Cabin Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1 - THE URGE TO BUILD

  CHAPTER 2 - PRELIMINARIES

  CHAPTER 3 - LOST LANDSCAPE

  CHAPTER 4 - FOUNDATION

  CHAPTER 5 - BROTHERS

  CHAPTER 6 - THE FRAME

  CHAPTER 7 - SUMMER WORK

  CHAPTER 8 - RESPONSIBILITIES

  CHAPTER 9 - THANKSGIVING

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY LOU URENECK

  ALSO BY LOU URENECK

  Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey

  Through the Heart of Alaska

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in 2011 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Lou Ureneck, 2011 All rights reserved

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54427-3

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  For Paul,

  there from the beginning

  The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.

  —Emerson

  CHAPTER 1

  THE URGE TO BUILD

  The idea had taken hold of me that I needed nothing so much as a cabin in the woods—four rough walls, a metal roof that would ping under the spring rain and a porch that looked down a wooded hillside.

  I had been city-bound for nearly a decade, dealing with the usual knockdowns and disappointments of middle age. I had lost a job, my mother had died and I was climbing back from a divorce that had left me nearly broke. I was a little wobbly but still standing, and I was looking for something that would put me back in life’s good graces. I wanted a project that would engage the better part of me, and the notion of building a cabin—a boy’s dream, really—seemed a way to get a purchase on life’s next turn. I won’t lie. I needed it badly.

  So, on a day of warm September sunshine in 2008, after having bought a piece of land in western Maine the previous February, I stood in a corner of my brother Paul’s suburban backyard in Portland and examined a stack of lumber I had dropped there more than a decade earlier. I had to stomp down the weeds with my brown leather brogues to get to it. I hadn’t yet bought a pair of work boots. I was dressed for the classroom, where I now earned my living, disguised as a college professor: khaki trousers, buttondown cotton shirt and semiround tortoiseshell glasses. I confronted the wood; or maybe, as a symbolic artifact of an earlier life, it confronted me. It was a temporary standoff with the past. Piled chest high, the wood made an incongruous sight among the neighborhood’s turquoise swimming pools, oversized gas grills and slumping badminton nets. To a passerby, it must have looked like a heap of old railroad ties dumped by the side of the road. I brushed the rough surface of the wood with my hand and pressed a thumbnail into its pulpy flesh. It was spongy: not a good sign. A few of the boards showed sawdust and smooth channels that were the work of carpenter ants. There were many more pieces—heavy posts, big square beams and long silvery rafters with bird’s-mouth mortises—that had come through the years of sun and snow mostly sound. I couldn’t help feeling some affinity with the wood: weathered but mostly intact. This was what I had hoped for on the drive up from Boston, where I lived and worked. I had counted on salvaging enough lumber from the pile to form the frame of the cabin that already had taken shape in my mind.

  Paul stood with me in his backyard. He was less sure about the wood.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “A lot of it’s wet, maybe rotten.”

  Paul is an experienced and methodical builder. He typically works with architects, engineers, cranes and shipments of steel. He is the construction and project manager for a commercial real estate company in Portland—its vice president, in fact. He is a nonconformist in other parts of his life—a big man with a thick mustache, he drives a Harley-Davidson motorcycle wearing a sleeveless undershirt, open leather vest and a head kerchief tied tightly above his ears for a helmet—but he is cautious in matters of construction, the equivalent of the prudent and spectacled accountant. He applies conservative principles to the building of things, and he was exercising his professional caution on my woodpile. He might as well have been a banker sniffing weak collateral. I, on the other hand, was determined to work up the cabin from the old lumber, which would seriously reduce the project’s cost and give me a rustic shelter that was an appreciation of the beauty of wood, and I wanted to get started right away. I was feeling the burden of his skepticism.

  “The roof is going to have to carry a big snow load in those hills,” Paul said.

  I could feel him inching closer to saying what he was actually thinking, which was that I should forget the woodpile and have a fresh bundle of two-by-four studs delivered from the lumberyard. That after all was the sensible thing to do: new lumber, new windows, prehung doors and prefabricated roof trusses. We could hire some help, engage subcontractors for the plumbing and electricity and have the cabin up in a few weekends. I would summarize his attitude as “Let’s make this easy and get to the part where we sit inside and enjoy the place.”

  Instead, I wanted to construct the cabin with these big woebegone slabs of wood in the old timber-frame method of building a barn, which meant employing, as much as possible, old-fashioned wood joinery rather than nails. It would hold together in much the same way as a chest of drawers assembled in a furniture shop. I wanted a place with some craft and heft and tradition—a place that could make a natural and authentic claim to a piece of rugged Maine hillside. I didn’t want a vacation home; I wanted a cabin. The rough-sawn and weathered beams, as I planned it, would be exposed inside the cabin just as they would be in a barn or backwoods Maine camp, and it would be sturdy and raised up from local materials, and it would be all the better for requiring the expenditure of time and skill with a mallet, wood chisel and framing square. And I wanted for us to do it all ourselves.

  Paul listened to all of this without passing judgment or rolling his eyes. He was keeping an open mind, but I knew that I already had raised his suspicions when I showed him a bunch of dilapidated wood-frame windows I had scrounged over the summer for the price of hauling them away. They also were stored in his ba
ckyard.

  Paul slid a rafter out of the pile that had the surface texture of Roquefort cheese. It was a good sixteen feet long. Its edges were gnawed and ragged. It crumbled in his hands.

  “I’m not sure I want to be standing under this one when the snow on the roof gets to be four feet deep.”

  I had to agree with him about that particular rafter. It was awfully ratty and might snap under a load of wet snow.

  “You’re right,” I said, wanting to keep him engaged in the project.

  In this experiment in mental health, building the cabin with Paul was one of the reasons I wanted to build it at all. When you get around to reassembling your life, as I was doing, it’s good to have someone at your side who remembers how the parts once fit together.

  “Let’s spread the wood out on the grass and put the bad pieces in a pile,” I said. “We’ll see what we have left.”

  Paul was agreeable, which is his natural disposition. His agreeableness is broken only now and again by a surfeit of suburban life. Then he gets gruff, bossy and next to impossible. He had inherited our mother’s need for a little danger to keep life interesting, and when he doesn’t get it, he turns surly. At present, he was living in a five-bedroom garrison with his wife, Laura, and their blended family of eight children, six of whom were at home, one at college, and another, Paul’s oldest son, on a tour of duty in Iraq. Even in the best of times, when he accommodated himself to the routines of mowing the lawn, painting window trim or putting out citronella candles for a backyard barbecue for his and the neighbors’ kids, Paul’s silent argument with the suburbs had a way of showing through. He was the only person in the neighborhood with a disassembled body of a stock car on blocks in the driveway.

  Paul’s cantankerous bouts come two or three times a year. They are usually cured by long trips on his Harley. It is a black-and-chrome monster with studded leather saddlebags. When he drops his two hundred twenty pounds down on the leather saddle and turns the key, it sounds like a 727 accelerating for takeoff at Logan Airport. The muffler blows out a bass line that reverberates in the chest cavity of anyone standing nearby. The bike is his antidote to the suburban blues. The miles on the road with the engine roaring below him, the wind in his dense curly hair and the absence of lawn sprinklers bring him back into balance and an even temperament. After a long bike trip, he returns with stoicism and equanimity to work at his real estate company’s downtown office, to face yard chores at home and meetings of the church parish council, where he has become indispensable to the building committee and is the closest and perhaps only confidant of the church’s serious but excitable priest. Having just come home from a bike rally week in Florida, Paul was being unusually patient with me, his older brother, the professor. He wore a black Harley T-shirt with red flames that read “Ride It Like You Stole It.”

  “Okay, what the hell,” Paul said. “Let’s pick through it and see what we’ve got.”

  We discussed each stick of lumber as if we were putting together a football team from a field of tryouts. Yes to this one, no to that one. Some pieces clearly were rejects. We picked them up together and tossed them into the discard pile. They landed with a slap and rumble. Others were solid. We restacked them in a neat pile with lathing sticks between to keep them ventilated and dry. Many pieces fell somewhere in between: possibly usable depending on what we would ask of them. These required longer conversations. A questionable timber might work as a post where the stress would be downward compression; it wouldn’t work as a horizontal beam, where the rot would result in it snapping, toothpick-style. We took our time under the blue sky. It was a pleasant day for this kind of easy labor. I liked the weight and feel of the wood and the workout it was giving my arms and back, and it was roughing up my hands, which had grown used to paper and keyboards. Paul’s company was a tonic. It was good to be with him again after a long absence. He had a way of anchoring me in our mutual past and keeping me steady in a reliable present.

  As we went through the wood, I tried to rationalize each piece. Paul was more likely to say, “What, are you kidding? Forget it.” He paused. “Are you sure you don’t want to buy new lumber?”

  A cabin gets built in three steps. There is the placement of the footing on which the cabin rests; there is the assembly of the simple box that is the cabin itself, and this includes the top of the box that is the roof; and finally there is the collection of final decisions and touches about the interior space that make the cabin habitable. The size and position of doors and windows fit in the second step but influence much of the third. The first step teaches all of the figurative truths associated with sure foundations and good beginnings. “Well begun is half done.” This is one of many builders’ homilies that apply to an awful lot of life in general. “Measure twice, cut once” is another. The real action of the cabin is the box: it defines the space and consumes most of the builder’s effort and materials and displays his skill. A well-built cabin is an aesthetic as well as practical statement, and, on the high end, it is a manifesto of craft and simplicity. It blends function and beauty in the way of a Shaker chair, an Indian sweetgrass basket or even a Stillson plumber’s wrench. The beauty derives from elegance of function. There is nothing extra, nothing fake. The final step of building moves the cabin from habitable to comfortable and even pleasing to the soul. So there is a hierarchy of sorts, from boots-in-the-mud foundation work to the Zen of sitting in front of a window that is exactly the right height and position to show the fall of the land toward a distant prospect on which the satisfied builder’s attention is focused. Maybe this prospect is a gnomish hemlock tree silhouetted against the gray November sky, allowing the builder in repose to dissolve into the landscape and achieve his yogic samadhi.

  Paul and I had been through this before—right down to the search for a mutually tolerable midpoint between my absorption in the history of vernacular New England carpentry and his intention to get the goddamned thing built.

  Thirty years earlier, when we were in our twenties, we had built a house together, my first (and only) house as a married man. It was a simple, honest, mostly square and plumb cape with a redbrick chimney down the center. It had four bedrooms, one and a half baths, a big kitchen, dining room, living room and full basement. It was shingled with Canadian white cedar, four inches of each overlapping shingle showing to the weather. The shingle spacing gave it the lateral lines of a Maine planked dory without the upward sweep. It was stained silver-gray, like a weathered beach cottage, with Cabot bleaching oil. Wide pine boards formed the floors. The door and window trim were white, and it had a twelve-inch overhang on the eave and one-over-one pitch on the roof, which meant that the roof rose one vertical foot for each foot of horizontal span. In other words, the roof was steep. It was a handsome and modest house at the end of a long driveway, and with the exception of a designer window near the peak of one side wall, it looked like it had been built two hundred years ago. It sat on fifteen acres in a small farming community northwest of Portland. I had insisted on timber framing that one too, in the old and traditional way. It was as if I were doing fieldwork for a dissertation in colonial architecture and Paul was building a house for his brother.

  The story of the lumber that Paul and I were sorting in his backyard on that day in September nested inside the story of that first house, and if nothing else, the one story giving birth to the other showed that I hadn’t fully left my old life behind. There was something encouraging for me in the realization of the connection. If there’s one thing that I had yearned for in my life, it was coherence. I just didn’t seem to have the talent for it. I felt like I had been stringing together a series of isolated episodes, punctuated by failures, with one episode seeming to bear no relation to the next. This, I think, had been a source of the drizzly moods that sometimes descended on me. It’s difficult to give your life meaning if you can’t give it coherence.

  So looking back, maybe the backyard lumber was a way for me to knit together two episodes of my life, two dre
ams, really, one that had cracked long ago and another that was about to commence.

  Here is a sequence from the first dream:

  In 1975, having been married for one year and most definitely, completely and unarguably without money, I decided to build a house. My bride wanted a house, and I wanted to give her one. I simply needed to materialize it out of optimism and thin air. I was twenty-four and working at the daily newspaper in Portland and persuaded my employee credit union to lend me $7,500 with no collateral, no credit history and only fourteen months of employment. I bought a piece of land about a forty-five-minute drive from Portland—the land got a lot cheaper as you got farther out of town. We had been renting the second-floor apartment of a wooden three-decker in a distressed part of Portland. My only asset was a willingness to work. I was at that stage of life when young confidence blends with the illusion that time and possibility are limitless—I could draw on them forever to build a career, a house, or whatever it was I thought I wanted to do. I was brash. Why not build a house? Maybe it would take a year; maybe two years. Money? No problem. I would borrow it. Tools? Easily solved. I would buy them at the hardware store as I needed them, and I would do all of this while working full-time as the assistant city editor of a small daily newspaper. But even I knew that building an entire house was not a job for one person. I needed another set of hands just to carry the other end of a long board. So I called Paul.

  Paul was twenty-one, and he had just quit a factory job in New Jersey. Only months before and despite good grades, he had left Monmouth College in Long Branch, New Jersey, mostly out of disgust with the gap, as he saw it, between the need for a revolution in America and the hypocrisy of college life as embodied in the privileged attitudes of rich girls from Long Island—of which many populated Monmouth College. Paul had always harbored a very low tolerance for hypocrisy, or to use the more direct term, bullshit. He was, at the time, deeply radicalized over the war in Vietnam. His hair was kinky and long, and he had a tight-coiled beard and dense eyebrows. It would have been easy to mistake him for Che Guevara—if Che Guevara had been the son of a Slavic father. There was also this: he had recently ended an intense relationship with his college girlfriend. The breakup was painful. So close were they that it had seemed to me a tearing of flesh. She was the daughter of a wealthy family from Philadelphia. She had soft dark eyes and the same antiwar politics as Paul. Paul told me much later that he had seen those big soft brown eyes of hers only once again in his life: in a doe that had died slowly beside the road after it had been struck by a car.