• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

So looking back, maybe the backyard lumber was a way for me to knit together two episodes of my life, two dreams, really, one that had cracked long ago and another that was about to commence.

Here is a sequence from the first dream:

In 1975, having been married for one year and most definitely, completely and unarguably without money, I decided to build a house. My bride wanted a house, and I wanted to give her one. I simply needed to materialize it out of optimism and thin air. I was twenty-four and working at the daily newspaper in Portland and persuaded my employee credit union to lend me $7,500 with no collateral, no credit history and only fourteen months of employment. I bought a piece of land about a forty-five-minute drive from Portland—the land got a lot cheaper as you got farther out of town. We had been renting the second-floor apartment of a wooden three-decker in a distressed part of Portland. My only asset was a willingness to work. I was at that stage of life when young confidence blends with the illusion that time and possibility are limitless—I could draw on them forever to build a career, a house, or whatever it was I thought I wanted to do. I was brash. Why not build a house? Maybe it would take a year; maybe two years. Money? No problem. I would borrow it. Tools? Easily solved. I would buy them at the hardware store as I needed them, and I would do all of this while working full-time as the assistant city editor of a small daily newspaper. But even I knew that building an entire house was not a job for one person. I needed another set of hands just to carry the other end of a long board. So I called Paul.

Paul was twenty-one, and he had just quit a factory job in New Jersey. Only months before and despite good grades, he had left Monmouth College in Long Branch, New Jersey, mostly out of disgust with the gap, as he saw it, between the need for a revolution in America and the hypocrisy of college life as embodied in the privileged attitudes of rich girls from Long Island—of which many populated Monmouth College. Paul had always harbored a very low tolerance for hypocrisy, or to use the more direct term, bullshit. He was, at the time, deeply radicalized over the war in Vietnam. His hair was kinky and long, and he had a tight-coiled beard and dense eyebrows. It would have been easy to mistake him for Che Guevara—if Che Guevara had been the son of a Slavic father. There was also this: he had recently ended an intense relationship with his college girlfriend. The breakup was painful. So close were they that it had seemed to me a tearing of flesh. She was the daughter of a wealthy family from Philadelphia. She had soft dark eyes and the same antiwar politics as Paul. Paul told me much later that he had seen those big soft brown eyes of hers only once again in his life: in a doe that had died slowly beside the road after it had been struck by a car.

Out of college, out of work and without a girlfriend, Paul was untethered and looking for the next thing in his life. He has always been one to move on—Paul is not a brooder, the opposite of me. Coherence is not a big concern of his; or rather, I should say, he possesses it naturally, and from within, and not with conscious consideration. Or, as he has counseled me through the years, “There are times when you can think about things too much.” This readiness of his to move on was in 1975, and he had just bought a blue 1955 Chevy pickup truck. He was busy rebuilding the engine in an extra room of our mother’s apartment in Lakewood, New Jersey, where he was living when I called him about the house I wanted to build.

“Sure,” he said. “I can come up.”

He finished work on the truck, drove it to Maine and moved in with my wife and me—we had a small spare bedroom in our apartment.

Neither of us had built a house all the way through before. We had the experience of summer construction jobs growing up in rural South Jersey. In college I had worked on a framing crew; Paul had worked as a Sheetrock installer.