Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [81]
Sylvester Adams, in whose home Hosea and Albion had grown up before going off to war, eventually married, and he had three sons: Perly, Winfield Scott and John Quincy. John Quincy had a son, Albert, and Albert was the last Adams to live in the intervale. One of my neighbors remembers him sitting on the porch of the house that occupied the knoll. The house and land were sold in 1930 to a rich eccentric from New Jersey, Roy C. Wilhelm, who bought up all the land in and around the intervale during the Depression for a song and raised goats as a hobby. He had been a coffee importer. Wilhelm died in 1951 and left his estate to the National Spiritual Assembly of Baha’i. It was eventually sold off in pieces, the biggest of which went to the developers of the shortlived ski area on Adams Mountain. The hillside piece on which the cabin was rising had three owners between the Baha’i ownership and my purchase, the last before me being R.F. Land Partners, which was Rick Rhea and Wayne Field.
The rain came often in the last two weeks of June, and the mist hovered and moved among the mountains, making them look like steaming teapots. The fields were full of dandelions and yellow and orange Indian paintbrush. The locust trees bloomed, and their pendulous puffy white clusters of fibrous duff made my eyes itch. The pond was swelling with weeds.
I went to the cabin from the inn even when it was raining. I puttered under the plywood roof. I picked up nails and odd board ends on the deck and swept up or straightened out the tools in the toolbox. There was always some little task waiting to be done. I was dry and happy and enjoyed my shelter out of the downpours. Now and again I just stood by the door’s rough opening and watched the water come down from the roof and fall from the eaves. Sometimes it came down as drops, one drop following another to form a series of thin watery lines pouring from the roof’s edge; other times it was a cascade, something like standing under a paper-thin waterfall. At the roof’s valley, where the two roofs met to make an inward crease, the water came down as a spout and sailed into the air as if a cherub were pissing a clear stream from above. Italian Renaissance plazas had nothing on me. So pleasing were these interludes, as the rain fell out of the sky and I stood there shivering with the cold damp air stirring inside my light shirt, that I was convinced they were touching me in some atavistic place. I was in my cave or teepee or hut: like a fox in his den or a raccoon pulled inside a hole in a tree, I was safe and dry. By then, I had a chair in the cabin, and I would just sit and watch the rain come down, tapping the leaves, splattering on the ground or blowing this way and that as the wind shifted.
There are these moments that occur in nature that can stay with a man for a lifetime. Like love, they are almost beyond language. I remember one such experience that was exquisitely distilled into a single spoken word. It taught me that there are subtle pleasures that should not be hurried, and that pleasure itself could bring a man to a higher level of consciousness and leave him with a fuller appreciation of the world he has been born into.
I had traveled to southern Greece years earlier, to the farthest tip of the Peloponnese, and I was staying with a man, deep into his seventies, who was a resident of a mountaintop village there and a relative of mine through my grandmother. He was a gentle and philosophical person, who had lived a life of labor, and now he spent his days gathering herbs, roots and wild vegetables from the hills. His evenings were spent at kafenios or quiet tavernas, where he talked with his friends long past midnight over water glasses of red wine. He brought me with him on these nights, and afterward we would return to his home—an ancient stone house of one room that looked over the mountains and the sea. One night, he set