Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [10]
With manufactured optimism, I also decided that part of what I was feeling was simply my inability to be satisfied without some work to do with my hands. I’m happiest when I have a project—a boat to build, a desk to refinish, dinner to prepare. I even enjoy untying stubborn knots in a fishing line. My daughter says I have attention surplus disorder. For no particular reason other than the joy of it, I once spent the better part of a year learning ancient Greek so I could read Plato. I convinced myself that my attention needed a happy and absorbing target and real work, and the depression would lift.
I went down into the basement of my apartment building and rummaged through my storage bin. I took stock of what I had there—again, the obsession with memories—but also inventoried the outdoor gear I had managed to keep through the disorder of the last few years: skis, snowshoes and fishing equipment. I had derived an awful lot of pleasure from these pursuits in the past. The outdoors had always been good for my soul, and more of the outdoors, combined with some physical activity, might just be what I needed. Trees filtering sunlight or water rushing over mossy rocks—they had worked their healing power on me before. There I was in the city, moving between my second-floor apartment and the university’s urban campus, and the closest thing to nature in my life was the nearby arboretum with mothers pushing monstrous baby strollers along asphalt paths and dog walkers stuffing their hands into plastic bags to pick up dog shit. A city park is not the outdoors. I figured some of what I needed to do was get back to that part of me that thrived in nature. I collected my fishing gear and began to prepare for the spring opening of the trout season. It brought back some of the boyhood pleasures of anticipation and absorption. The first day of trout season had always been a kind of second Christmas for me. It was a long way off, but I could still tie flies, assemble equipment and plot trips.
One thought led to another, and soon several strands of what had been occupying my thoughts—fishing, the satisfaction I got from making something, a chance to gather together what remained of my family—began to fuse into a project. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a cabin in the woods? Surely, I thought, a cabin would be plenty of project for me. It would put nature—wild nature, real nature, not citified cut-grass and dog-shit nature—back in my life. In a way, it would be a cameo of the bigger effort I was making to put my life back together after a decade of loss and change.
Yes, a little retreat in the woods: it would be just the thing. It filled me with pleasant thoughts. I liked the idea of fitting together posts and beams to make a snug cabin, and there was always the knowledge of the wood sitting in Paul’s backyard. I had enjoyed working with Paul before, when we had built the house. I had found the simple task of making a mortise and tenon joint to be a satisfying and complete experience. There was the heavy forward feel of the mallet in hand, the sharp clean edge of the chisel and the fragrant pine shavings that came up from the timber. I loved the way that two and then three pieces of wood fit together to make a solid corner post. It was honest and healthy work. It roughed the hands and rebuilt muscles. I would be outside, breathing woods-scented air. If the day was hot, I could drink cold water from a jug; if the day was cold, I would pull on a wool sweater. All of this struck me as immensely right and necessary. Once the cabin was complete, or so my reverie went, I could bring family and friends for holidays or weekends, or I could use it as a wilderness retreat to be with myself if that was what I needed.
All of this was hovering within me as not much more than a pleasant daydream until early one