Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [55]
The first task for Kevin and me was to take stock of our materials. The timbers had been cut in different ways to serve a variety of structural purposes, and the differences were in the dimensions and the idiosyncrasies of the joinery. We had corner posts with shouldered mortises on adjacent surfaces and running posts with mortises on opposite surfaces. We had beams with tenons that would fit these mortises, and beams that did not. Then we had rafters with tongues and others with forks so that they would fit together right and left at the roof’s peak.
Post-and-beam carpentry owns a vocabulary every bit as rich and arcane as that of nineteenth-century seamanship. There are scarf joints, dovetail joints, housed dovetail joints, laps and half laps, knee-brace joints and bird’s mouths. Each serves a distinct purpose. In Japan, where timber-frame carpentry is a thousand-year-old craft, master framers have developed four hundred different ways of joining timbers for strength and beauty. One simulates the neck of a goose. The Japanese have a term, kodama, “the spirit of the tree,” to describe this art; their timber framers make roofs that look like hands in prayer or an emperor’s hat floating in the air. In New England, which drew on its European roots for building methods and adapted old-world practices to the abundance of virgin forests, housewrights adhered to a half dozen joints, building sturdy capes, saltboxes, barns and churches from native pine and oak. And just as every sail on a Yankee clipper ship had a name for the practical purpose of efficient seamanship, so it is with every timber in a timber frame: there are girts, girders, struts, beams, summer beams, purlins, collar purlins, crown posts, king posts, queen posts, collar ties and ridgepoles.
All this complexity and craft immediately appealed to Kevin. He was never happier than when he was sorting something: tools, materials, techniques. Now he was also learning a new vocabularly to match the work. We pulled timbers from the pile and arranged them on the deck. The deck also had to be shoveled off and swept, and while the snow was piling higher, it still had not yet topped thirty-two inches, the distance between the ground and our raised work surface. But it was getting close.
Nearly all the joinery work for the cabin had been done for us by that long-ago carpenter. Our challenge was to lay his conception of the cabin over my more recent intentions. This would require some new joinery to accommodate the discrepancies of vision, but mostly our work was to sort the pieces, connect them into bents and raise them into place to make our box. It was plenty of work for two men, both brain work and back work, especially since one of the men was not as strong and limber as he used to be. We fitted the tenons into the mortises, tightened the pieces together with a ratchet and pulley and pegged the joints with oak dowels when we had the angles at square. We raised the first bent at the far end of the cabin, and after taking a suitable amount of time to admire our achievement, realized the need for the first major adjustment. The long-ago carpenter had designed beams that ran from bent to bent at midwall height. Those horizontal beams would make it impossible to put in my tall windows. I wanted tall windows, nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, for lots of light. I had stayed in a nearly windowless trapper’s cabin once, and it was like living in an old shoe. I had no desire to be a shoe dweller. I wanted cascades of sunshine falling on my buttery pine floors and lots of fresh air and balsam scent pouring in through the windows.
“We don