Cabin

by Lou Ureneck

  Conflicts inevitably arose. The Indians pushed back on the English trespass, and the English returned the push—with force. The English believed they had a right, by God’s command, to the wild land. It was improvident to leave these places to the native peoples. It was the Puritan mission to bring civilization in, to clear and cultivate the wilderness and deliver it to their God. To the English, the native people were not fully human, at least not in the way the English themselves were, and this made the taking and killing of them easier.

  One incident—of many—captures the English attitude toward the native peoples. In the summer of 1675, a group of Indians traveled down the Saco River to the seacoast—their regular summer trip. They would swim, fish, dig clams and enjoy the cool sea breezes. Near the mouth of the river, they encountered English fishermen. A few of the Englishmen, on seeing the Indians in their canoes, began to speculate on the veracity of a belief among many of the European colonists that an Indian baby could not be made to sink. They laughed and argued about this and decided to make a test. There was an Indian woman in a canoe nearby with her child. Three Englishmen tipped the canoe. The baby sank and died. Now, it happened that this particular baby was the son of the tribe’s sachem, Squando. When he learned of his child’s death, and its cause, his grief and anger transformed into a rage that was unleashed on English homes and settlers up and down the Maine coast. And so it went. Squando’s rage, classical in its proportions and worthy of a treatment by Sophocles, merged with the more general Indian resistance to English encroachment along the Atlantic coast as far south as Rhode Island in a series of deadly clashes called King Philip’s War.

  By 1690, the Massachusetts General Court was offering a bounty on dead natives. The bounty was collected by bringing scalps to Boston, and Indians who were captured were enslaved, kept by the English colonists or sent to the Caribbean for sale.

  Indian genocide by our religious forebears proceeded relentlessly through the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Within biking distance of the cabin was a trace of this most shameful aspect of the nation’s history. In 1725, a group of Massachusetts men, led by a roughneck named John Lovell, traveled to Pequawket to kill Indians and collect scalps. They ambushed a group—men, women and children—and a battle ensued that ended pretty much in a draw. Lovell and some of his comrades (including a Harvard divinity student) were killed, but most of them escaped back to Boston, where they were regarded as heroes. In time, these men and their relatives were granted ownership of a big tract of land just north of Pequawket in recognition of their horrible deeds. That tract of land is now the town of Lovell, Maine. I buy my wine there at the Center Lovell Market. The site of what was once Pequawket is the grounds of an annual agriculture fair in the town of Fryeburg, and adjacent to the fairgrounds is Fryeburg Academy, which received a grant of land from the Massachusetts General Court in 1796 in appreciation of the early men of the region who cleaned out the “savage nation.”

  By the middle of the 1700s, prior to the American Revolution, the Wabanaki were cleansed from the countryside. Nearly all of those who had survived retreated to St. Francis, Quebec, on the St. Lawrence River, where another bully by the name of Robert Rodgers took a group of English colonists and burned the village and slaughtered its inhabitants in 1749. These men were also rewarded with big tracts of land around Pequawket. All this is terribly ironical now. Beset as we now are by problems of pollution, global warming, diminishing natural resources and alienation from our environment, we can see that the native peoples offered a lesson in sustainable living and a reverence for God’s creation—one that would serve us well today. Theirs is a history worth recovering and celebrating.

  But to bring this back to my siding and the white pine I was buying at Lovell Lumber: the native people not only were farmers, hunters and fishermen; they were also foresters. Their tool was fire, and they used it prodigiously. They burned the underbrush regularly to make travel and hunting easier and to encourage the growth of trees that they favored, especially nut-bearing trees. The forest of middle New England before the arrival of the Europeans was a magnificent garden of giant trees—chestnut, oak, hickory and beech—which mostly covered the upland areas. But none of these came close to the size of the monumental pines, which would tower over them by fifty feet. Those great white pines are long gone. You might as well look for a wooly mammoth.

  The elimination of the natives was followed by the stripping of the forest. It was cleared for lumber and then used as farmland or sheep pasture. Hillsides were left bare, and billions of board feet of logs were floated down the region’s rivers to sawmills. The logs were turned into lumber and the lumber into houses and cash. A lot of it was shipped to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. It wasn’t until the widespread abandonment of Maine farms following the Civil War that a new crop of pine trees emerged on the fallow landscape. The old titans had grown mostly along the rivers, where they were protected from the wind by ridges that followed the watercourses. The logs that I was admiring in the yard at Lovell Lumber were part of the new succession of Maine pine that had grown up on the stone wall–threaded uplands that had once been farms.

  The drop siding that Billy and I brought back from the lumberyard went up slowly, one board at a time. There was no rushing it. It looked good, but it was a task that required two men working methodically to accomplish. The upper edge of the boards was square with a groove; the lower edge had a cove that beveled into a tongue. The tongue of the board above fit into the groove of the board below. This created a tight seal against the weather. The challenge was fitting tongues into grooves over long spans. Sometimes we could just pound the upper piece down into the lower piece, but more often than not the upper piece needed to be worked in by putting a wedge behind the upper piece to help it find the groove of the lower piece. We began at the bottom of each wall of the cabin and stepped our way up to the top.

  The wood was a buttery white and yellow and smooth to the hand. The long pieces flexed if turned flat to the earth and sky, and were stiff if turned with their edges down. At the mill, pine boards had come in several grades depending on the clarity of the wood, meaning the absence of knots, which are the vestiges of branches growing out of the tree’s trunk. I had bought a grade that was run-of-the-mill, meaning we encountered a fair number of red and occasionally black knots. Red knots were fine; black knots tended to fall out of the board. We trimmed the boards to eliminate big or troublesome knots and found that we had very little waste. The drop siding had been a good choice. It gave the cabin a finished but unfussy look.

  I liked the idea of using local wood to build the cabin. There was a harmony and rightness to it. My wood wasn’t coming from Ecuador’s rain forests or Siberian clear-cuts. It came from the sandy loam soils of the watershed of which the cabin and I were now a part, and I was feeling very good about it. The owner of the sawmill had told me that the valley could continue to produce pine and his mill could continue to saw it into perpetuity with wise management of the resource. This also seemed a good thing. If a man knew and cared about the source of his lumber, just as if he knew and cared about the source of his food, wouldn’t it necessarily follow that a lot of mischief and wickedness would be avoided?

  The feeling was real, and the question legitimate, but the ideal as it turned out was an illusion. I did a little checking on the origins of the other materials for the cabin. The gaslights I intended to install came from China—I could only guess under what conditions the Chinese workers had labored to produce them. The nails, manufactured by a Japanese conglomerate, came from China. The Japanese conglomerate owned a North American subsidiary, based in New York, which manufactured the nails in China and distributed them in the United States through another subsidiary, in Irving, Texas. The Chinese factory, I determined, was probably in Qingdao, on the north Chinese coast, and employed peasants who had recently migrated from the countryside and received the equivalent of about three hundred dollars per month. They were good nails, and
inexpensive. They came in a thirty-pound bucket that cost $30.14 at my lumberyard, which was about two cents a nail. I used two buckets.

  The cabin would be made mostly from Maine wood, but it was not in the end an organic loaf made from local yeast and grain. There was too much progress to be gained, and money to be saved, by accepting the benefits of technology and global trade. For a cabin builder, this was a conundrum not easily solved. How might the balance be struck between the availability of low-price products whose provenance was unknown to me, on one hand, and social and environmental responsibility on the other? Was this balance something that could legitimately be delegated to government through regulation? For example, might the government forbid importation of nails or gaslights produced under inhumane or planet-damaging circumstances? Or must I investigate the sources of all the materials I used to determine their suitability and alignment with the ethical standards I subscribe to? There were no local sources for many of the items I needed. Are nails still mass-produced in the United States? I did not find them. Yet surely the use of a product made by slave labor or through the addition of toxic chemicals or processes implicates me in a crime.

  No product more exemplified my inability and unwillingness to escape modernity than the rubbery material I would apply to the sheathing to prevent leaks in the cabin’s roof—something called Ice & Water Shield, which is manufactured by W. R. Grace & Co. Stoneham is metal-roof country. Through the trees, a driver often sees glints of silver that could be mistaken for ponds. They are in fact metal roofs. There is the occasional asphalt shingle roof, but mountain winters have schooled local people in more serious overhead protection, and the material of choice is steel. It used to be that they were uniformly silver, and many were the old tin roofs typically found on Quonset huts, chicken coops and third-world shanties. They now come in green, several shades of blue (including an electric blue) and red. Nearly all of these roofs have one thing in common: the dermis below the steel is Ice & Water Shield. It is stickier than flypaper and difficult to apply, and after my experience with it I named it Ice & Water Torture. But it is supremely effective. Nearly everyone in the hill country uses it because it so completely keeps water on the weather side of the sheathing.

  Ice & Water Shield is made at plants in Chicago and Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee. Its ingredients are oil, asphalt, rubber, polyethylene and paper. According to Grace, the oil comes from a refinery in New Jersey, the asphalt comes from Illinois, the polyethylene from Texas, the paper from Finland and the rubber from Mexico. What is a cabin builder to do? I bowed to the prospect of dry ceilings and used Ice & Water Shield—many, many rolls of it. It is difficult to leave the world behind.

  By the end of July, the cabin had a roof. The son of Bill Parmenter, my water wizard, installed it for me. He had the skills and specialized tools for bending and cutting metal, and I did not. The roof’s green metal surface warmed and shined in the sun. It was the green that I associated with Adirondack pulling boats, Maine warden camps and old spruce trees, demonstrating once again that I was both making shelter and trying to write a poem.

  Paul had enlisted a plumber friend of his from Portland, who installed a reserve tank in the loft above the bathroom. It would hold water pumped in through a long blue plastic pipe from the well. Smaller black plastic pipes would carry the water down to sinks in the kitchen and bathroom, to a shower and, most impressively, a bathtub. Paul had retrieved a giant iron claw-foot tub that had been pushed aside in the basement of his church. It was dirty and chipped but it was huge, a Halifax dory of a bathtub. I liked the idea of soaking in hot water after a day of snowshoeing, so I set about restoring it. I scrubbed and sanded it, then washed it with an acid solution and painted it white. It looked as new as the day it passed out of the foundry in Portland in 1898. This would be the cabin’s touch of luxury.

  The next step for us was the installation of the windows. A double-hung window is an ingenious device, and a world of its own inside the universe of carpentry. There is the window frame, which is made up of jambs (the side walls), a header (the top) and a sill (the base). Inside this frame are set two sashes (windows)—one up and one down. An elegant but strong crosshatching of millwork called muntins divides each sash into numerous lights (or panes). The sashes ride between interior and exterior stops, and between them is a so-called parting strip (or bead). This allows the sashes to move up and down as needed, without rubbing against each other. In a double-hung window frame, four pulleys are set into the jambs, through which ropes are attached to window weights. The ropes ease the opening and closing of the sashes and stabilize them in a fixed position.

  I was proud of my windows, with their multiple panes crosshatched into ten over ten and ten over eight. They would give the cabin a distinctive traditional appearance and admit generous quantities of light. At the moment, with the window openings roughed out but no windows installed, the cabin looked like a man without his dentures. But getting the windows ready for installation was going to take some clever retrofitting. We had to make new parting strips and stops because the old ones were damaged. Paul made them from leftover pine stock. Since we didn’t have any of the old windows’ exterior trim, we were confounded by the problem of fitting the windows to new trim. The original trim had been milled with channels that slipped onto the original jambs, making a tight seal. Paul solved the problem by running the new trim over the blade of the table saw several times to create a dado (or groove) that accepted the old jamb. It worked perfectly.

  A cabin without a porch is a lesser creation. It is a hat without a brim, a boat without a prow, brandy without a cigar. My plan was to put the porch in the cavity we had created when we thrust the ell forward from the front of the cabin. There was a full fourteen feet from the inside wall of the ell to the corner of the cabin. If the forward edge of the porch finished even with the front of the ell, which it should for a pleasing appearance, I would gain a porch with dimensions of fourteen feet by ten feet. It was plenty of porch, creating enough space to accommodate four Adirondack chairs or a card table and four folding chairs or four cords of wood, plus a path to the door. In cinematic terms, it was just enough space for Fred to spin Ginger, but not quite enough, as the old saying goes, to swing a dead cat. I also wanted it screened against bugs. With a depth of ten feet, we would have to pitch its roof less steeply than the main roof of the cabin; otherwise, the roof would come down at about five feet at the front edge of the porch, the height of my Adam’s apple. Reducing the pitch had a big drawback. Snow was less likely to shed of its own accord from the metal surface. It would need to be pulled or shoveled off a couple of times a year. There was nothing to be done about it. We needed the height to make the porch work, so the pitch would have to be diminished. Could I have avoided this? I guess I could have pitched the entire roof less steeply but still made it steep enough to let gravity do its work with the snow. I could have also raised the top plate of the wall. I ran those cabin profiles through my mind and liked neither of them. Our plan had been sound. I would just buy a roof rake and brace the porch’s roof against the eventuality of me failing to get up some weekend after a giant snowfall. It would be fine.

  I had to break my summer work for a trip to New York. I dragged myself back into the world, and Paul took on the task of building the porch. I returned and was surprised to find that he had it fairly well completed. He had finished the floor framing and the rafters, and all that remained was for us to sheathe the porch roof and eventually put up the rail and balusters.

  By now in mid-August, the pond was as thick as vegetable stew, and showy white water lilies floated on the surface. They were as big as salad bowls in the mornings; toward evening they shrank to teacups. I saw daily blooms of darning needles, those iridescent blue dragonflies that manage to hover and dart with astonishing speed, whirring their four transparent wings. No doubt they came from the pond, where they had lived as nymphs in the mud. Maybe it was the plethora of these bejeweled and delicate insects that accounted for the a
bsence of mosquitoes that we enjoyed at the cabin. Darning needles are great eaters of mosquito larvae.

  This was a period of frequent thunderstorms. Often, as I drove to the hardware store or Melby’s, the National Weather Service would break in to the radio program I was listening to, with static and an alarmed voice warning of severe thunderstorms, which were great fun when they broke over the hillside with fierce cracks and booms and buckets of water falling from the sky. Standing out in one for just a minute left you as soaked as if you had gone for a swim. In hardly any time, though, the sun would be out again, the leaves sparkling and the blue darning needles darting this way and that over the wet ground. Even as the clouds disappeared and the thunder booms traveled ever farther away, the air remained suffused with moisture and smelled of sulfur, and the humidity lingered into the nights, which now were beginning to cool. The late summer nights carried the scent of cut hay and overripe vegetation. The season was fading.

  This was the time when the birds began to congregate in readiness for their flights south. The pond was a resting place and feeding station for migratory birds. Some of the migrations were already under way. The teal, bluish buzz bombs, were the first travelers to arrive and then depart. The wood ducks departed soon after. They were spring and summer residents, and each male wood duck was a glorious sight as it exploded from a woodland stream, offering only the quickest glimpse of its red head, cinnamon breast and lemon yellow flanks. I walked to the pond’s far side, passing through the woods and meadows that rimmed it to reach its outlet. A small brook flowed over and through a derelict beaver dam and carved a muddy channel through a boggy place spiked with gray tree trunks, remnants of the flood from an earlier dam that must have increased the circumference of the pond and killed the surrounding timber.