Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [5]
The house we built was not perfect but—being way, way overbuilt, with the intent to last forever—it most definitely captured my inner psychic complexity at the time. I wanted permanence. I fell somewhat short of the mark. My wife and I spent nearly twenty years of marriage in it, some of them happy, and together we raised our two children, Elizabeth and Adam, in it.
In the mid-nineties, as the marriage was coming unglued, we put the house up for sale. I decided, as a final act of ownership, to hire a man to clear a stand of big pine trees on a corner of the property. The trees were beauties: tall and straight as pencils but thick as carpenter’s crayons. They had been pruned of their lower branches years earlier to create clear white wood—furniture-quality wood. A truck hauled the logs to a nearby sawmill, and I paid a carpenter to cut and shape the lumber into the framing members that would eventually form a set of cabins. I more or less left it to the carpenter to figure out the work based on what the trees gave up for boards and beams. I had no mental picture of what I wanted the lumber to become. “Work it out as best you can,” I told him. I vaguely had in mind a set of small cabins that one day might be arranged near a pond somewhere to make a family compound, something like the Kennedys had at Hyannis Port, but on a workingman’s scale. I imagined children and grandchildren running and jumping into the pond off a long wooden dock, canoes tipped over in the grass and rocking chairs on the porch. I think I had seen that picture in a movie once.
Of course, none of this family-retreat fantasy fit the reality of my true situation. Aligning aspiration with reality has never been a strong point with me. This is the gene that I inherited from our mother, and in better times might account for whatever progress I have made in my life. In other words, I sometimes didn’t know what I shouldn’t attempt. But back then, as the carpenter was doing his work on my lumber, I was a man on an icy slope toward divorce who was simultaneously assembling the pieces of a family retreat. I haven’t yet found the right analogy to capture the conflicted quality of my life then: maybe a man fixing his porch on the morning of the day he knows he will burn down his house. Was it desperation or delusion? I don’t know. But clearly I had an obsession with shelter. The reason for claiming those trees as future cabins would have been perfectly obvious to any slightly self-aware person, but I was not paying a lot of attention then to my deeper motivations. My gaze was ahead, not back or inward. I wasn’t able to see the submerged reasons until much later, when I started trying, with the help of a psychiatrist, to understand why I was coming seriously unhinged.
Stories are like hens. They hatch new stories. So here’s another story, and it stands in a row behind the stories of the woodpile and the house we built in 1975 and even the marriage that cracked —it’s all part of a long line of explanation that leads to the cabin.
Growing up, I had always been on the move, from one place to another, sometimes in the middle of the night. My mother and father had separated several times when I was very young, and my father disappeared from my life when I was seven years old. There was no explanation from him or my mother. There was no last day with him; he was simply not there anymore. Following his departure, my childhood became a succession of rentals—small homes or apartments in which we often lived for just a few months before departing—with the rent unpaid and the security deposit sacrificed. My mother was a beautician, and the foundation of her income (and our lives) were her skills and hard work and a small suitcase that contained several pairs of scissors, combs, frocks, curling irons, a handheld hair dryer, a tin of wax, tweezers and other tools of the hairdresser’s trade. There