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By Root 432 0

and slumping badminton nets. To a passerby, it must have looked like a heap of old railroad ties dumped by the side of the road. I brushed the rough surface of the wood with my hand and pressed a thumbnail into its pulpy flesh. It was spongy: not a good sign. A few of the boards showed sawdust and smooth channels that were the work of carpenter ants. There were many more pieces—heavy posts, big square beams and long silvery rafters with bird’s-mouth mortises—that had come through the years of sun and snow mostly sound. I couldn’t help feeling some affinity with the wood: weathered but mostly intact. This was what I had hoped for on the drive up from Boston, where I lived and worked. I had counted on salvaging enough lumber from the pile to form the frame of the cabin that already had taken shape in my mind.

Paul stood with me in his backyard. He was less sure about the wood.

“I don’t know,” he said. “A lot of it’s wet, maybe rotten.”

Paul is an experienced and methodical builder. He typically works with architects, engineers, cranes and shipments of steel. He is the construction and project manager for a commercial real estate company in Portland—its vice president, in fact. He is a nonconformist in other parts of his life—a big man with a thick mustache, he drives a Harley-Davidson motorcycle wearing a sleeveless undershirt, open leather vest and a head kerchief tied tightly above his ears for a helmet—but he is cautious in matters of construction, the equivalent of the prudent and spectacled accountant. He applies conservative principles to the building of things, and he was exercising his professional caution on my woodpile. He might as well have been a banker sniffing weak collateral. I, on the other hand, was determined to work up the cabin from the old lumber, which would seriously reduce the project’s cost and give me a rustic shelter that was an appreciation of the beauty of wood, and I wanted to get started right away. I was feeling the burden of his skepticism.

“The roof is going to have to carry a big snow load in those hills,” Paul said.

I could feel him inching closer to saying what he was actually thinking, which was that I should forget the woodpile and have a fresh bundle of two-by-four studs delivered from the lumberyard. That after all was the sensible thing to do: new lumber, new windows, prehung doors and prefabricated roof trusses. We could hire some help, engage subcontractors for the plumbing and electricity and have the cabin up in a few weekends. I would summarize his attitude as “Let’s make this easy and get to the part where we sit inside and enjoy the place.”

Instead, I wanted to construct the cabin with these big woebegone slabs of wood in the old timber-frame method of building a barn, which meant employing, as much as possible, old-fashioned wood joinery rather than nails. It would hold together in much the same way as a chest of drawers assembled in a furniture shop. I wanted a place with some craft and heft and tradition—a place that could make a natural and authentic claim to a piece of rugged Maine hillside. I didn’t want a vacation home; I wanted a cabin. The rough-sawn and weathered beams, as I planned it, would be exposed inside the cabin just as they would be in a barn or backwoods Maine camp, and it would be sturdy and raised up from local materials, and it would be all the better for requiring the expenditure of time and skill with a mallet, wood chisel and framing square. And I wanted for us to do it all ourselves.

Paul listened to all of this without passing judgment or rolling his eyes. He was keeping an open mind, but I knew that I already had raised his suspicions when I showed him a bunch of dilapidated wood-frame windows I had scrounged over the summer for the price of hauling them away. They also were stored in his backyard.

Paul slid a rafter out of the pile that had the surface texture of Roquefort cheese. It was a good sixteen feet long. Its edges were gnawed and ragged. It crumbled in his hands.

“I’m not sure I want to be standing under this one when the snow