Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [29]
Back in Boston, I stacked them inside the rear courtyard of my apartment building. It was only a matter of time before everyone in my building got an e-mail from the building manager wanting to know whose windows were blocking the courtyard and warning that they would be put out with the trash if not removed immediately. I hit “reply all” to his message and confessed to everyone in my building that they belonged to me. I begged for a little more time before clearing them out. Over the next two weeks, I hauled them in three trips to Maine, on top of and inside my car. Paul looked them over. “I hope you didn’t pay anything for these,” he said. Of course, I left them in his backyard.
By July, I had the town’s permission, an excavator and even windows. It was way past time to get started. I still had a chance to have the cabin closed in by winter if we pushed the work schedule. I wanted to use the next four months to get a lot of the building work done, but just as my excavator arrived at the hillside, it began to rain, and rain some more. We couldn’t begin, my excavator told me, until the rain stopped. The ground was soaked. We needed at least three or four days of no rain, or the hillside would turn into a field of mud. So we waited. The rain would stop for a day, then begin again for three or four days. We would get two dry days in a row; then it would rain for six days straight. I kept checking the reports: more rain ahead. It was destined to become the wettest summer on record. It rained fifteen inches; a normal summer in Maine gets about nine and a half. There were local flood warnings.
Eventually the weather turned more favorable for building, at least briefly, but on the days of no rain my earnest young excavator had equipment problems—either the equipment was on the wrong end of town at another job or something was not functioning. (Why, I wondered, was it at another job?) I had been calling him every Friday through the summer to see if he had been able to snatch some time to get some work done when the sun made brief appearances. I usually reached his wife, who said she would be sure he got the message. At summer’s end, I still had no driveway even though the rains had mostly ceased. I was running out of time, and my young excavator was growing more difficult to reach and more diffuse in his commitment to a start date. I saw where this was going—nowhere—so I called him and said I would need to find someone else to do the work. He seemed relieved, but I had lost my summer. I went back to the excavator who I had initially rejected because he had given me the highest price. This time I was a supplicant. I explained my predicament—limited time, need to get started, wanted to have it closed in by winter. I didn’t touch my forehead to the floor, but only because he would not have seen my prostration over the telephone. I would have said ten Hail Marys and offered five readings of the Uniform Building Code if he’d asked for it as a condition for starting work. I’d really appreciate it, I told him, if he could get up there soon. After a long moment, he said he thought maybe he could get to it that month, September. His price came in a little higher. This, I guessed, was the premium I would pay for not having selected him the first time. I was willing to pay it. He turned out to be as good as his word. He got there rapidly, and I soon had a path to the cabin site.
Hallelujah.
It was late September by then, and I was back to teaching classes at the university, so I could not run right up to have a look as I wanted. Paul drove up, approved of the work and sent me some photos. By now the leaves on the hillside were just beginning to turn color, and his photos showed a sweeping path tunneling through the oaks and maples and climbing the hillside. It was just as I had pictured it. Double hallelujah. I broke free of university duties