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By Root 471 0

of men and materials had he been at the hillside on that Saturday in February. Paul arrived with two snowmobiles and a sled, which consisted of a piece of scrap plywood screwed to two old water skis. He also had Kevin and his friend Russell with him, and Russell’s bird dog Abby. So there were four of us, and Abby, all charged up for the work. Abby was charged up mostly for running up and down the hill behind the snowmobiles. We hustled the lumber up the hillside. It took all morning and a half dozen trips, with the heavy-duty snowmobile groaning against the loads and the homemade sled fishtailing behind it as we tried to keep the lumber from falling off. A couple of times it did fall off.

A good three feet of snow covered the ground. The day was sunny and cold, with a stiff wind out of the northwest. I had noticed on many of my trips to the hillside that the wind seemed to blow harder and more often here than in coastal Portland and even other parts of Stoneham and nearby Lovell. I surmised some sort of tunneling effect from the nearby mountains and did not give the reason or implications much more thought, but it was apparent when the maple trees swayed and their frozen branches clicked against the winter sky that this was an unusually windy location. We were bundled against the cold, and even with the rigors of bringing the lumber up and down the hill, we needed hats and gloves. While the absolute temperature was around twenty degrees, the windchill was at zero or below. It kept us moving.

By now, in the chronology of construction, I had settled on the positions of the windows in the cabin’s walls, and I knew the heights and widths of the used ones I had scrounged. For the few that remained for me to buy, I worked with standard sizes. The information was necessary to lay out and assemble the stud walls.

Russell was a good carpenter. You could tell by looking at him: quality work boots, carpenter’s jeans, layered parka and shell, blue Polartec gloves, a nail apron tied smartly at his waist and a thick pencil pushed up into his wool cap. Polite and soft-spoken, Russell seemed always well groomed, even when he was cabin building. As a young man, he had worked with his father building post-and-beam homes down around Freeport and up the coast. He knew his way around a framing square. Russell had been a commercial real estate property manager when Paul had met him a half dozen years earlier, and now he had his own set of businesses: a two-person mortgage finance company (an office assistant and himself), a small restaurant and a couple of mobile home parks. Paul and Russell had an easy rapport, and I was struck by Paul’s ability to kid and quip with irreverence among his friends. I could see that Russell, like many others, enjoyed being around Paul—his confidence, his lack of anxiety, his humor and steadiness. It seemed like we all leaned on him.

“Why don’t you lay out walls, and call out what you want for cuts,” Paul said to Russell. “I’ll run the saw.”

Kevin and I were going to be secondary actors on this day, gofers. Paul directed Kevin to do the nailing. My role was to answer Russell’s questions about the placement of the windows and doors and bring Paul the two-by-fours as he needed them. I also stepped the cut pieces to Kevin as they fell from Paul’s saw so Kevin could nail them without interruption. We built the two-by-four walls on the deck and then lifted them into place, fitting them between the posts and beams.

As a formal matter, I was overseeing the job, but as a practical matter Paul had taken over and was directing the work, an important distinction. He had thought through the flow of tasks. I was happy to concede to him the role of skipper of the vessel. I noticed a subtle but important second shift: through the previous month, it had been Kevin and me working together and running the job. Now Kevin had moved to a lesser role—an assistant to the expert players, Paul and Russell. Kevin chafed at this, I could see, and he resented the directions he was being given. Paul was telling him how to nail the two-by-fours