminum. This is an observation, not criticism: my neighbors live in what they can afford, and what is available to them. The story of the deterioration in housing here is one piece, I assume, of the more general slide of the entire nation away from an expectation, regardless of wealth, of craftsmanship and good native materials.

  On the older homes, the predominant siding material was clapboards, almost always painted white, and the old seasonal cottages and camps near the lake employed a beveled siding of pine boards, almost always painted green, which appealed to me. It struck me as pleasing, practical and inexpensive. It was this style that I settled on, though I decided I would oil rather than paint them. Paul had recommended a mix of linseed oil and turpentine. It had worked wonders, he said, on preserving wooden ladders.

  Billy and I made a trip in his pickup truck to the Lovell Lumber Co., which sawed and milled the siding boards that I liked. It was at the south end of Lovell, on the Kezar River, near the remains of an old water-powered mill. The log yard at Lovell Lumber was piled high with big pine logs that had been cut and hauled from throughout the Saco River valley, which is about as close as one gets to the perfect environment for growing white pine—well-drained sandy gravel soil, adequate rainfall and cold winters. Many of the logs in the yard were three feet in diameter. They smelled of pitch and faintly of licorice, and they made an impressive sight stacked ten and twenty feet high. Still, these logs were pygmies compared to the logs that came from trees that had once grown in this part of Maine. The white pines of the old forest of what is now middle New England were giants. Their bases were bigger around than the columns of the Parthenon, they soared more than two hundred feet into the air and they occurred in stands that would remind us today of the California redwoods. There were other big trees, chestnuts and walnuts, but the most majestic of all were the white pines. A single giant pine would have provided enough wood to build three or four of my cabins. The forest then was a kind of primeval parkland—an Eden for the people who lived there. These people, the Algonquin nations to the south and the Abenaki to the north, were in part responsible for the character of the forest. The history of the forest and the New England landscape was tied up in the customs of the native peoples.

  There had been an Abenaki settlement about twenty miles from my hillside until the early 1700s. It was called Pequawket, and it was the picture of small-town life in America for a thousand years before the swarm of Europeans. Of course, America was not yet America then: the people who lived there called it the Dawn Land. A few hundred people, of a group called the Wabanaki, lived at Pequawket in small permanent homes, made of woven sticks and covered with branches and bark. They were farmers as well as fishermen and hunters, and they lived peaceably among themselves, the community governed by consent of the village’s residents. They spent their summers, as extended families, at the seacoast. They valued relationships and grieved terribly when a child died, painting themselves black when a death occurred. They abjured wea
lth, which was a burden to them because it meant weight; and to be fleet was to be free. They liked to move lightly through the forest in their moose-hide moccasins. They had a reverential relationship with the land, believing it was inhabited by spirits. They lived on the land but did not think of themselves as owning the land. They passed a leisurely sort of life, as befit an Eden, which drew on the abundance around them: fish, game, corn, squash, beans, nuts, berries. A Jesuit priest who had observed the native peoples of the region, wrote: “Never had Solomon in his mansion been better regulated and provident with food . . .”

  And so the native people lived until (by the European calendar) the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. At about this time, they began dying off in catastrophic numbers from horrific unknown (to them) diseases for which they had no resistance. Typhus, chicken pox, pneumonia, influenza, yellow fever, hepatitis, dysentery, plague, smallpox—the diseases took up to three-fourths of the entire native population. The only explanation the natives had for the deaths was spiritual. Somehow, they had transgressed. Close behind the deaths, like thunder following lightning, came the Europeans themselves, the source of the disease. In the case of the Pequawkets and other tribes of New England, they came as the English, who were building a religious and mercantile colony at Massachusetts Bay. These English people came first to the Indians as traders, seeking furs, especially beaver, which the people of Pequawket were adept at capturing. The commercial engagement with the English was fine with the Pequawkets and the others: they enjoyed the trade and exchanged their furs for tools, cloth, and ultimately guns and alcohol. But later, as the English colony began to outgrow its first perimeters, the English came as settlers, building homes and bringing with them their livestock. The English as permanent residents presented the native people with countless problems. They blocked the streams and their livestock were allowed to wander, playing further havoc with fish-filled waterways and sometimes getting caught in Indian deer traps or causing other mischief. Even the idea of keeping livestock was anathema to the native spiritual beliefs and practices, which bestowed a kind of equality on all forms of life.