Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [43]
Kevin joined me the following Saturday. The excavator was there with his man, so that made four of us. The machine cracked the icy earth as if it were nothing more than crust on a burnt casserole, and the three of us on the ground set the concrete piers in the new holes and backfilled them with stone and clods of frozen soil. The excavator cleaned the existing holes of mud and we planted piers in them too. It sleeted the entire day, and at times poured down a heavy rain. We worked in rubber slickers and high boots. Kevin’s ungloved hands were wet, red and cold. He maintained a cheerful attitude and kept working even when I went to get all of us lunch and hot coffee at the Center Lovell Market. We stayed with it until dark, and by then we had all of the piers in the ground.
I took a deep breath. The foundation was in.
The top of the piers defined my work surface at two feet above the little bit of snow that covered the ground. So, unless a big storm blew through the hills, which was more than just a possibility, I knew I would be able to move rapidly to the next step, which was to set the girders on the piers and frame the floor. It was winter, but in this race to erect the cabin, I was leading by a neck. Paul said he was unavailable for the next few weeks, and I had student papers to mark up and grades to submit anyway. Work ceased. I watched the forecast for snow. It came down, an inch or two at a time almost every night, and soon it was more than a foot deep, but it remained below the tops of those piers.
In the two-week pause, I made a trip to the site to look things over and stroll the hillside and surrounding woods. I had been walking alone in the winter woods my entire life and never found them without surprise, joy or inspiration. I put on my snowshoes and made my way over the undisturbed snow to the cabin site and then pushed higher up the hillside, pausing among the stand of red pines, allowing myself to think again that this would make a good place for an orchard; then I moved farther to the top of the ridge, which gave me a view of Adams Mountain, brown and gray against the scudding clouds. I turned downhill on an old logging road that followed an ancient stone wall. The experience of the woods in winter is almost entirely visual: shadow and sunlight; tree trunks black, gray and white, some of them smooth as suede, others rough as oyster shells. The light is everything, turning ice-tipped branches into ornaments and the quartz caught in granite boulders into pink jewels. I stopped from time to time to absorb the silence. The winter woods are nearly always silent. There may be the muffled woof of snow falling from the burdened bough of a spruce tree or the isolated chatter of chickadees as they search among the softwood for seeds, but usually the only sound is the rasp of one’s own breathing. I walked for an hour, letting my mind empty itself into the frozen landscape.
Walking was one of the ways I marshaled my feelings and thoughts and brought my mind and body together into a union of well-being. I often take long walks to settle questions, quiet my mind or warm and regulate my muscles and breathing. If I find myself in a new city, I often walk well into the night down unknown streets to distant landmarks and near exhaustion. It sharpens my senses and brings me to a state of greater awareness of myself and my surroundings. At home in Boston, if my mind is a swarm of bees or if I am absorbing the power of some book I have just finished reading, I go to the streets and begin walking. Each step brings me closer to a feeling of clear comprehension and a sense of both pleasantly inhabiting but not being