Cabin Read online

  My body cooled quickly. I enjoyed the sensation of hard work and cold air on my chest and back as we continued upward. We walked in single file. I went first. The rabbit tracks disappeared into the stiff parchment leaves of some small beech trees that had been uncovered by the wind. The land and the walk were conforming to the fantasy I had been concocting at my desk, and already my mind was made up. I would make an offer.

  “Do you think he would take thirty for it?” I asked Paul.

  “You can always give it a try,” he replied. “The economy’s bad, and he might need the money.”

  Two weeks later, we returned to meet the owner, Rick Rhea of South Freeport, Maine. He had bought the lot and the adjoining 120 acres a year earlier and subdivided it into eight parcels, which he was selling one at a time. He had partnered with a logger in nearby Albany Township, who worked with a crew and skidder. The combination of land developer (or subdivider) and logger is common in the north country. They make their money by identifying parcels of land that can be logged for additional profit and sold in parts, the sum of which exceeds the price paid for the entire piece. Rick was about fifty, wiry with a temporary smile that struck me as either cold or vulnerable. I couldn’t tell which right away. His smile seemed as skittish as a small and frightened animal. It would take me some time to get to know him, and I eventually grew to like him. He was direct and without ornament or affectation. I would later learn that he had clashed with the planning board in town—not surprising given my first impression of him—and there was lingering ill will that eventually would affect my plans. Rick had brought his own snowshoes, made of aluminum and plastic, and the three of us walked a wider circle than Paul and I had on our first trip up the hillside. We followed the same trail but then crossed the line of fluorescent flags to a second lot. It was lot No. 7 on the map Rick was carrying, rolled under his arm. The lot was not quite six acres, a little bit bigger than the first, and it held a site for a cabin that was more distant from the road where we’d parked.

  The extra distance suited me. I wanted a place to escape to. I wanted to be in the woods. I didn’t even want a driveway. I wanted a long walking path from the road to the cabin. Rick suggested a site for the cabin that was mostly a flat patch of ground with a few spindly firs sprouting through the snow—Charlie Brown Christmas trees. The spot was bounded on one side by a granite outcropping that thrust to shoulder height and on the other by a steep downward slope of spindly hardwoods that fell to the road below.

  The trees obscured the road, but I caught a glimpse, beyond, of a flat white expanse that looked like an open field. I asked Rick if it was a farm. No, he said, it was a frozen pond. Little Pond, he called it.

  Really, I thought. Little Pond?

  Ah, that old seductress—water.

  “I can offer you thirty,” I said to Rick, springing the amount on him without a lot of questions. I figured, why not lowball it? He hadn’t mentioned any other offers. Maybe I could save myself two thousand dollars.

  I saw he didn’t expect the offer, that he had figured I was a real estate shopper and not a real estate buyer. This was evident in the way he had tossed his snowshoes to the ground at the beginning of our walk—as if to say, More time wasted with some asshole from Massachusetts. The mention of real money changing hands, though, warmed him up. His smile now seemed less distant, more fixed on his face. We made eye contact and he was searching me for bullshit. He said he would have to talk to his partner. This struck me as a variation on the car salesman routine, and I searched him for bullshit. Already we were quietly negotiating.

  A week later, in an e-mail exchange, Rick held firm at $32,000. I knew it was a good price despite my lower offer, so I agreed to it. We set a date for the closing. On February 8, 2008, after the stamping of papers and affixing of signatures, I owned 5.49 acres on a hillside in Stoneham in Oxford County, Maine.

  It was the beginning of an arc that would carry Paul and me through two cycles of the seasons, and a sequence of surprises, discoveries and unanticipated transformations in our lives.

  CHAPTER 2

  PRELIMINARIES

  There wasn’t much I could do before spring. The land was locked with snow and ice, and the first step in actual construction would be to cut a path up the hillside so we could bring building materials close to where the cabin would sit. The lumber was still sitting in Paul’s backyard, unsorted. I envisioned a path that would climb from the road, wend through the trees and reach the cabin in a broad curve up and around the hillside. I wanted something not much wider than a game trail. I imagined it as being hardly big enough to let two or three men walk abreast, a trail padded with dry pine needles and showing the coiled roots of some trees that had muscled through the ground. My hope was that the path would be complete in the spring and the cabin would be closed in by winter. It was an ambitious plan. Everything would have to go just right for it to happen.

  The land I had bought was on a hillside formed by the sloping face of a knob that rises on the northwesterly shore of Little Pond. The knob rises gently at first, then steeply—so steeply that it would seem impossible to climb to the top except by grasping 36 branches and bushes and pulling oneself up a single step at a time. I doubt that anyone has reached its crown, though I’m tempted to give it a try one day. I will bring some ropes if I do, and binoculars and a nice lunch. A pocked and buckled road threads narrowly between the pond and the knob. The road is the only year-round passage into a mountain intervale about a quarter mile farther up the road.

  My hillside and another heaving of the land—this one uninhabited—directly across the pond form the two sides of an entrance into the intervale. The breadth between these two hills is about the length of a very long home run—the sort that sails over the bleachers and bounces on the street outside the stadium. My knob is unnamed; the heaving across the pond is called Gammon Hill. I have a neighbor who is a Gammon, but I have not yet met him. I have heard the pond called Little Pond, Small Pond, Beaver Pond, No Name Pond, Mud Pond and That There Pond. Some people call it Moose Bog. The moose like it in April, when they come down, after a long winter of dry woody tips, for a spring salad of green pondweed. I guess its size at about six acres. It has marshy edges, and a big beaver lodge on its far side, and two wood-duck boxes that some Samaritan has nailed to flooded dead trees. The pond drains into a brook that finds its way to the grassy meadow of the nearby intervale and eventually to Kezar Lake, about a mile distant.

  George Ebenezer Kezar was a trapper who explored this country in the early 1700s. He came up from Hiram, in what was then a southerly town in the Province of Maine, and ran a line of traps to the border with Canada, beginning at Great Brook, which is a ten-minute walk from my hillside. Kezar was famous for his encounters with bears, and one legend has him being buried with one arm—the other lost to a bear that had got the better of him before Kezar dispatched it with a knife. Today the lake, several ponds and a river bear his name. So does a pub that serves expensive Belgian beers in nearby Lovell. It’s called Ebenezer’s. I spent some evenings there as the cabin was going up.

  These intervales are common in the hill and mountain country of northern New England: pleasant interludes of paisley-patterned flatland made fertile either by the overflow of brooks or by the downwash from the surrounding hills that ever so slowly manufacture topsoil from eroding rock and composting vegetation. Topsoil is a scarce and valuable commodity in these parts: as thin as cloth on a rough table, not fathoms deep like the prairie soil of the Midwest. My down-the-road intervale is split by a rushing stream called Cold Brook, which has its beginning in the high country between Speckled and Palmer mountains. I have tested it, and even in summer it runs as cold as a glass of iced lemonade. The brook holds small blue and red flashes of sunlight that are actually wild trout not much bigger than a pinky finger. In that first winter of purchase and discovery, when the brook bubbled around translucent and rectilinear panes of sharp ice, I resolved to one day take the time to find its alpine sour
ce. So there was another trip set aside for another day.

  Today the intervale bristles with poplar and white birch at its tightening margins, but once it was a settlement of subsistence farms owned by kin families with the names Adams, McAllister and McKeen. They grew beans and corn, kept oxen for the plow and milk cows, and raised pigs and sheep. Walking through that settlement in 1860 must have been a cacophonous affair, with chickens clucking, cows mooing, sheep bleating and pigs grunting. The road to the intervale is called Adams Road. As best I can tell, the Adamses have vanished from town, and there’s not much now to mark their former presence except the occasional rusted bucket or farm tool half buried in the woods.

  It took me some time to find the Adams cemetery. I knew from the moment that I learned of their past in the intervale that there would be a plot of mossy headstones nearby. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life in backwoods New England was a numbing succession of deaths: of children from diphtheria, measles, smallpox, fever, influenza and tuberculosis, and of women from childbirth, loneliness and suicide. A resident in town showed me an old photograph of a husband and wife who lived in the intervale in the late 1800s, and they looked like two strips of dried New England cowhide with expressions that would curdle milk. His worn-out shoes, overalls and sunken cheeks and her determined posture and pulled-back hair suggested a life of continuous labor and loss without complaint or capitulation. The longer I looked at the photo, though, I saw in their gaze an appealing countrified awareness that seemed touched with irony; and as I looked still longer, I saw maybe even a little mischief and carnality. Possibly it was the slightly playful addition of his straw hat, with its round brim and shallow top, and his slouch and suspenders, and there was the frankness that resided in his wife’s eyes. Surely something must have just occurred on the cornhusk mattress inside the old house.

  The mountain at the terminus of the intervale is called Adams Mountain. In the 1960s, an attempt was made to develop a ski area there. The attempt failed for many reasons—not the least of which is that Adams Mountain faces south into the eye of the winter sun. Its brow caught the warming rays and turned the snow on its slope to ice, which of course ruins the skiing by toppling skiers and breaking bones. In more recent years, it has been a good place to find a deer napping in a bed of beech leaves on a cold November afternoon, catching those same warming rays on its dense gray-brown flanks. If a doily of early snow happens to cover the woods floor, then steam sometimes can be seen rising from the deer’s warm and recently vacated mountainside bed.

  I had a rough idea of the cabin I hoped to build. I wanted it small and simple and tight to the weather. I wanted it snug. I did not want a shack, and neither did I want a vacation home. The very sound of the words “vacation home” made me grimace. I hate even to see it on the page. I was not looking to pile up possessions or bring expensive diversions into the woods. I did not want televisions, microwaves, toasters, electric can openers, popcorn poppers, food blenders, electric blankets or tchotchkes of any kind. This would be something like a monk’s cabin or, better, since I wanted to include books, binoculars, some magazines and a sketch pad, a naturalist’s or writer’s cabin. The woods would be my diversion, and I would look forward to the dramas of big snowfalls, noisy woodpeckers, new seasons emerging out of old ones, furtive pine marten and summer thunderstorms. I thought of a deck officer’s quarters on a sailing ship—a gentleman’s space reduced to its spartan essentials: desk, chair, chest, bunk, a wooden box with sextant, glass and compass, a table for reading maps and a few good books. Everything would fit together tightly, and anything loose would be stowed in its proper compartment against rough weather. I was building a cabin because I wanted to pare down and find the me that had been misplaced in life’s big and little catastrophes of the last decade. The project would be a move toward integration—not separation, escape or temporary stimulation.

  I decided I would not bring power up from the road. I would let Central Maine Power Co.’s lines pass by without planting poles on the hillside or stringing a cable through the trees. Maybe I would admit a portable radio to listen to a ball game on a summer evening. I liked the way a baseball game called on the radio collapsed the universe down to a ball, a bat, nine leather gloves and one person’s knowledgeable commentary. I had noticed one day while driving to the hillside that a ball game heard over the radio slowed my breathing, maybe even reduced my heart rate—not a bad thing for a guy with my medical history. A small radio would be a good addition to a cabin. The Internet—well, that was an open question. I liked being able to search for a good curry recipe or refresh my memory on the definition of the categorical imperative, but the Web would be a temptation to distraction and pointless stimulation. I preferred books and the company of humans, occupying their bodies and holding glasses of Scotch in their hands. I was not seeking a virtual experience. In a pinch, I could always drive to the town hall and use my laptop to poach the Internet signal in the parking lot.

  Of course all this asceticism and roughing it was environmental ideology, pure and simple, and not all of it intellectually consistent. It surely was not cabin construction. I hadn’t yet lifted a hammer or bought a nail. But it was a necessary step, I think, and a pleasant one. A cabin is a courtship and not an elopement. Through this period, in that first winter, I was filled with the agreeable feeling of anticipating a cabin—the contemplation of assembling and inhabiting it—and not of making any final decisions about the specific details of shape, size and pitch, nor of actual work. Of course, many details passed through my mind, but I was trying them on casually without making decisions. It was the infatuation stage of cabin construction. It was enough for me to sit (or lie) down with the idea of a cabin, to own it and enjoy it, anticipation being the purest pleasure.

  But as winter ran down and infatuation matured into intention, I began to feel the need to order my ideas about the cabin’s design and get serious about the practical aspects of this big project. I already had sunk $32,000 into it—serious money for me. Despite the deep snow, I was impatient to do something, anything to get started. I took out a yellow legal pad and began a list of tools I would need: framing hammer, finishing hammer, circular saw, wood chisels, mallet, combination and roofing squares, chalk line, nail apron, tape measure, carpenter’s pencils, cat’s paw, drill, wood bits, four-foot level. I browsed antique tool catalogs and wandered the aisles of Home Depot. With scissors and Scotch tape, I built a cardboard model of a cabin, drew in the windows and wondered if winter would ever end.

  I was not unfamiliar with cabins, having had a lifelong love affair with the outdoors, and no doubt each of the cabins from my past would inform the one I was about to build. These earlier cabins had contributed to my sense of what made a cabin a cabin, in an ideal Platonic sense, and at some below-conscious level I was probably running through the ontogeny of my cabin experiences, in literature and life, as I planned this one. This project was, after all, partly personal archaeology—the search for an earlier and happier self.

  I had stayed in many cabins through the years. There was the cabin at Nesowadnehunk Lake, near Katahdin, made from whole logs that had been peeled and painted brown and topped with a shallow roof. It had four small beds, a cookstove and a flimsy card table for meals. Paul and I stayed there on a fishing trip after building that first house. Then there was my old friend Pete Jordan’s hunting camp on the upper Kennebec River. It reeked of boots and damp wool and resonated at night with the snores, farts and slurred sleep-talk of men stacked in bunks like paint cans in a hardware store. Pete had been a commercial fisherman in the 1950s, and he was retired by the time he paid me the compliment of an invitation to the camp. It was no small thing to be invited to Pete’s camp during the deer season. I tried to reciprocate by inviting him down to Harvard, when I was a fellow there for a year, and he responded in a handwritten letter that Harvard might be an interesting place but he had hay to cut and bale. It was always first things first with Pete. I admired him hugely for his knowle
dge of the woods and his generous character, which showed in the love he lavished on his bird dogs, none of which paid his commands the least bit of attention. His cabin was positioned below a high ridge, and I liked the way my eyes were naturally pulled upward as I approached it. I stayed there with my son Adam when he was about twelve.

  In my list of lifelong cabins, there is the cluster of four or five in northern Maine that Paul and I and our sons traveled to for about eight years over Thanksgivings when the boys were growing up and old enough to go on hunting trips with us. Those cabins were more like bunkhouses with a sink and stove and innumerable nails angled out of the bare two-by-four studs for hanging wet coats and pants. We never shot a deer on those expeditions, but we enjoyed the trips. They regularly commenced a couple of hours after Thanksgiving dinner with a long car ride from Paul’s house in Portland to Aroostook County, not far from the Canada border. We would arrive late Thursday night, and a cabin’s single outdoor bulb would have been left on for us, marking the particular cabin we were to occupy. They had names like “The Moose” and “The Brook Trout.” The proprietor was Carroll Gerow, a man of medium height, slightly stooped, with big rough hands that seemed proportioned to a person a foot or more taller. In addition to being the owner of the sporting camps, Carroll was a woodcutter, local burgher and businessman and hunting guide, and in the years we knew him he never removed his blue porkpie hat, not even at the long dinner table in the lodge that was also his home. Part of the fun of the trips was mimicking his five a.m. roustings: “Okay, boys, time to get up. Boys! Boys!” Just a few years ago, Carroll was killed by his own woods tractor, run over as he made repairs. I’m sure he died with his hat on. He lives in our boys’ memories, and mine, too, and we still get cards from his kind and gentle wife, Deanna. Those cabins stand as proof that inspiration derives from many sources. Nails as clothes hangers had already been incorporated into my vision of a proper cabin.