Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [0]
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