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By Root 461 0

stayed in many cabins through the years. There was the cabin at Nesowadnehunk Lake, near Katahdin, made from whole logs that had been peeled and painted brown and topped with a shallow roof. It had four small beds, a cookstove and a flimsy card table for meals. Paul and I stayed there on a fishing trip after building that first house. Then there was my old friend Pete Jordan’s hunting camp on the upper Kennebec River. It reeked of boots and damp wool and resonated at night with the snores, farts and slurred sleep-talk of men stacked in bunks like paint cans in a hardware store. Pete had been a commercial fisherman in the 1950s, and he was retired by the time he paid me the compliment of an invitation to the camp. It was no small thing to be invited to Pete’s camp during the deer season. I tried to reciprocate by inviting him down to Harvard, when I was a fellow there for a year, and he responded in a handwritten letter that Harvard might be an interesting place but he had hay to cut and bale. It was always first things first with Pete. I admired him hugely for his knowledge of the woods and his generous character, which showed in the love he lavished on his bird dogs, none of which paid his commands the least bit of attention. His cabin was positioned below a high ridge, and I liked the way my eyes were naturally pulled upward as I approached it. I stayed there with my son Adam when he was about twelve.

In my list of lifelong cabins, there is the cluster of four or five in northern Maine that Paul and I and our sons traveled to for about eight years over Thanksgivings when the boys were growing up and old enough to go on hunting trips with us. Those cabins were more like bunkhouses with a sink and stove and innumerable nails angled out of the bare two-by-four studs for hanging wet coats and pants. We never shot a deer on those expeditions, but we enjoyed the trips. They regularly commenced a couple of hours after Thanksgiving dinner with a long car ride from Paul’s house in Portland to Aroostook County, not far from the Canada border. We would arrive late Thursday night, and a cabin’s single outdoor bulb would have been left on for us, marking the particular cabin we were to occupy. They had names like “The Moose” and “The Brook Trout.” The proprietor was Carroll Gerow, a man of medium height, slightly stooped, with big rough hands that seemed proportioned to a person a foot or more taller. In addition to being the owner of the sporting camps, Carroll was a woodcutter, local burgher and businessman and hunting guide, and in the years we knew him he never removed his blue porkpie hat, not even at the long dinner table in the lodge that was also his home. Part of the fun of the trips was mimicking his five a.m. roustings: “Okay, boys, time to get up. Boys! Boys!” Just a few years ago, Carroll was killed by his own woods tractor, run over as he made repairs. I’m sure he died with his hat on. He lives in our boys’ memories, and mine, too, and we still get cards from his kind and gentle wife, Deanna. Those cabins stand as proof that inspiration derives from many sources. Nails as clothes hangers had already been incorporated into my vision of a proper cabin.

My first cabin experience had come much earlier, and it was also in Maine. I was fifteen years old, living my outdoor life in South Jersey, fishing and hunting and gaining a reputation as the boy you went to if you wanted to know how to catch blackfish or where to set a duck blind. One day I got an invitation from the stepfather of a friend. Would I like to join him on a hunting trip to Maine? This was beyond my most extravagant imaginings. Maine! The family had just moved from New Hampshire to our part of town, a slowly developing wedge of swamp and piney woods on Barnegat Bay advertised as “Waterfront Living—No Money Down.” The stepfather was an odd and silent man—my friend had warned me that he was peculiar but encouraged me to come on the trip anyway.

So in late November we drove fourteen hours north, with an overnight stop in New Hampshire for provisioning—mostly,