Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [33]
As a next step, Paul developed two sets of drawings for the positioning of the piers. He sent an e-mail to an engineer with whom he worked on some big commercial projects and asked him to review the pier, girder and joist options for the cabin. He copied me on all of these e-mail exchanges, and I enjoyed reading the back-and-forth with its professional jargon and banter. It gave me an insight into his manner at work and his competence. “This is a camp so it doesn’t need to be a perfect analysis,” he wrote to the engineer. “No special inspections here.”
Near the end of November, we finally found a weekend when we could get to the hillside together. With the engineer’s input, we had settled on a pier design and marked it on the bare ground. My excavator had scraped the ground clear of bushes and trees. We snapped chalk lines and drove stakes. There it was: the size and shape of the cabin, as a living blueprint stamped on the dirt and fallen leaves in blue carpenter’s chalk. I stepped inside, walked around a bit, testing out the rooms. I pronounced myself satisfied. We were ready to set the foundation.
Somewhere along the way, Paul had developed an aversion to using a power auger to dig the holes for the foundation piers, which had been my preference and plan. He predicted it would hit rocks in the ground and be unable to achieve the four feet of depth we would need to sink the piers below the frost line. He suggested I rent a small backhoe. “If you hit rocks,” he said, “you will end up having to get one anyway to dig them out.” I favored the auger, reasoning that the job would go faster. If we hit a rock, I would simply move the position of the pier and dig a different hole. He was adamant in his opposition to the auger. “You can’t do that,” he said. The piers needed to be in the right places to bear the weight of the cabin, he explained. I was prepared to risk the small possibility that an offset pier might stretch the span specifications of the cabin’s girders. When I said this, he looked at me as if I had suggested we hire monkeys to pack our parachutes.
One of the stories that had been told and retold about Paul sums up his attitude toward shortcuts. He was on his first big construction management job, as the owner’s representative at a major office building project in Portland. He was about twentyeight years old. The day had arrived for a major concrete pour—for the building’s footings and foundation to be constructed. A long line of concrete trucks arrived to make their deliveries. Paul decided to check the wet concrete in the trucks for its soundness before accepting it. It was his discretion, and he was going by the book. The quality of the wet concrete is checked with a slump test—a concrete sample is poured into a cone, the cone is inverted and removed, a steel rod is inserted and then the degree to which the concrete slumps is measured against specifications. The sample that Paul had taken from a truck failed the test. It contained too much water, and since all the trucks were carrying concrete from the same mixing plant, he told them he was rejecting all of their concrete. There was nothing for them to do but take it back and dump it, he said. Hell broke loose among the drivers, and the concrete company called the project’s owners, furious. Who was the new kid pulling this shit? Paul’s decision stood, and the trucks departed and returned with fresh concrete that could pass the slump test.
So I should have known when I suggested a shortcut that his answer would be firm. I rented the backhoe.
We turned up the first ground in November. Late fall is not the usual time to start a building project in the north country, but I was craving this cabin and unwilling to delay it any longer. I hoped we could get a lot done before the first snow. In the meantime, I continued to wonder what was distracting Paul. He seemed a little distant.
CHAPTER 3
LOST LANDSCAPE
By the time you hit your sixth decade, life’s losses begin to pile up. If you