Cabin Read online

  It is hard to account completely for the shadow that then fell over me, but fall it did, and it came down hard. Maybe it was more than the loss of family members—maybe it was the acknowledgment that I had passed my own personal equinox. I was coming to terms with being the generation within the family that stood between the children and death. I was not old, of course, but I had stepped forward in the inevitable succession of generations. When I was a boy, my grandmother represented the generation that occupied that final position, and it seemed then that it would always be so; for a very long time, my mother and uncles held it; now it was falling to me and Paul. I had survived—barely—the passing of my mother, because I had begun preparing myself for it as a nervous child, rehearsing the pain of her loss. With her gone, how would I survive without the web of family that my uncles represented? Or a worse thought: I knew I could not survive a world without Paul. He figured too importantly into my recollecting and possession of a past, and he was the one person I could rely on for coherence. We had shared a childhood, and the things that were important to me, the things I could not retrieve—my mother, father, stepfather, holidays, disappointments—belonged to Paul too. He was my link to my past, and that past was at the core of who I knew myself to be.

  When I returned from New York, I thought of the hawk, contemplated the shadow that had fallen over me and brooded yet more on the past. Suddenly, memories of growing up took on a powerful and unhealthy importance to me. I felt like I needed to hold on to them to hold on to myself. I leaned against them the way a drunken man might lean against a wall. I recognized all of this as morbid thinking, and I knew myself well enough to realize that I was falling into a familiar abyss. It was as if the ground were giving out from under me. I smiled for my students and diligently put marks on their papers, but the shadow pursued me along the streets of Kenmore Square and in the corridors of the university building where I taught on Boston’s short winter days. Neither had the trouble in my new relationship gone away—no one’s fault, and not for lack of love, just the reality of two adults juggling far-flung jobs and responsibilities. I didn’t have my feet firmly under me.

  I had waited out the darkness before. It took longer than a cloud—or a hawk—passing in front of the sun, but it was not dissimilar, and I knew it could be done. One of the benefits of getting older is that you recognize your antagonists and know how to defeat them, or at least give them the feint until they pass of their own accord. I got prescriptive with myself. There were things I could do that had worked before—get some exercise, engage with a pleasant and absorbing task, put myself in a setting that would give me a lift. Maybe I just needed a vacation. I thought of the Florida Keys. I loved the blue water, green cays and sparkling light.

  With manufactured optimism, I also decided that part of what I was feeling was simply my inability to be satisfied without some work to do with my hands. I’m happiest when I have a project—a boat to build, a desk to refinish, dinner to prepare. I even enjoy untying stubborn knots in a fishing line. My daughter says I have attention surplus disorder. For no particular reason other than the joy of it, I once spent the better part of a year learning ancient Greek so I could read Plato. I convinced myself that my attention needed a happy and absorbing target and real work, and the depression would lift.

  I went down into the basement of my apartment building and rummaged through my storage bin. I took stock of what I had there—again, the obsession with memories—but also inventoried the outdoor gear I had managed to keep through the disorder of the last few years: skis, snowshoes and fishing equipment. I had derived an awful lot of pleasure from these pursuits in the past. The outdoors had always been good for my soul, and more of the outdoors, combined with some physical activity, might just be what I needed. Trees filtering sunlight or water rushing over mossy rocks—they had worked their healing power on me before. There I was in the city, moving between my second-floor apartment and the university’s urban campus, and the closest thing to nature in my life was the nearby arboretum with mothers pushing monstrous baby strollers along asphalt paths and dog walkers stuffing their hands into plastic bags to pick up dog shit. A city park is not the outdoors. I figured some of what I needed to do was get back to that part of me that thrived in nature. I collected my fishing gear and began to prepare for the spring opening of the trout season. It brought back some of the boyhood pleasures of anticipation and absorption. The first day of trout season had always been a kind of second Christmas for me. It was a long way off, but I could still tie flies, assemble equipment and plot trips.

  One thought led to another, and soon several strands of what had been occupying my thoughts—fishing, the satisfaction I got from making something, a chance to gather together what remained of my family—began to fuse into a project. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a cabin in the woods? Surely, I thought, a cabin would be plenty of project for me. It would put nature—wild nature, real nature, not citified cut-grass and dog-shit nature—back in my life. In a way, it would be a cameo of the bigger effort I was making to put my life back together after a decade of loss and change.

  Yes, a little retreat in the woods: it would be just the thing. It filled me with pleasant thoughts. I liked the idea of fitting together posts and beams to make a snug cabin, and there was always the knowledge of the wood sitting in Paul’s backyard. I had enjoyed working with Paul before, when we had built the house. I had found the simple task of making a mortise and tenon joint to be a satisfying and complete experience. There was the heavy forward feel of the mallet in hand, the sharp clean edge of the chisel and the fragrant pine shavings that came up from the timber. I loved the way that two and then three pieces of wood fit together to make a solid corner post. It was honest and healthy work. It roughed the hands and rebuilt muscles. I would be outside, breathing woods-scented air. If the day was hot, I could drink cold water from a jug; if the day was cold, I would pull on a wool sweater. All of this struck me as immensely right and necessary. Once the cabin was complete, or so my reverie went, I could bring family and friends for holidays or weekends, or I could use it as a wilderness retreat to be with myself if that was what I needed.

  All of this was hovering within me as not much more than a pleasant daydream until early one evening in September 2007. I had come home from the office and went to pick up a few groceries for dinner at the neighborhood supermarket. As I was approaching the register, I grew light-headed, and then I felt the sensation of a bird beating its wings in my chest. In seconds, the bird was flapping madly. I was dizzy and disoriented. I tried to swallow. My throat was tight. I couldn’t push the saliva down my esophagus.

  At Massachusetts General Hospital, I was put on a gurney and hooked to an IV tube and heart monitor. A nurse took some blood. The test came back rapidly, and a doctor told me there was no trace of the protein that would indicate that I had suffered a heart attack. It was a case, he said, of atrial fibrillation, a flutter of my heart’s left atrium. “Have you had this before?” he asked. I told him it was my third experience in eight years. “Getting to be a habit, I see,” he said, which I took to be medical humor.

  I was in no danger of dying once the doctors had administered a blood thinner, which prevented a clot from forming in the blood that might pool in my misfiring heart. The hazard presented by a clot is in its possible trip to the brain, where it can lodge and cut off the supply of oxygen. This, of course, is a stroke. The doctors—and there seemed to be a growing number of them, including interns, that gathered around my bed each day—were reassuring, but they warned me against a recurrence. In the two previous incidents, and in this one, too, the A-fib had been preceded by a period of anxiety. Each occurrence had increased the likelihood of another. In times of major stress, my heart was learning to slip down a well-beaten path toward arrhythmia.

  For the better part of a week, the doctors and I waited for my heart to stop tapping out its distress signal. I sat in the hospital bed and looked out a big window that framed a blue stretch o
f the Charles River beyond Beacon Hill. Water has always made my mind wander. As sailboats skimmed the surface of the Charles and salt water dripped through a tube into my right arm, I spooled back to those cool late September days when I was a boy of thirteen in South Jersey. Barnegat Bay would flatten under a thin blue sky, and I would row out with long wooden oars to catch a few of the snapper blues that were left over from the August run. It was a good memory, the sun on my shoulders and the red-and-white bobber racing over the wavelets whipped up by summer’s last breath.

  In the present, though, the heart monitor continued to beep an irregular rhythm. My heart refused to end its tantrum. It wanted to be heard. It had a message. A hospital gives you a lot of time to listen. The idea of getting back to my first self began to seem more important.

  In a world that hadn’t seemed entirely reliable or kind these past few years, the memories of the woods and waters of my boyhood were pleasurable, and the notion of the cabin, which I had been entertaining, seemed a natural next-step extension of them. My mind grew calm as I pondered how I might build this cabin. I considered its dimensions, thought about materials and even began, in my daydreaming, to hang fishing rods on its walls. I’d make a big mess of blueberry pancakes for the people I brought there. Many of the feelings I had been sorting through seemed to be converging and shifting for the better.

  Then, along with everything else, there was this thought that just appeared from I don’t know where: the cabin would be a home of last resort. It would root me in a place. It would be my hedge against that old and irrational fear, homelessness. Maybe that had been the ultimate source of my anxiety, and the message my heart was tapping out through the bars of my ribs: build yourself a home.

  To the surprise of the doctors, my heart went back to its even beating without the electric shock to my chest that they already had scheduled.

  Back at the apartment, after leaving the hospital, I felt stirrings of anticipation and possibility. It helped that it was September, a month I’ve always associated with beginnings. The crickets whirred in the trees outside my second-floor windows. They seemed to be singing me forward. Isn’t it a wonderful thing, that the whir of crickets is the same year in and year out? It is the sound of continuity and coherence. Already I was feeling better. I went to sleep contemplating the woodland scene of a simple gable roof, a screened porch and a chimney pushing up wood smoke. I told Paul what I had in mind. I wasn’t far into my explanation when I asked if he could help with me it, and he said he would. The same old Paul.

  “Where are you going to get the land?” he asked.

  “I have some ideas,” I said. “Maine, I hope.”

  First, I had to contend with a practical matter. I lacked a car. In Boston, I was forced to live frugally. My savings had been wiped out in the divorce, and my professor’s salary left me with little extra money to buy a car, but I would need a car if I wanted a cabin, and a car cost money. This is what life in America has come to, I thought: a man who wants a little nature in his life must first find the money to buy a car. My stroke of good fortune came with the sale of a book. The first installment of the advance bought a used car; subsequent installments would get me started on the cabin.

  At my computer in my office at the university, I scrolled through the country-property ads. They described lots that were along rivers or beside lakes, parcels that held old apple orchards or were open fields. I focused my search on Maine. I knew it held what I wanted in copious amounts: green hillsides watered by little streams, backwoods ponds, and miles and miles of roads that remained unpaved. An unpaved road had emerged as a necessity in my imagination. Let the dust fly. I wanted to be free of pavement for a few long weekends a year and maybe a month or two in the summer.

  As I dodged the Boston traffic, the idea of a small cabin had become a way for me to at least think about nature, to put some tree bark and pine sap into my thoughts if not my life. My step felt a little lighter. I took it as a sign that the cabin was the right prescription for what ailed me. I conjured a cabin small, tight and secure against the wind blowing down from Canada and lit by the yellow flame of a hurricane lamp, squeaking as it swung slightly from a hook on the porch. Logs snapped in the woodstove of my fantasy.

  I doodled and made sketches. I spent a lot of time thinking about the porch. It seemed to me a porch elevated a cabin above mere shelter. I was talking cabins and porches with a physician friend at dinner and he said, “Yes, a cabin—and a porch that you can piss off of. I’ve always wanted one.” We agreed that the absence of porches off of which to piss had become a serious deficiency of modern male life. The women at the table groaned.

  The prospect of doing the work with Paul—and by extension, his sons—made the labor ahead even more appealing and the feeling right. When I was living in Philadelphia, because of the distance and our responsibilities, I had seen him only a few times a year, usually when I returned to visit my mother, who by then was declining and beset with numerous health problems. Paul—with eight children at home, a new marriage and a demanding job—had taken on the burden of caring for her in those final years. There was also some repairing that I needed to do with him.

  So the way I was conjuring it, the cabin was going to be a kind of recapitulation of the first house Paul and I had built, except this time it was going to be done in late middle age and the goal would not be to construct a house for starting out in life, but to put up a place for ourselves, where our sons and daughters, now grown, could come to spend time with us in the out of doors.

  As my kids burrowed deeper into their own lives and grew more distant from mine, this seemed to be more my dream than theirs. “You’re going to build a what?” my daughter asked me when I told her on the phone about my plan to build a cabin in the Maine woods, maybe deep in the mountains. “How will anybody get there?” she asked.

  One day in January 2008, I got an e-mail from a real estate agent that said, “This could be a good property for you. It’s rural but not too far out. I believe there is power right at roadside.” The price was $32,000. It was a number within my reach. The ad described it as five acres of “mixed woodland.” It was near the New Hampshire border, in the lee of the White Mountains and in the town of Stoneham. Stoneham, I would soon learn, had no traffic lights, about a dozen roads and a single small market that sold pizza, live bait and two-dollar draft beers and served as a deertagging station. I called Paul and told him I had come across a property that might be right. He agreed to come along.

  In the code of northern New England, “mixed woodland” means that the trees that are valuable as lumber or pulp have been removed and the logs turned into boards or paper. In other words, some developer had already extracted the commercial value of the land as a woodlot. I guessed that most of the trees from the parcel I was driving to had by now been turned into paper towels at the sulfurous mill in Berlin, New Hampshire, and were on their way to kitchen spills across America. But it was worth taking a trip to see what was left.

  What remained was recreational property—a euphemism for a rocky hillside of mostly second-growth oak, maple and beech scored with the ruts of a logging tractor, but close enough to ski areas and trout streams to attract a buyer who wanted a place in the country. This, of course, was me. I hadn’t skied since an accident some years ago in which I departed a chairlift too late and blew out both knees, but I had once been a pretty good fly fisherman and I knew the area was threaded with streams. After a couple of wrong turns that brought us to dead ends and unplowed roads blocked by deep snow, we found it. We recognized the lot by the surveyor’s fluorescent ribbons and a path that had been cleared by a logging skidder. With three feet of new snow blanketing the ground, we strapped on snowshoes and paddled up the hillside.

  The sun was bright, the sky a powdery blue and the snow glittered like tiny crystals as we climbed the east-facing slope. The woods were silent except for our huffing and puffing. Neither of us was in great shape. Both of us could have stood to lose twenty pound
s. The only exercise my work had afforded me was pacing back and forth in front of a classroom. Paul is stockier than I, but neither of us makes a delicate presentation. We both have dark hair and broad faces and mustaches that give us an unintended intimidating look. I remember a friend once remarking, when he saw Paul and me talking privately in the back of a room, “Looks like the Archduke may be in for some trouble.”

  Our snowshoes bit the snow in small steps and sunk a few inches in the plump fluff as we put our weight down from leg to leg. The snow sighed with each press of the snowshoes. We made a trail of overlapping webbed ovals and followed the flags that marked the property’s boundary up the hillside. We crossed a single set of deer tracks, heart shaped and distinct in the snow. Later a bobcat track wended along a trail stitched with the prints of a snowshoe hare. It’s no small thing to see the mittened shape of bobcat pad. Both animals had been walking, not running, separated by hours or minutes, and I guessed the hungry cat was stalking the hare. I looked ahead but saw no signs either that the hare’s tracks were lengthening into a panicked dash or that the cat had crouched, ears back, to leap. I was taking no sides in the tale in the snow. I simply read it as a poem pressed in the winter page.

  I would have been happy to follow those tracks all afternoon. I savored this feeling of being out of doors, of pulling the frigid clean air in and out of my lungs, and of being in a place where nature seemed to prevail over people and pavement. I had forgotten how much I relished just being in the woods. I was sweating from the climb up the hillside. I pulled off my jacket and opened my flannel shirt’s top two buttons. Paul, I could see, was looking for a good building site—something flat and accessible to a truck and excavation equipment.