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By Root 499 0

It seemed that there were a few deer around, but the numbers were down because of the previous year’s heavy snow. The room was poorly lit, by one bulb at the end of a cord that hung from the ceiling, though Earl proudly made note of the fact that he now had “hydro.” In the car, on the way back to our cabin, Bump filled Jay and me in on Earl’s tragic history: he had lost his entire family, a wife and four children, in a canoeing accident on a nearby lake and had never emerged from his grief—a grief so powerful it had turned him into a child.

On the afternoon of the last day of our hunt, Maurice put me in a place where a deer might cross since it was his plan to make a loop around a nearby swamp. He assured me he would come back to this spot and we would walk out of the woods together on the logging road we had come in on. I was without the slightest sense of where I was. It was bitter cold, and we had three hours of light left in the day. The woods would go black when the sun dropped below the hills, around four p.m. So there I waited, and shivered, and waited, either for a deer or for Maurice.

Soon the sun dropped behind the trees, and Maurice had not come back. At sunset, the temperature fell further, and fast. I put my gloved hands in my armpits. In time, it was completely dark, and Maurice had not returned. I was worried, close to a panic. Had I misunderstood his directions? Was he having trouble finding me? Should I try to make my way out of the woods on my own? I considered firing the gun to signal for help. I got colder and more frightened. My hands and feet felt frozen. Maybe the best thing to do was to let out a yell. If Maurice was nearby and searching for me, he would hear me and holler back. We would find each other. But it seemed a kind of personal failure to yell—after all, I had a reputation back home as a boy of the woods. What sort of woodsman yells for help because it’s dark? What would I yell? I decided that I would holler out his name, which was better than calling for help. So I did, and as I did, I saw him leaning against a tree, smiling. He had been there for who knows how long, just watching me be afraid.

Maybe it was this first cabin experience that planted Maine in my imagination as a source of wilderness and personal testing, a place to which, for many reasons, I eventually would return again and again. I am still sorting out the reasons. Each time I returned I was a slightly different person, but surely the reasons included an intuition that nature was a path toward discovery. And maybe, too, I nursed a stubborn need to face down an old fear, one that had developed long before I met Maurice, and that was the fear of being abandoned and lost.

From the beginning, I had thought of the cabin as four walls and a simple roof to shield the rain—that wooden box. Of course, boxes are fine things. I have always been drawn to them—music boxes, pencil boxes, jewelry boxes, shaker boxes that fit one inside another. They have hinges, drawers, nesting lids and doors. A box creates order by enclosing and taming space. A sonnet is a kind of box. So is a symphony.

The nature of the box that would become my cabin depended on the answer to a series of questions:

How would its walls, floor and roof convert the open air through which birds flew into the captured space that was appealing shelter?

How would its pieces be stacked, joined and fastened to withstand wind, weather and gravity?

What materials would be employed?

Would the box have six surfaces—a cube with flat top, bottom and four sides—or would it have ten, twelve, fourteen or more surfaces? A roof alone presents numerous possibilities. A simple gable roof would make a cabin of seven surfaces—folded roof of two sides, bottom and four walls.

Considering these possibilities took me through the end of winter. I looked at a lot of books with photographs of cabins in Montana, Minnesota, Norway, Nova Scotia and California. They were designer cabins with polished logs, wraparound porches set with Adirondack chairs painted in primary colors and spacious