Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [54]
It surely was not because I was a born carpenter. Not even close. Neither did I grow up with barns or timber frames. I was a boy who had grown up in coastal South Jersey where there were farm stands and chicken coops, but not barns, and certainly not the stands of big-circumference trees in which were packed the beams to build them. My boyhood timber was scrub pine, swamp cedar and spindly sassafras. I can’t even recall precisely, down to the actual barn, the first time I saw a timber-frame structure. It must have been in a book or magazine, which is not surprising when I think 130 of the extent to which I had taken from books the ideas about how I might live my life. Books had been my surrogate parents.
My first recollection of an encounter with an authentic timber frame coincided with several crucial vectors in my life: the attempt to make a start as a husband and father, a yearning for a life in the country and a deepening appreciation of an aesthetic whose principal virtue was simplicity. I suspect, too, that my response was wrapped up in some spiritual way with my life then as a reader and the discovery of Tolstoy and his projected self, Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin. I was about twenty when I first read Tolstoy, and each time I finished reading one his stories, I felt as if I needed to recover from the stun of an electric shock. Never had literature spoken so directly to me or had life so fully opened up on the page. The beauty and intimacy of the land, the mix of the vast landscape and the Christianity of the gospels, the mysticism of Mother Russia and the wonder of it all—the sunshine, the rain, the snow, the grass bending before the breeze and of course the Great Man’s ability to put all of this into language (at least as it was conveyed to me in those Victorian translations by Constance Garnett)—was a crucial part of me trying to form myself as a young man. I was looking for a code, and his books provided it. For about two years, as I read my way through his novels and stories, I was drunk on Tolstoy.
There was Levin pulling on his big boots to survey the countryside around his farm, or Levin, back bent, in the hot sun with scythe in hand:
Another row, and yet another row, followed—long rows and short rows, with good grass and with poor grass. Levin lost all sense of time, and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it came all easy to him.
I was impressionable, and as I say, I had built an awful lot of my life out of books. My other hero out of Tolstoy at the time was Father Sergius, the dashing military officer who forswore a brilliant career at court to become a monk, and who after retreating into asceticism fell again to pride and temptation. I sometimes wonder if a different reading list would have made me a different person. In any event, the Russian with the big boots, tunic and long beard had prepared the ground for a lot of my decisions that followed. What was happening on that hillside was the continuation of something that had begun when I was a young man looking for a way to lead my life.
All of which is to say that for me a timber frame is nothing so much as an aspiration toward an idea—in the same way that a Japanese teahouse is an idea or the Parthenon is an idea or even a well-constructed bait shack at the end of a pier is an idea. It is a conception with both aesthetic and practical implications for the people who use it or live in it. In the case of my cabin, the idea was humble, but it had the benefit of being built on a hillside in Maine with wood sawn from Maine trees. Surely there was some virtue in its origins. Didn’t Tolstoy put simplicity in the same company as goodness and truth?
My nephews and I had stacked