Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [16]
Today the intervale bristles with poplar and white birch at its tightening margins, but once it was a settlement of subsistence farms owned by kin families with the names Adams, McAllister and McKeen. They grew beans and corn, kept oxen for the plow and milk cows, and raised pigs and sheep. Walking through that settlement in 1860 must have been a cacophonous affair, with chickens clucking, cows mooing, sheep bleating and pigs grunting. The road to the intervale is called Adams Road. As best I can tell, the Adamses have vanished from town, and there’s not much now to mark their former presence except the occasional rusted bucket or farm tool half buried in the woods.
It took me some time to find the Adams cemetery. I knew from the moment that I learned of their past in the intervale that there would be a plot of mossy headstones nearby. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life in backwoods New England was a numbing succession of deaths: of children from diphtheria, measles, smallpox, fever, influenza and tuberculosis, and of women from childbirth, loneliness and suicide. A resident in town showed me an old photograph of a husband and wife who lived in the intervale in the late 1800s, and they looked like two strips of dried New England cowhide with expressions that would curdle milk. His worn-out shoes, overalls and sunken cheeks and her determined posture and pulled-back hair suggested a life of continuous labor and loss without complaint or capitulation. The longer I looked at the photo, though, I saw in their gaze an appealing countrified awareness that seemed touched with irony; and as I looked still longer, I saw maybe even a little mischief and carnality. Possibly it was the slightly playful addition of his straw hat, with its round brim and shallow top, and his slouch and suspenders, and there was the frankness that resided in his wife’s eyes. Surely something must have just occurred on the cornhusk mattress inside the old house.
The mountain at the terminus of the intervale is called Adams Mountain. In the 1960s, an attempt was made to develop a ski area there. The attempt failed for many reasons—not the least of which is that Adams Mountain faces south into the eye of the winter sun. Its brow caught the warming rays and turned the snow on its slope to ice, which of course ruins the skiing by toppling skiers and breaking bones. In more recent years, it has been a good place to find a deer napping in a bed of beech leaves on a cold November afternoon, catching those same warming rays on its dense gray-brown flanks. If a doily of early snow happens to cover the woods floor, then steam sometimes can be seen rising from the deer’s warm and recently vacated mountainside bed.
I had a rough idea of the cabin I hoped to build. I wanted it small and simple and tight to the weather. I wanted it snug. I did not want a shack, and neither did I want a vacation home. The very sound of the words “vacation home” made me grimace. I hate even to see it on the page. I was not looking to pile up possessions or bring expensive diversions into the woods. I did not want televisions, microwaves, toasters, electric can openers, popcorn poppers, food blenders, electric blankets or tchotchkes of any kind. This would be something like a monk’s cabin or, better, since I wanted to include books, binoculars, some magazines and a sketch pad, a naturalist’s or writer’s cabin. The woods would be my diversion, and I would look forward to the dramas of big snowfalls, noisy woodpeckers, new seasons emerging