Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [40]
In the morning, Paul climbed onto the backhoe and started the engine. It fired up with loud popping sounds as if firecrackers had been dropped into the upright exhaust pipe. It roared when he put it into gear and moved it to the position of the first hole. But then he shut it down, got off the machine and handed me the key.
“Go for it,” he said.
Me?
I was not ready for this. There was a subtle shift in the hierarchy of the work, or workers. I thought he would dig the holes. He was better at this work. The man on the backhoe was going to be the one shouldering the work for the day. I had just assumed he would operate the backhoe and I would assist with a shovel. No, he was handing the project back to me. Was he telling me that he would help with this project but he wasn’t going to let me, slyly as the smart big brother, set it down on him? Or was the message, maybe unconsciously, even more profound? Was he telling me to give up on the role of older and more sensitive brother, which insinuated him into his old childhood role of bad and irresponsible boy, and to recognize him as an adult? In other words, was he telling me to acknowledge that he had grown up? I looked into his eyes, and I could see that he wasn’t climbing onto the backhoe.
I climbed up to the seat, started the engine and tried out the hydraulic levers that moved the bucket up and down and right and left. They jerked madly like some spasmodic insect, and I was unable to get the smooth swing of a professional operator. I dropped the teeth of the bucket into the ground and opened the first hole, on the front left side of the cabin, under what eventually would be the porch. Paul set about lining up grade stakes and strings and marking the positions of each of the holes with a can of red spray paint. He was doing the brain work; I was doing the grunt work.
There is no month in Maine worse for work than November. It is the rainy season, and the rain mixes with below-freezing temperatures to make sleet, slush and frozen mud. Even the loggers wait until December before they take their equipment into the woods. The day was cold and overcast, but so far we were lucky—it had not yet snowed, and we felt only the occasional bit of drizzle through the day. Now and again, I heard the report of a rifle in the distance. It was the last Saturday of the deer season.
The hardest part of the backhoe work was dropping the dirt that came out of the holes in the right place and moving the machine from hole to hole. All the digging was inside the footprint of the cabin, and I was fast running out of room. It was difficult to both pile the dirt and keep enough space open for the machine to change its position for the next hole. To make matters worse, I was making no progress on smoothing the swing of the bucket. Occasionally, a bucket spasm knocked dirt back onto the hole I had just dug. I had to start over. I began to wish that I had insisted on the auger. It would have yielded sixteen clean and easily dug holes. Who cared if one was off a bit? I should have stood my ground against Paul’s objection. I sat on the backhoe, fumbled with the controls and nursed my failure to insist on the auger approach. I held my anger and stayed silent.
A more serious problem soon developed. Water began to collect at the bottom of the holes I was digging, lots of water, and it began oozing into the holes at just two feet of depth. We were contending with a seriously shallow water table. Given the altitude of the cabin and the positive drainage down the hillside, this took me by surprise. It was as if we were trying to dig holes at the beach. The sides of some of the wettest holes began to collapse, and pretty soon they were three feet across and full of mud and water. The wider holes made it even more difficult to move the machine. The job was fast becoming hopeless.
Our water problem had a long history. The great Laurentide glacier had crept down