Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [60]
I drove back to Boston, feeling awfully good, and sent Paul an e-mail when I arrived. Me to Paul:
I got up to the cabin early this morning. The work looked great. I covered the lumber with a tarp and picked up the site a bit. Just got home this minute.
Paul to me:
I think the place will really fly from here. I see two, maybe three more productive weekends of work before you can start closing it in. I don’t see any reason why it can’t be habitable this summer. It’s going to be a nice getaway.
Me to Paul:
I’ve relied on you a lot for this, and don’t let me rely too much and take advantage of your good nature. I know you’ve got a lot else on your mind. Probably more than I realized. Kevin and I had a nice talk on the way back—I enjoy these trips with him. He’s really looking forward to coming up in the summer and taking the boat out on Kezar Lake. I see so many good impulses in him, and brains.
Paul to me:
Kevin has a lot of potential; this project is a huge confidence builder for him and all of this is great for his psyche; Andrew just e-mailed me a picture of a boat he wants me to go halfs with him on. Will probably do it. It would be a good boat to haul up to Kezar Lake for a day of fishing out on the lake.
I spent the next month filling in the two-by-four framing, mostly alone. My old solitary self was fully engaged on these weekend trips. It was a lifelong habit, being alone.
Solo work has always appealed to me. My favorite activities have been solitary pursuits: fishing, walking, reading and writing. Each of these activities has offered me antiphonal moments of effort and ease, concentration and relaxation. They also accommodate my tendency to daydream, and occasionally I caught myself taking a long mental walk around some idea that had occurred to me as I was working. The experience was entirely pleasurable, if not always productive. Antisocial? Maybe a little. Misanthropic? Not at all. I brought a better self to my encounters with others after a period of sustained solo work. So to my list of pleasant solo occupations, I now added cabin building. Alone with myself, I took my time with each building task, thinking it through lightly, letting myself feel the materials, visualizing the conclusion.
The other benefit of these periods alone is the erasure of time. While fishing, for example, an intense couple of hours spent approaching, studying and casting a fly to a single feeding trout might compress into the sensation of a few brilliant seconds. It is an experience not so much out of time as before time—before the careful ordering of tasks and responsibilities turned daily consciousness into a chronometer of looming responsibilities. I was discovering these same pleasures of undistracted and pure concentration in the carpentry the cabin required. These moments were temporary escapes, but they were powerfully cleansing and restorative. I was even adding a little muscle.
Usually, I would go up on a Saturday morning, work along easily, and then drive five or six miles to Melby’s, a country restaurant at the top of the hill in North Waterford, where I’d sit at the Formica counter and order the world’s best fried haddock sandwich. I passed the end of February 2009 this way, and the beginning of March, too, and I witnessed the turning of the season, from deep and implacable winter to a shallower collapsing winter that was struggling to let it be spring. The north country year does not have four seasons. It has more like twelve: winter, spring, summer and fall, each a triptych with a slow start, a glorious peak and an ambiguous conclusion.
If you are attentive to the light, and the taste and feel of the air, it even is more like sixteen seasons. Winter is easily parsed into four seasons: cold and wet, cold and snowy, bitter cold, softening cold. These follow a sine curve not unlike the shallow course of the winter sun. I was in the phase of softening cold: the tips of the once long shadows of the trees were creeping back toward the tall trunks as the pale sun traveled higher