Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [63]
Paul, Kevin and I regrouped in the middle of March, with one week, by the calendar, left in winter. We completed the framing and moved to the rafters, which was hard and serious work. Kevin was still unemployed, so he remained engaged in the project, to my good fortune but not his. He had been picking up occasional part-time work on a maintenance crew at Portland City Hall. As usual, Paul had given the work a lot of thought. His judgment was that we should first build and then position the lighter rafter assemblies, the two-by-six trusses, which we were adding for strength and reliability to the roof between the massive timber rafters. The plan was to assemble them on the deck, and three of us, with Kevin up in the high staging, would raise them to the top plate of the wall. First one end of the rafter assembly went up to the plate, then the other end, and then with a rope we (Kevin) hauled the peak upward. Once the assembly was in place and plumb, we nailed it to the plate; after the first one went up, we nailed boards across the surface of them for bracing. Our plan was to bring the big rafters up into place once all the lighter rafters had been secured. At the end of the first day we had eight light trusses in place.
On the following Saturday, Paul and I returned to assemble the rest of the trusses. Paul wasn’t feeling well. He had the beginnings of a cold, a headache and a sore throat. He decided to come anyway. I had tried to reach Kevin, but he was not answering his phone. I guessed he had had a rough night; Paul said that was most certainly the case. The day brought several snow squalls—the snow came down so rapidly at times and in such big flakes that we could barely see the frame from one end to the other; other times the sun was out and the day sparkled like a palace chandelier. The wind blew with hardly a pause, but we pulled our hoods over our heads and turned our faces away from the weather and continued to work. I stopped only to wipe the snow from my glasses. It was sticky wet snow, like the cottony puffs of windborne seeds, and the flakes attached to whatever they touched. It was a joy to be out in it, but I worried about Paul and his cold. He said he was fine and worked right along. We needed to be careful not to slip on the slick surface of wet snow the intermittent squalls were laying down on the deck. At day’s end, all of the trusses were assembled and neatly stacked, ready for hoisting atop the walls.
There is a curved line of mountains west and north of the cabin. The closest ones, to the west, are about a half mile distant—Joe McKeen, Stiles, Adams, Rattlesnake and Palmer mountains. They are named for early settlers, except for Rattlesnake. To the west and north, in the bend, are Speckled, Durgin and Butters mountains. Durgin and Butters were men who came into this country early too, and one of the later Durgin boys, a sergeant in the Union Army, helped carry the coffin of Abraham Lincoln. His grave is about two miles from the cabin. These mountains share a rugged fifteen-mile ridgeline, like the spine of some skinny and curled-up cat. It may be the ladlelike shape of the hills that captures the wind as it comes down from the north and then bends it, either speeding it up or spinning it into high-speed eddies that barrel past the cabin on the way toward Kezar Lake. Stoneham residents have told me about brief powerful windstorms in and around the west shore of Kezar Lake, sometimes accompanied by thunder, that have laid a hillside of trees as flat as the spines on a porcupine’s back.
I knew none of this weather history when