Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [12]
“Where are you going to get the land?” he asked.
“I have some ideas,” I said. “Maine, I hope.”
First, I had to contend with a practical matter. I lacked a car. In Boston, I was forced to live frugally. My savings had been wiped out in the divorce, and my professor’s salary left me with little extra money to buy a car, but I would need a car if I wanted a cabin, and a car cost money. This is what life in America has come to, I thought: a man who wants a little nature in his life must first find the money to buy a car. My stroke of good fortune came with the sale of a book. The first installment of the advance bought a used car; subsequent installments would get me started on the cabin.
At my computer in my office at the university, I scrolled through the country-property ads. They described lots that were along rivers or beside lakes, parcels that held old apple orchards or were open fields. I focused my search on Maine. I knew it held what I wanted in copious amounts: green hillsides watered by little streams, backwoods ponds, and miles and miles of roads that remained unpaved. An unpaved road had emerged as a necessity in my imagination. Let the dust fly. I wanted to be free of pavement for a few long weekends a year and maybe a month or two in the summer.
As I dodged the Boston traffic, the idea of a small cabin had become a way for me to at least think about nature, to put some tree bark and pine sap into my thoughts if not my life. My step felt a little lighter. I took it as a sign that the cabin was the right prescription for what ailed me. I conjured a cabin small, tight and secure against the wind blowing down from Canada and lit by the yellow flame of a hurricane lamp, squeaking as it swung slightly from a hook on the porch. Logs snapped in the woodstove of my fantasy.
I doodled and made sketches. I spent a lot of time thinking about the porch. It seemed to me a porch elevated a cabin above mere shelter. I was talking cabins and porches with a physician friend at dinner and he said, “Yes, a cabin—and a porch that you can piss off of. I’ve always wanted one.” We agreed that the absence of porches off of which to piss had become a serious deficiency of modern male life. The women at the table groaned.
The prospect of doing the work with Paul—and by extension, his sons—made the labor ahead even more appealing and the feeling right. When I was living in Philadelphia, because of the distance and our responsibilities, I had seen him only a few times a year, usually when I returned to visit my mother, who by then was declining and beset with numerous health problems. Paul—with eight children at home, a new marriage and a demanding job—had taken on the burden of caring for her in those final years. There was also some repairing that I needed to do with him.
So the way I was conjuring it, the cabin was going to be a kind of recapitulation of the first house Paul and I had built, except this time it was going to be done in late middle age and the goal would not be to construct a house for starting out in life, but to put up a place for ourselves, where our sons and daughters, now grown, could come to spend time with us in the out of doors.
As my kids burrowed deeper into their own lives and grew more distant from mine, this seemed to be more my dream than theirs. “You’re going to build a what?” my daughter asked me when I told her on the phone about my plan to build a cabin in the Maine woods, maybe deep in the mountains. “How will anybody get there?” she asked.
One day in January