Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [26]
The man had authority. His reasoning settled on the board like a gentle snow. After a little silence, I could hear it being processed in the light hum of conversation. It was hard to refute: good country sense, they thought. His money, his cabin, his fire, his loss. Besides, he doesn’t look like such a bad guy. Okay, they agreed as a group, I could go ahead and build a narrower driveway, but it would be provisional and need approval of the town’s residents at the next town meeting in March. Everybody in Stoneham would get to vote on my driveway. I thanked them and happily made my way home to Boston.
In May, with the hillside showing new leaves, Paul and I met my young excavator at the base of the right-of-way on Adams Road. We planned to walk the intended path of the driveway and establish the site of the cabin. Paul brought with him his son Paulie and his three-year-old grandson Maddik, who was the son of Paul’s older daughter, Katherine. I was struck by how much he looked like Paul as a boy, impish yet with heavy eyebrows. Paul often babysat for Maddik when Katherine was working, and he took him on many of his errands and excursions. Maddik liked to climb over Paul when he was in his big chair at home, watching television or opening the mail, and Paul would lift and spin him overhead. They traveled as sidekicks in Paul’s pickup truck.
Paulie was twenty-one years old, long, skinny and furiously tattooed on his arms, chest and back. In another few months, he would leave for Orlando, Florida, where he would attend the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute. Paulie had been a handful for Paul to raise—impulsive and often in trouble at school and with the police—but lovable and irresistible even to the teachers and school administrators Paul often had to meet with about Paulie’s behavior. He simply could not sit still in class. He was a jack-in-the-box with ants in his pants. He would get up and walk around in the middle of a lecture. At one point, as a way of keeping him in school, his teachers had decided they would dismiss him ten minutes early from every class so he could go to the gym and shoot baskets to burn off energy before the start of the next class. Paulie had found trouble the way cockleburs find a pant leg. It came in many forms: driving unregistered snowmobiles, tearing around the neighborhood on dirt bikes without mufflers, getting into shoving matches that turned into fistfights . . .
His most prominent tattoo was for his grandmother—my mother—with whom he had been especially close. He’d often drop by with a pizza, which she preferred to the food served at her senior housing complex, or help her from her easy chair to the bathroom as she grew more infirm in her last years. Paulie’s preoccupation at the moment was stock car racing. He drove a 1986 Chevrolet Monte Carlo with a 350-cubic-centimeter engine, which he had assembled himself from five or six other cars. Paul had taught him basic auto mechanics in their two-car garage. I had gone to one of his races at a country track near Portland. His crew included a seasoned mechanic and driver, friends from the Portland neighborhood and two girls who were currently working at a local strip club. As a child, Paulie had been present when I had brought the lumber to Paul’s backyard all those years ago, and when I had come to visit he would often ask, “Uncle Louie, are we ever going to build a cabin?” Now that it was about to begin, he wanted to be present for the event.
Back in January, when Paul and I had walked the land with Rick, we had trudged straight up the hill, following the right-of-way that had been knocked down by the logger’s tractor. This eventually would be the base of the driveway until just shy of the ledge. Then it would turn right and find its way, switchbacking with the lay of the land to its destination, once we had settled on it.
My unnamed knob is a ripple in the runup to the White Mountains. The big peaks, which hold snow into June and sometimes even later, rise up several miles to the west. Still, the hill country surrounding