Cabin Page 6

  These were good suggestions, and I made the adjustments. I left undecided how I would handle my water system. My guiding principle all along was to keep everything cheap and simple, and I was considering ways of employing a raised cistern, which might be filled with rainwater or groundwater pumped from a shallow well. If the cistern was set high enough, the water would flow into the cabin’s sink, shower and toilet. The cistern could be built on a platform outside the cabin like one of those old-time railroad water tanks, or it could sit in the cabin, above the bathroom. I let the decision stew for a while.

  Once the snow had mostly melted from the hillside in late April, Paul and I went up to take some measurements.

  The hillside had come with an important restriction. Nothing could be disturbed within 250 feet of the pond. The state had designated Little Pond and its surrounding marsh as critical wading-bird habitat. It was home part of the year to Canada geese, wood ducks, rails, gallinules, herons and cranes. The conservation restriction was fine with me; I was pleased, in fact, that it was in place. I had no need or desire to disturb the woodland below the cabin. The pond was a piece of the landscape that I looked forward to exploring. I was intrigued by the beaver lodge and the mounds of feeding sticks the beavers had scattered around the pond as food caches against tough times. In the early spring the pond wriggled with pollywogs, and already long-legged water striders were skimming over its surface. I was curious to see if I could catch a fish in the pond someday, maybe a small bass or even a trout that had come up from the brook below. I had no desire to harm what would be for me one of the treasures of cabin life that I knew would take me years to fully understand and appreciate. It was one more project I set for myself—a survey of the pond. I would collect leaves, make sketches, take measurements and conduct an inventory of species.

  But once I had measured off the distance from the pond’s edge up the hillside, I was presented with a problem. The restriction allowed a path to be constructed up the hillside, within the 250-foot zone, but a turn-in to the eventual building site would have to be above the 250-foot mark. Again, fine, except that, at 240 feet, a long granite ledge thrust up from the ground and ran along the edge of the property. Turning in anywhere near the 250-foot mark would require blasting the ledge, and that would be expensive and difficult, and would blow a big hole in the landscape. I was sick about it. I wanted my presence on the hillside to be light and harmonious, and now I was having a serious discussion with Paul about backhoes, pneumatic hammers and dynamite. Maybe I had not done my due diligence and the purchase had been illconsidered. I could sell the land, I thought, and still get out of it without a loss.

  Paul and I walked up and down the right-of-way and took more measurements, but we could not figure out a way around the ledge. There was only one way in, and the ledge was a good forty feet of granite obstacle preventing it. It was blast, back out or seek an exception to the no-disturb rule. I doubted we could get an exception. Paul, who often encounters construction impediments in his work, said it might be possible. We talked it over and decided to play it out. Paul made a telephone call to the Department of Environmental Protection, then followed up tenaciously with e-mails through the spring to environmental officials who had questions. It was a reasoned back-and-forth with references to distances, environmental buffers and intrusions. Finally, he received this note: “You may proceed with your plans to develop that path to the cabin site as proposed. No further permitting will be necessary as the proposed path is not likely to have a significant impact on the adjacent wildlife habitat buffer.”

  The experience certainly debunked all the loose talk that gets thrown around about the inflexibility of bureaucrats and environmental regulations. Now that I knew I didn’t have to blast, I went looking for an excavator who could cut in the cabin path. These men are spread across most of rural America. With backhoes and dump trucks they dig foundations, clear paths, construct driveways, plow town roads in winter and clear culverts in the fall. Sometimes to make a living they combine their digging and hauling with concrete foundation work and carpentry. They usually carry big debt on their equipment, their lives are noisy and hot (or sometimes very cold), and more often than not they have dirt in their shoes, but they are their own bosses with their own businesses. Their wives do the books, and somehow they get their kids through college. The difference between a good month and a bad one might be having a few guys like me showing up in town wanting to build a place in the country.

  I called three excavators, and all of their estimates struck me as high. I soon learned why from the excavator who had given me the lowest price. In the aftermath of Rick Rhea’s dealings with the town’s planning board and the ill will that had developed between them, the town had increased the minimum driveway width for newly subdivided property to twenty-four feet. The town could not do much about Rick since he had prevailed in his division of the property, but it could be tough with the people who bought his land, and the twenty-four feet that the ordinance required might settle the score. It was heavy-handed—wider than many of the roads in town. Not only would the new width add expense to my project before I had even gotten started on the cabin, it would disturb the hillside, perhaps even more than blasting the ledge. I would have to give up my dream of a narrow trail from the road to the cabin. I had wanted the cabin to disappear among the trees, to fade among the grays, browns, blacks and greens of the trees and rocks. A twenty-four-foot driveway would be a big gravel scar up the hillside. And there was more: the town’s part-time code enforcement officer thought I should also have a forty-foot turn-around on the hillside at the top of the drive, to accommodate a fire truck. I was looking at the construction of a parking lot.

  I put my head in my hands. I had settled on the excavator who offered the lowest price, an earnest young man in town who was also a builder. We were discussing the code problems when he let me know that he was a member of the town’s planning board. Why hadn’t he told me this before? This was a stroke of major good fortune. He even agreed that the width rule was unreasonable. I asked him if it would be useful for me to appeal directly to the town by making an appearance at a planning board meeting. He blew some air skeptically through his lips, not quite a whistle. He shook his head in indecision. He was not so sure it was a good idea. Probably not, he said. I was from out of town—Boston, no less. There was still a lot of heartburn over Rick Rhea. We talked the problem through further, and I perceived that he had his own dispute going with the board, the exact nature of which I could not grasp. He was telling me, obliquely, that his problem with the board might attach itself to my problem with the driveway. I would be wading into complicated town politics and personalities. I decided I should give it a try anyway.

  The planning board met in the back of the town’s fire station. I had called ahead and asked to be put on the agenda. On the evening of their meeting, I waited for my turn, the only nonmember in attendance. Seated around the table were a woman and four men. The youngest was in his twenties, my excavator, who was trying to aid my cause by not making eye contact with me; the oldest was in his seventies, a small and wiry man with a T-shirt that read “Kiss a Moose.” The board’s chairman, a person I knew to be an attorney from a little research I had done ahead of the meeting, noted my presence and told the group that I had asked to speak to the board, which gave its assent.

  I introduced myself, thanked them for the opportunity to address them and explained my situation. I had bought a piece of land in town, wanted to put up a cabin and hoped to do so without disturbing the natural setting, but had come up against the wide driveway regulation. I asked, respectfully, if it might be waived to allow a narrower drive, maybe twelve or fourteen feet, which was common in nearby towns. Somewhere in my discourse I acknowledged the board’s authority and the importance of its work and complimented the town on its beautiful setting among the hills and lakes. There was silence when I was done. I could feel them sizing me up. Maybe they thought if they looked hard enough they could see i
nto my real self and real intent. The specter of Rick Rhea loomed in the room. I broke the silence and said, with some earnest enthusiasm, that I hoped to be a good neighbor. This was true. A debate ensued. Some expressed their concern about the entire way the land had been subdivided in the first place; another worried about a precedent for other lots up on the hill; still another pointed out that a wide driveway would be necessary for a fire truck to turn around. I felt the discussion trending against my request, and I was powerless to stop it. It would be impolitic to interrupt their deliberation once it had begun. I had had my chance to speak. I was going to be stuck with twenty-four feet. The oldest member of the board, the one wearing the “Kiss a Moose” T-shirt, finally spoke. He had been silent until then. He unscrewed himself from the posture he had been in, legs crossed in one direction and torso turned pointing in the other. They all shifted to hear him. Even before he had begun, I could see that he had taken the taut coil of his body and was transferring its energy to what he was about to say.

  “Damn it,” he said. “The man wants to build a camp on property he bought. He paid money for it.” It was clear that he was unleashing outrage over the state of the nation as he had come to judge it from his perch as a lifelong and tenth-generation resident of Stoneham; to him, my problem with the regulation was only the latest example of the sorry state of the country. “If it’s okay with him that a fire truck can’t get up there to turn around, and it burns down, well, that’s his problem. I say let him do it.”

  The man had authority. His reasoning settled on the board like a gentle snow. After a little silence, I could hear it being processed in the light hum of conversation. It was hard to refute: good country sense, they thought. His money, his cabin, his fire, his loss. Besides, he doesn’t look like such a bad guy. Okay, they agreed as a group, I could go ahead and build a narrower driveway, but it would be provisional and need approval of the town’s residents at the next town meeting in March. Everybody in Stoneham would get to vote on my driveway. I thanked them and happily made my way home to Boston.

  In May, with the hillside showing new leaves, Paul and I met my young excavator at the base of the right-of-way on Adams Road. We planned to walk the intended path of the driveway and establish the site of the cabin. Paul brought with him his son Paulie and his three-year-old grandson Maddik, who was the son of Paul’s older daughter, Katherine. I was struck by how much he looked like Paul as a boy, impish yet with heavy eyebrows. Paul often babysat for Maddik when Katherine was working, and he took him on many of his errands and excursions. Maddik liked to climb over Paul when he was in his big chair at home, watching television or opening the mail, and Paul would lift and spin him overhead. They traveled as sidekicks in Paul’s pickup truck.

  Paulie was twenty-one years old, long, skinny and furiously tattooed on his arms, chest and back. In another few months, he would leave for Orlando, Florida, where he would attend the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute. Paulie had been a handful for Paul to raise—impulsive and often in trouble at school and with the police—but lovable and irresistible even to the teachers and school administrators Paul often had to meet with about Paulie’s behavior. He simply could not sit still in class. He was a jack-in-the-box with ants in his pants. He would get up and walk around in the middle of a lecture. At one point, as a way of keeping him in school, his teachers had decided they would dismiss him ten minutes early from every class so he could go to the gym and shoot baskets to burn off energy before the start of the next class. Paulie had found trouble the way cockleburs find a pant leg. It came in many forms: driving unregistered snowmobiles, tearing around the neighborhood on dirt bikes without mufflers, getting into shoving matches that turned into fistfights . . .

  His most prominent tattoo was for his grandmother—my mother—with whom he had been especially close. He’d often drop by with a pizza, which she preferred to the food served at her senior housing complex, or help her from her easy chair to the bathroom as she grew more infirm in her last years. Paulie’s preoccupation at the moment was stock car racing. He drove a 1986 Chevrolet Monte Carlo with a 350-cubic-centimeter engine, which he had assembled himself from five or six other cars. Paul had taught him basic auto mechanics in their two-car garage. I had gone to one of his races at a country track near Portland. His crew included a seasoned mechanic and driver, friends from the Portland neighborhood and two girls who were currently working at a local strip club. As a child, Paulie had been present when I had brought the lumber to Paul’s backyard all those years ago, and when I had come to visit he would often ask, “Uncle Louie, are we ever going to build a cabin?” Now that it was about to begin, he wanted to be present for the event.

  Back in January, when Paul and I had walked the land with Rick, we had trudged straight up the hill, following the right-of-way that had been knocked down by the logger’s tractor. This eventually would be the base of the driveway until just shy of the ledge. Then it would turn right and find its way, switchbacking with the lay of the land to its destination, once we had settled on it.

  My unnamed knob is a ripple in the runup to the White Mountains. The big peaks, which hold snow into June and sometimes even later, rise up several miles to the west. Still, the hill country surrounding the knob has more than an easy roll to it, and sometimes you have to turn and tilt your head to see the tops of the foothills as you are driving along the state highway from Norway. The knob is seventy-one miles from the sea—a straight line east would touch the coast at Camden, but the natural direction to the sea follows the contour of the land, south by southeast, which is the path the Saco River takes to the Gulf of Maine. The hillside occupies the north end of the Saco watershed. All the water that falls from the sky or gurgles from the earth in a wedgeshaped basin whose west wall is New Hampshire’s Presidential Range flows, in a variety of brooks, streams and rivers, to the Saco, and then to the big sandy beaches at Camp Ellis and Biddeford Pool. A watershed is a marvelous thing. It embraces plants and animals at high and low elevations, in swamps and atop dry escarpments, making a natural community through topography, climate and gravity. It provides a metaphor for harmony, diversity and wonder. The rain that would drip off my metal roof might eventually be sipped by a deer in the eddy of some brook twenty miles away, or by a lady serving tea in Biddeford.

  The cabin would be about seven hundred feet above sea level, which meant that the average declination to the beach at Camp Ellis would be about ten feet per mile. If I could pull a string from the top of the knob above the cabin to the seaweed lying on the beach at low tide at Biddeford Pool, the line would seem nearly as flat as a billiard table, maybe with the west end of the table propped up with a few dimes. But of course it’s not the average declination that matters. The land between the sea and the knob is mostly unvarying coastal plain until you get within a mile or two of the cabin; then it begins to rise, giving the Saco River its quicker upper currents and my hillside its steep slope.

  The five us, with Maddik on Paul’s shoulders, meandered up the hillside, getting a better sense of its shape and the possibilities for holding the cabin in one of those flat places that seems like a natural terrace. Ferns had sprung up among the trees in the cool dark places along the logger’s path, and near the bases of the pine trees mayflowers tendriled along the ground and put out small bursts of white blossoms. The ground was moist underfoot, even a little spongy, still full of snowmelt and spring rain, pulsing water out of old leaves to form small brooks.

  We dispersed on the way up the hill, giving the impression of a search party. This was just what we were. We found two or three good sites for the cabin. The places were high and dry, somewhat flat, and two of them afforded a partial view of the pond across the road. After a thorough surveillance, we regathered on a big flat rock, sat and talked it over. We narrowed the choices to two, and then put one over the other because it was closer to the right-of-way and therefore would require removal of fewer trees and a shorter path, which meant less expense and less disruption to the
hillside. While the others stayed at the rock and dozed in the sun, I went back to have a second look. I wanted to stand there quietly and alone and open myself to the sight, sound and feel of the spot. Paul had understood and had made no effort to come with me.

  I put myself in the place, roughly, that would represent the center of the cabin. My mind ranged over the hillside, in all of its folds, creases and flat places, like a dog looking for a place to lie down.

  The site was on the far side and upper end of the ledge we had successfully avoided blasting. It was a kind of small tabletop set within the descent of the hillside, which made it good for building since it would not require scraping to create a flat space out of the hill’s slope, and it was more open than the other locations we had considered. A few beech and hemlock trees grew on it, and some spindly striped maples, which in Maine are often called moose-wood. There was a stand of tall red pines uphill of the site and slightly back, a good spot, I couldn’t help thinking, that I might one day clear for an apple orchard. In a direct line from what would possibly be the front of the cabin, about one hundred yards distant, the hillside showed a gully, down and then up—and up and up toward the knob. Looking in the direction of the road, I caught a glimpse of the silver sparkle of the pond through the new leaves of the red maples and oaks, which mostly covered the cuff of the hillside.

  At this time of day, around ten a.m., the sun was over the farthest end of the pond. The sun’s arc, I guessed, would drop below the westerly hill behind the cabin at sunset. I pictured the cabin in a variety of positions on the site, turning it in my mind; taking a few steps, I imagined myself standing on the porch at each position. How would the sun touch the cabin through the day and through the year, and what would I see from my aerie among the trees? I looked right and left, down to the ground and up to the sky. I gave all of this considerable thought and felt good about the possibilities. After a half hour or so of these land-sun-cabin speculations, I arrived at the angle at which I thought the cabin should face the downhill slope, which would put the morning sun in the kitchen window four seasons of the year. I liked a cheerful morning kitchen. The cabin would look obliquely down the hillside, at an angle of about forty-five degrees to its descent, so that its front would face east by northeast. Of course, this would mean a porch full of snow after a December nor’easter, but this was what the land presented. There were lots of variables that were in my control, but the position of the knob and the direction of the wind were not among them. These were limits within which I had to work. I was partial to an eastern exposure anyway, and was already enjoying the warmth of the May sun and the thought of myself busy in the sunlit kitchen.