Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [15]
It was the beginning of an arc that would carry Paul and me through two cycles of the seasons, and a sequence of surprises, discoveries and unanticipated transformations in our lives.
CHAPTER 2
PRELIMINARIES
There wasn’t much I could do before spring. The land was locked with snow and ice, and the first step in actual construction would be to cut a path up the hillside so we could bring building materials close to where the cabin would sit. The lumber was still sitting in Paul’s backyard, unsorted. I envisioned a path that would climb from the road, wend through the trees and reach the cabin in a broad curve up and around the hillside. I wanted something not much wider than a game trail. I imagined it as being hardly big enough to let two or three men walk abreast, a trail padded with dry pine needles and showing the coiled roots of some trees that had muscled through the ground. My hope was that the path would be complete in the spring and the cabin would be closed in by winter. It was an ambitious plan. Everything would have to go just right for it to happen.
The land I had bought was on a hillside formed by the sloping face of a knob that rises on the northwesterly shore of Little Pond. The knob rises gently at first, then steeply—so steeply that it would seem impossible to climb to the top except by grasping 36 branches and bushes and pulling oneself up a single step at a time. I doubt that anyone has reached its crown, though I’m tempted to give it a try one day. I will bring some ropes if I do, and binoculars and a nice lunch. A pocked and buckled road threads narrowly between the pond and the knob. The road is the only year-round passage into a mountain intervale about a quarter mile farther up the road.
My hillside and another heaving of the land—this one uninhabited—directly across the pond form the two sides of an entrance into the intervale. The breadth between these two hills is about the length of a very long home run—the sort that sails over the bleachers and bounces on the street outside the stadium. My knob is unnamed; the heaving across the pond is called Gammon Hill. I have a neighbor who is a Gammon, but I have not yet met him. I have heard the pond called Little Pond, Small Pond, Beaver Pond, No Name Pond, Mud Pond and That There Pond. Some people call it Moose Bog. The moose like it in April, when they come down, after a long winter of dry woody tips, for a spring salad of green pondweed. I guess its size at about six acres. It has marshy edges, and a big beaver lodge on its far side, and two wood-duck boxes that some Samaritan has nailed to flooded dead trees. The pond drains into a brook that finds its way to the grassy meadow of the nearby intervale and eventually to Kezar Lake, about a mile distant.
George Ebenezer Kezar was a trapper who explored this country in the early 1700s. He came up from Hiram, in what was then a southerly town in the Province of Maine, and ran a line of traps to the border with Canada, beginning at Great Brook, which is a ten-minute walk from my hillside. Kezar was famous for his encounters with bears, and one legend has him being buried with one arm—the other lost to a bear that had got the better of him before Kezar dispatched it with a knife. Today the lake, several ponds and a river bear his name. So does a pub that serves expensive Belgian beers in nearby Lovell. It’s called Ebenezer’s. I spent some evenings there as the cabin was going up.
These intervales are common in the hill and mountain country of northern New England: pleasant interludes of paisley-patterned flatland made fertile either by the overflow of brooks or by the downwash from the surrounding hills that ever so slowly manufacture topsoil from eroding rock and composting vegetation. Topsoil is a scarce and valuable commodity in these parts: as thin as cloth on a rough table, not fathoms deep like the prairie soil of the Midwest. My down-the-road intervale is split by a rushing stream