Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [69]
Before the inn, his most recent job had been the best paying but most stressful. He had driven a bucket loader at a biomass energy plant in New Hampshire. He made fifteen dollars an hour straight time, and time and a half after forty hours. He received health benefits there. (He did not at the inn.) His job was to scoop the wood chips brought by trucks to the plant and dump them in the hopper, in the proper mix and at the proper rate. A bad mix, one that was too wet, for example, would slow the generation of electricity. It was stressful work, he told me as we put up the plywood. The job required him to work overtime, sometimes thirty additional hours a week. “They were screamers, too,” he said. “You couldn’t do nothing right.” The money was good but the pressure and the hours, he said, had begun to wreck his health. He was smoking heavily. He developed an ulcer, which burst, and he spent a week in Bridgton Hospital, where he nearly died. He went back to the power plant after his recovery, but the ulcer returned so he quit. By then, he had bought a four-wheel drive pickup truck, and the payments were five hundred dollars a month, which he had been able to afford when he was working at the generating plant. His second wife worked at a plant in New Hampshire that manufactured dog collars, but with his reduced hours and pay at the inn, he was struggling to make ends meet, with the truck an especially big burden. It was one of the reasons he had jumped at the prospect of working with me—he needed the money. He was also worried about the heating bill for his home. Heating oil was going for $2.50 a gallon that season. Sometimes the anxiety that the bills brought on was too much, he told me, and the doctor had written him a prescription to help control it. He was also taking pills to control his blood pressure.
We also talked of more pleasant topics. His favorite times were hunting deer with his son Bill, now a mechanic, and deep-sea fishing for cod and haddock down the coast. He lived in a house he had built himself twenty years earlier. He had four children: Bill, from his first marriage; a girl from a relationship following his first marriage; and two girls from his current marriage, one of whom his wife had brought into the marriage but who counted Billy as her father. His house, which I once visited when I drove him home, was on a sandy road not far from the potato fields that occupy the Saco River bottomland where he had worked as a farmhand. It is just about a mile from the location of the house where he grew up.
“There aren’t many people who can do what you’re doing,” he said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean there aren’t many people who could just build this place the way you are—buying what you need as you go along and, you know, just deciding to build a place, and then going to the lumberyard or hardware store and getting what you need and having the money for it.”
I told him that he was right about that, and I felt fortunate I could do it.
I sometimes walked to the cabin from the inn, and the trek would take me through the intervale, which was alive with robins picking up worms from the damp alluvial soil, and along the southwest edge of the pond. In any season, a pond is endlessly absorbing. In late May, the painted turtles pushed their plow-point beaks out of the water, and tiny green leaves—the floating roofs of the pondweeds that were anchored in the mud below—dappled the surface. On several mornings I spotted a young bull moose, belly deep in the water with a muzzle full of weeds, looking preposterous, slightly puzzled and self-satisfied in the way that only a moose can. These trips, just over a half mile, sometimes took an hour or two. I dallied along the way and rewarded myself with the leisure of observation even before