Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [13]
In the code of northern New England, “mixed woodland” means that the trees that are valuable as lumber or pulp have been removed and the logs turned into boards or paper. In other words, some developer had already extracted the commercial value of the land as a woodlot. I guessed that most of the trees from the parcel I was driving to had by now been turned into paper towels at the sulfurous mill in Berlin, New Hampshire, and were on their way to kitchen spills across America. But it was worth taking a trip to see what was left.
What remained was recreational property—a euphemism for a rocky hillside of mostly second-growth oak, maple and beech scored with the ruts of a logging tractor, but close enough to ski areas and trout streams to attract a buyer who wanted a place in the country. This, of course, was me. I hadn’t skied since an accident some years ago in which I departed a chairlift too late and blew out both knees, but I had once been a pretty good fly fisherman and I knew the area was threaded with streams. After a couple of wrong turns that brought us to dead ends and unplowed roads blocked by deep snow, we found it. We recognized the lot by the surveyor’s fluorescent ribbons and a path that had been cleared by a logging skidder. With three feet of new snow blanketing the ground, we strapped on snowshoes and paddled up the hillside.
The sun was bright, the sky a powdery blue and the snow glittered like tiny crystals as we climbed the east-facing slope. The woods were silent except for our huffing and puffing. Neither of us was in great shape. Both of us could have stood to lose twenty pounds. The only exercise my work had afforded me was pacing back and forth in front of a classroom. Paul is stockier than I, but neither of us makes a delicate presentation. We both have dark hair and broad faces and mustaches that give us an unintended intimidating look. I remember a friend once remarking, when he saw Paul and me talking privately in the back of a room, “Looks like the Archduke may be in for some trouble.”
Our snowshoes bit the snow in small steps and sunk a few inches in the plump fluff as we put our weight down from leg to leg. The snow sighed with each press of the snowshoes. We made a trail of overlapping webbed ovals and followed the flags that marked the property’s boundary up the hillside. We crossed a single set of deer tracks, heart shaped and distinct in the snow. Later a bobcat track wended along a trail stitched with the prints of a snowshoe hare. It’s no small thing to see the mittened shape of bobcat pad. Both animals had been walking, not running, separated by hours or minutes, and I guessed the hungry cat was stalking the hare. I looked ahead but saw no signs either that the hare’s tracks were lengthening into a panicked dash or that the cat had crouched, ears back, to leap. I was taking no sides in the tale in the snow. I simply read it as a poem pressed in the winter page.
I would have been happy to follow those tracks all afternoon. I savored this feeling of being out of doors, of pulling the frigid clean air in and out of my lungs, and of being in a place where nature seemed to prevail over people and pavement. I had forgotten how much I relished just being in the woods. I was sweating from the climb up the hillside. I pulled off my jacket and opened my flannel shirt’s top two buttons. Paul, I could see, was looking for a