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By Root 509 0

so I walked along the Adams Road and turned down Cold Brook, following it downstream. I came to a beaver pond that I had been unaware of. It had been created by a mud dam that held back a small tributary to the brook. A couple of swallows swooped over the water, picking insects out of the air, and then I saw a beaver making his way across the pond, only his big head breaking through the surface. He spotted me and gave me the angry slap. He went down and did not come back up. I waited quietly. I walked a little farther to an open spot near the brook and listened. This seemed to be a perfect place to hear woodcock whistling. It was the time of year for their courtship display of high flights and sudden twisting drops, but I heard nothing except the sweet melody of the peepers, which was its own reward. It is among the brightest and most cheerful sounds of the woods. The sun was setting now, so I headed back. I reached the big pond, and the sun’s rays lit the trees along the far shore and sent a red glow over the water’s still surface. Once again, I witnessed that incredible bowl of light—this time as it was rapidly losing its luminescence, like a gas lamp that has been shut but whose glow takes a few seconds to extinguish.

I returned to the cabin, taking my time along the way to examine the hillside. I arranged my sleeping bag and slipped into it. The deck was hard, but at least it was flat and without rocks as there would have been had I been sleeping on the ground. I was using my son Adam’s sleeping bag, a fancy mummy bag from L.L.Bean. It had a little hood that rolled up into a small pillow. The peepers were singing loudly, and occasionally I felt a cool puff of damp spring air come up from below when the wind lifted. The air smelled of the wet thawing ground and the new season. Somewhere off in the distance I heard an owl’s windy nine-syllable hoot: Whoo cooks for you, whoo cooks for you all?

The stars shone brightly in the sky, and I watched them through the crossbeams of the cabin frame. It was as if I were looking through the rigging of a sailing ship, maybe a coastwise schooner making its way down the Atlantic shore. I folded my hands behind my head and stared upward. Another gentle damp breeze blew across the deck, and I imagined my cabin lifting into the sky like some heavenly gaff-rigged raft, ascending into the night sky toward the stars, tacking toward Polaris and then hauling south and west toward Orion and bright Betelgeuse, and eastward for a closer look at the planet Saturn, and silently, behind a big spinnaker full of moonlight, sailing home again. I fell asleep to the sound of the geese gabbing away in the pond, here on earth.

CHAPTER 7

SUMMER WORK

I had been away from the cabin for nearly a month, back in temporary disguise as a professor. I had left the hillside in late April just as the black limbs of the swamp maples had pushed out their delicate red flowers, and now, on my return in May, those same lithe trees were showing tender five-pointed leaves. The fiddlehead ferns were fully unscrolled in the wet places, and along the brooks the skunk cabbages were as big as Alaska cauliflower. It was no longer possible, as it had been in winter and late spring, to see into the woods. The deep spaces were filled in with greenery.

I was free to put my hands and back into the work of cabin building for three uninterrupted months. The time spread ahead of me like a gift, an indolence of chosen work in the outdoors. This was pleasure of a high order. I had sketched out a sequence of building tasks and they stood in my mind as orderly as a long row of Indiana corn. If the need came over me—as it might at any moment—I was accountable to no one but myself and could grab my fishing rod and explore some nearby brook for wild trout. 161 I guessed my conscience would hold me fast to the cabin at least until the roof was overhead, but the combination of pleasurable work and freedom to slack off if I wanted it was delicious.

I splurged and took a room with a small kitchen at the nearby inn for six weeks: clean