Cabin Page 5

  My first cabin experience had come much earlier, and it was also in Maine. I was fifteen years old, living my outdoor life in South Jersey, fishing and hunting and gaining a reputation as the boy you went to if you wanted to know how to catch blackfish or where to set a duck blind. One day I got an invitation from the stepfather of a friend. Would I like to join him on a hunting trip to Maine? This was beyond my most extravagant imaginings. Maine! The family had just moved from New Hampshire to our part of town, a slowly developing wedge of swamp and piney woods on Barnegat Bay advertised as “Waterfront Living—No Money Down.” The stepfather was an odd and silent man—my friend had warned me that he was peculiar but encouraged me to come on the trip anyway.

  So in late November we drove fourteen hours north, with an overnight stop in New Hampshire for provisioning—mostly, as I recall, beer and whiskey at the state liquor store—and to pick up my friend’s grandfather, Cula, who everyone called Bump. So there was the stepfather, whose name was Maurice, my friend Jay and Jay’s grandfather, Cula, and me. (It was Bump, deep into his seventies, who consumed most of the beer on the trip, while Maurice drank the whiskey.) Our destination was Hainesville, a crossroads where Maine potato country meets the big North Woods. We arrived at our cabin late one frigid night; it was one big room with a massive old-fashioned cookstove along one side, and, on the other, a collection of beds with broken springs and cloth mattresses about as thick as your average dictionary. The sag of the mattresses was such that a forceful roll in the night would give you contact with the floor.

  The temperature was in the single digits when we pulled in, and the snow was deep and frozen. Bump stuffed some newspaper and kindling in the stove. With a fire roaring and the stove sucking air through its many cracks, one side of the cabin reached about ninety degrees while the side with the beds hovered just below freezing. Bump’s genius was to find the precise location between the stove and the beds that kept his beer, stacked in cases nearly to the ceiling, at the right temperature for consumption, maybe ten degrees above lake ice. I also remember a wooden door, some tar paper fixes on the outside walls, a sloped floor and tiny windows.

  It was late, but not so late that Bump was inclined to cancel the round of visits that were a ritual on arrival. Bump had brought with him gifts he intended to distribute to his local friends. One was Joe MacDonald. Joe was a woodcutter who hauled his logs out of the woods with draft horses, two big Belgians that, I was told, we would use to pull our deer out of the woods if we were to shoot one. This was more than I could take in. We would drag our deer behind a logging horse! We arrived in Joe’s driveway, and in the headlights I saw what looked like a fox hanging from his clothesline. And indeed it was: a dead fox awaiting skinning. Two clothespins held the rear paws to the line and the animal looked like it had just left the high dive.

  We piled out of Maurice’s car, a big Buick, and knocked at the door. It eventually was opened a crack by Mrs. MacDonald. Joe was not home, she said. Where was he? Bump asked. Mrs. MacDonald was saying something quietly to Bump when we all heard a terrible yelling and banging coming from inside. It sounded like a wild animal was loose. Mrs. MacDonald stepped from the door toward the crashing, which allowed us to see inside to another door that was bulging as if a bear were pressing against it. The commotion was coming from behind the door, which apparently led to a basement. This was enough information to allow Bump to discern the situation. Joe, it seems, was a heavy drinker, and had even been known to put down a bottle of the liniment he used on his Belgians. When he got drunk he was impossible to control, and Mrs. MacDonald would lock him in the basement. Bump suggested we depart, but first, to my astonishment, he left a bottle of Canadian Club in a bag with Mrs. MacDonald. “This is for Joe,” he said.

  Our next stop was a broken-down shed house at the end of a woods road occupied by a wisp of a man named Earl Lovejoy. Earl received us with a smile, and we entered into a room that was more hovel than human habitation. There were pieces of chain saw, car parts, gas cans, shovels and wood tools scattered about, and among all of this a swarm of scraggly kittens was tumbling and playing with a rag. Earl was about five and a half feet tall, twisted and bent from the waist, which made him look like he was constantly leaning over to pick something up, when in fact he was unable to straighten himself out. He had wild oily hair, and on both hands he had a total of six fingers, not evenly distributed. Beer cans were immediately popped, and after Bump gave Earl mittens, cigarettes, a flashlight and some wool socks, a conversation about the condition of the deer herd began. It seemed that there were a few deer around, but the numbers were down because of the previous year’s heavy snow. The room was poorly lit, by one bulb at the end of a cord that hung from the ceiling, though Earl proudly made note of the fact that he now had “hydro.” In the car, on the way back to our cabin, Bump filled Jay and me in on Earl’s tragic history: he had lost his entire family, a wife and four children, in a canoeing accident on a nearby lake and had never emerged from his grief—a grief so powerful it had turned him into a child.

  On the afternoon of the last day of our hunt, Maurice put me in a place where a deer might cross since it was his plan to make a loop around a nearby swamp. He assured me he would come back to this spot and we would walk out of the woods together on the logging road we had come in on. I was without the slightest sense of where I was. It was bitter cold, and we had three hours of light left in the day. The woods would go black when the sun dropped below the hills, around four p.m. So there I waited, and shivered, and waited, either for a deer or for Maurice.

  Soon the sun dropped behind the trees, and Maurice had not come back. At sunset, the temperature fell further, and fast. I put my gloved hands in my armpits. In time, it was completely dark, and Maurice had not returned. I was worried, close to a panic. Had I misunderstood his directions? Was he having trouble finding me? Should I try to make my way out of the woods on my own? I considered firing the gun to signal for help. I got colder and more frightened. My hands and feet felt frozen. Maybe the best thing to do was to let out a yell. If Maurice was nearby and searching for me, he would hear me and holler back. We would find each other. But it seemed a kind of personal failure to yell—after all, I had a reputation back home as a boy of the woods. What sort of woodsman yells for help because it’s dark? What would I yell? I decided that I would holler out his name, which was better than calling for help. So I did, and as I did, I saw him leaning against a tree, smiling. He had been there for who knows how long, just watching me be afraid.

  Maybe it was this first cabin experience that planted Maine in my imagination as a source of wilderness and personal testing, a place to which, for many reasons, I eventually would return again and again. I am still sorting out the reasons. Each time I returned I was a slightly different person, but surely the reasons included an intuition that nature was a path toward discovery. And maybe, too, I nursed a stubborn need to face down an old fear, one that had developed long before I met Maurice, and that was the fear of being abandoned and lost.

  From the beginning, I had thought of the cabin as four walls and a simple roof to shield the rain—that wooden box. Of course, boxes are fine things. I have always been drawn to them—music boxes, pencil boxes, jewelry boxes, shaker boxes that fit one inside another. They have hinges, drawers, nesting lids and doors. A box creates order by enclosing and taming space. A sonnet is a kind of box. So is a symphony.

  The nature of the box that would become my cabin depended on the answer to a series of questions:

  How would its walls, floor and roof convert the open air through which birds flew into the captured space that was appealing shelter?

  How would its pieces be stacked, joined and fastened to withstand wind, weather and gravity?

  What materials would be employed?

  Would the box have six surfaces—a cube with flat top, bottom and four sides—or would it have ten, twelve, fourteen or more surfaces? A roof alone presents numerous possibilities. A simple gable roof
would make a cabin of seven surfaces—folded roof of two sides, bottom and four walls.

  Considering these possibilities took me through the end of winter. I looked at a lot of books with photographs of cabins in Montana, Minnesota, Norway, Nova Scotia and California. They were designer cabins with polished logs, wraparound porches set with Adirondack chairs painted in primary colors and spacious living rooms hung with elk antlers and Navajo rugs. Some of the cabins had kitchens with granite countertops, stainless steel refrigerators and track lighting. The only thing lacking was Sacagawea in six-inch heels. I thought of these books as cabin porn, a mix of money, fantasy and access to nature as a marker of status. This was not the direction in which I was headed.

  To put me back in the right frame of mind, I reread books by that old cabin dweller, eccentric ornithologist and Adirondack trout fisherman, John Burroughs. It helped me get right again. His relationship to the woods was direct, his prose and life unadorned and his observations precise and utilitarian. He measured rainfall, noted the dates of the appearances of frogs and named the birds he observed in the trees.

  I saw the construction as a series of steps to be taken in sequence. I would go from the ground up, and the outside in. They were:1. Foundation

  2. Frame

  3. Exterior siding

  4. Roof

  5. Interior siding and finish

  6. Plumbing, heating, lighting and cooking

  Early on, I had decided against a cabin made of logs. A well-built log cabin is a marvelous thing to behold, and it makes sense if you are good with an ax and have access to stands of big straight trees. They are emblems of frontier America. But they have their drawbacks—they are drafty and cold and best when kept small, and they require equipment or many men to lift the heavy green logs. These logs can be laid up round with notches or made square with an adze; in either case, they require caulking to keep out the wind. For me, a log cabin would also mean excluding the big timbers I had saved for so many years. They would become unnecessary given that the log walls would support the roof. I like log cabins; I just didn’t want to build one. Maybe someday I will take one on. It would be an absorbing challenge with old tools. I could use it as a backcountry camp for a day or two at a time in deep winter.

  My idea for the cabin’s foundation was a set of concrete piers set in the ground. They would be cheap, easy and effective. Resting on the piers, the cabin would hover over the earth by about two feet. The floors would stay dry, and I would have room enough to store a canoe underneath in winter. I didn’t yet own a canoe but surely would in time: a cabin demands a canoe. The only thing simpler than piers would be to rest the cabin on flat rocks set and leveled on the ground. Some of the old outbuildings in town were built just that way. I would have taken that approach if I didn’t fear the heaving of the ground from frost in the spring. Looking back, I wish I had done exactly that.

  The frame was a more complicated set of decisions. The pile of lumber in Paul’s backyard was still covered with snow, and we had yet to sort it. At this stage, in March 2008, I still didn’t know fully what materials I would have to work with, though I had taken a few quick measurements to get a sense generally of the lengths of the beams. Of course, Paul and I eventually got to the pile in the fall, on the sunny day in September, and when we did, we made a list of the timbers we could salvage based on their dimensions and joinery, the ways in which they had been cut to fit together. It was essentially an inventory of our building materials. I wanted to work with what I had, and I hoped not to have to cut them, nor supplement them with additional bigdimension lumber from the lumberyard. We would fit them together and raise them up as if we were raising a barn. Or so I hoped.

  The benefit of this sort of timber-frame construction is twofold: the beauty of the frame is exposed to the interior, and the frame carries the weight of the roof on the outside walls, which creates open interiors by eliminating the need for inside bearing walls. It is the method of construction that makes possible the vast interior spaces in old barns and New England’s colonial churches. Of course, I did not have in mind anything remotely close to a barn or church, but I would employ the basic materials and concepts of barn construction to create a cabin with an open interior and the warm and abundant feel of wood. With a timber frame and lots of big windows, I reasoned, I could bring the outdoors inside the cabin.

  The fundamental unit of timber-frame construction is the “bent.” This is an assembly of timbers fashioned into the shape of a raised H—two vertical posts connected near their tops with a horizontal beam. The timbers are joined by mortises and tenons, which are pegged, not nailed. The bents are constructed on the ground (or floor) and raised into place in succession to make the frame of the box. One need only look at the frame of an eighteenth-century church in Boston or Newburyport to see that I’m oversimplifying, but that H is essentially the unit that locks together to make a frame and carry the roof. The old-time housewrights elaborated on this theme in extraordinary ways to create soaring steeples, wide worship halls and multi-tiered barns of enormous capacity.

  I had made some sketches of a rectangle—the width of the cabin would be sixteen feet, because that was the length of the timbers that I had to form the horizontal line of the bent, the H. For efficiency and a pleasing appearance, the cabin’s length must be in proportion to the width. There’s no classic golden mean for cabins, but a design that is too long would turn the cabin into a bowling alley, and a design too short would sacrifice potential living and storage space. The timbers that I had to connect the freestanding bents, one to the next, were eight and ten feet long. Their lengths would establish the distance between the bents and ultimately—adding them together—the length of the cabin. So the length would be some combination of eight and ten. I struck on twenty-six feet—four bents spaced, after the first, at ten feet, eighteen feet and twenty-six feet.

  For the walls I decided to use two-by-four studs between the posts to provide a nailing surface for the interior and exterior materials and as away to hang batts of fiberglass insulation. I had done it this way before, when I had built the house for my family, and knew the process and materials. I went with the familiar.

  Then there was the problem of the rafters, the sloped timbers, front and back, that meet to form the peak of the roof and, at the other ends, the eaves. They transfer the weight of the roof to the outside walls. My early and quick inspection of the wood pile told me that the posts and beams were mostly sound, but some of the wood rafters I had hoped to use were questionable. It was essential that the roof framing be strong, safe and reliable. To have a rafter snap would be a catastrophe. I knew I would have to be ruthless in culling any bad rafter material. I decided it would be a good idea to fortify the roof framing by placing standard lumberyard trusses between the big timber rafters. These additional trusses would carry a lot of the roof weight and provide a surface for nailing the boards that would eventually become the ceiling of the cabin.

  So, with both the wall assembly and the rafters, I would make use of the big timbers but supplement them with lumberyard materials. I would fit the old lumber into the frame of a new structure. It was not pure timber-frame carpentry, and the serious wood butchers—the guys with Amish-style beards, canvas aprons, and German-forged chisels—surely would mutter, or worse, at my approach; on the other hand, there was reassuring continuity in this method that allowed me to use the old rafters, even if I had to bastardize the frame to force the metaphor. Anyway, it would make a safer building.

  For the siding of my timber-frame cabin, I had several choices. I could use clapboards, which are beveled pine boards somewhat less than an inch thick, the one above lapping the one below and showing four inches to the weather. This siding makes the classic look of the New England cape or saltbox, and it was a little too finished for my taste in a cabin. I could use half-log siding, which is nailed with the flat surface of the log to the wall. This would create the impression of a log-built cabin, but it would be a false impressi
on, and that held no appeal to me. Paul had suggested rough-sawn boards cut from unsquared logs, which would result in a wavy edge. They would give the cabin a frontier look—or maybe the facade of some ski-area brewpub.

  I poked around town, looking at camps and boathouses. I noticed that most of them used a simple pine-board siding that was milled with a cove along one edge. It is a common siding for Maine lakeside camps, practical and Doric with only a slight flourish. I liked it and found that a nearby lumberyard had it in ample supply. It was my choice.

  The roof surface was a settled matter. From the beginning, I wanted a green metal roof. It would last forever and I would get my overhead timpani.

  On a piece of graph paper, I fiddled with the design, and hoping that I would have an abundance of eight-foot timbers, I added an ell for additional space. It would come off the front and, if you were facing the cabin, would be on the right side. An ell added a bedroom and spatial texture, though, as Paul reminded me, it seriously complicated the roof. The cabin now would have two roofs, connected at a right angle, forming a valley at the line of intersection. I would need his help figuring out the framing of the valley. I worked out a floor plan with spaces marked for a kitchen and bathroom (left, facing the cabin) and writing room (with bunks) and storage room (right, still facing the cabin). In the middle was living space with a woodstove. The entire ell, ten feet long and sixteen feet wide—those salvaged sixteen-foot timbers being decisive—was the cabin’s biggest private room—bigger than both the bathroom and writing room. I e-mailed the plan to Paul. He e-mailed me back, “Getting there. I think I’d decrease the bathroom and kitchen two feet and increase the writing room and closet by two feet.”