Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [71]
In this way, I began to learn the geography and lore of the area, through the prism of Billy’s experience. He told me of places to hunt deer and catch rainbow trout where the wardens were unlikely to find you fishing with worms, and about the roads and trails that cut through the mountains. He had lived his entire life in this landscape, in a square maybe twenty miles by twenty miles, and he knew all the trout ponds, smelt brooks, deer trails and hornpout holes.
On the weekends, and some weekdays when he could get away, Paul arrived in his pickup truck and the work flew. More often than not, he had Kevin with him. Kevin was his usual agile, brave and hardworking self. When it came time for us to bring the sheathing to the roof, Paul set an aluminum ladder against the cabin near the stack of plywood. Kevin went to the rafters and, pulling a rope that had been threaded through a hole that Paul had drilled in each sheet of plywood, brought them aloft, along the rails of the ladder, and set them in place. It went as smooth as peeled ash. Paul had procured a nail gun from one of his vendors. It was an awesome machine, which used an electric spark to fire a blast of butane gas that drove a piston, sending the six-penny nails deep into the wood. Bam, bam, bam. Nailing had never been so easy.
The cabin was now closing in, with covered exterior walls and a roof. There was an inside and an outside in a way that there had not been before. The timber frame, bare to weather, described the structure’s perimeter but had insinuated no distinctions about interior and exterior. Now we had an inside that was definitely distinct from the outside. I did another one of my admiring walk-arounds. The rough cuts on the windows now really seemed like windows, illuminated rectangles in the darker walls, and I felt the interior embrace of the cabin: the walls meeting at the corners and the vaulted ceiling created by the sheathing on the roof. The cabin was quickly becoming a shelter.
It was about this time that a debate ensued among my building team about the layout of the inside. Framed Oxford-style, the proposition would have read something like this: “Resolved, a wall should be constructed creating a separate room at the right rear of the cabin that will be Lou’s writing room.” Almost from the beginning, I had decided on making a “writing room,” a private space inside the cabin to which I could retreat to put words down on paper (or a computer screen if the computer’s battery was sufficiently charged). I had decided on a desk, which would be a hardwood door set on sawhorses, and a spartan chair that I particularly liked for the support it gave my back as well as for the hard frame that would help keep me from drifting off to sleep. I had envisioned a built-in bookcase and a single rough bunk for napping when the words weren’t cooperating. I pictured a neat bed, with white sheets folded military-style under the thin mattress and a gray wool Hudson’s Bay blanket with a couple of yellow stripes. In my imagination, I had even begun to select the books for the bookcase. I would set a good dictionary on a stand, and I had an excellent collection of New England sporting books that would add a nice touch. Next to the bed, on a small Shaker table, would be a volume of Proust. It is my favorite nighttime reading, an experience never fully mastered. The density of his prose inevitably yields for me new subtleties of emotion and thought with each fresh entrance to the pages. I can read and reread it the way I can listen over and over again to Mozart’s music for clarinet. It is a plunge into sensation, heartache and rapture. As we sat on nail kegs and sawhorses in the cabin, I did not bring Proust into the debate over the wall, but I did argue that there were bound to be times when all of us would be up at the cabin, maybe playing poker deep into the night, and it would be a good thing to be able to retreat from the din to a room with a door that closed to allow some sleep.
Paulie, home for a couple of weeks from motorcycle