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By Root 431 0

up two stiff wooden chairs on a small flat space inside the little compound that was his home. It was a precipitous drop to the valley of olive trees below; to the right was the Laconic Gulf and somewhere out there was Kythira, the island to which Paris had carried Helen on that infamous first night. Straight ahead of us, as we were seated, were mountains, with a few sparse trees, and at the ridge of the mountains the moon was rising. It was a big silvery disc. We had swallowed plenty of wine through the night, but we were not drunk, and we had eaten well, fresh tomatoes, feta cheese, crusty bread, olives, fried potatoes, grilled lamb. Stelios, my friend and relative, brought out two cool glasses of water for us, water he had drawn from his well with a bucket. We watched the moon ascend and sipped the water. We said nothing. Stelios spoke no English; I spoke only a little Greek. Slowly, after several minutes, the big moon cleared the ridge and it was fully surrounded by the dark Mediterranean sky.

“Oreia,” Stelios said in Greek. “It’s a fine thing.”

Yes, I thought, that is the word for this moment: “Oreia.”

Eventually the rain stopped on the hillside long enough for serious work to resume, and the traffic was heavy, by hillside standards, for the better part of a week. I had hired an excavator to put in a septic system, having decided that an indoor toilet was necessary if the cabin were to be a place for family to gather. My new excavator was Bill Parmenter, from nearby Fryeburg, a neighbor of Billy’s. He was seventy-six years old and six feet of sunburned sinew—a farmer, builder, excavator and, as I soon learned, a water diviner. He worked by himself and stopped only at noon for a few minutes to eat a lunch that was a cellophane packet of peanut butter crackers. During one of these quick lunches, he asked me about my well plans, and I told him I hoped to save money by putting in a dug well. I figured on a hole maybe ten to twenty feet deep and lined with a wide cement pipe or stones. I could drop an electric pump to the bottom or rough it with an old-fashioned hand pump. It was standard technology in Stoneham.

“I can help you with that,” he said. “I can find the water for you.”

“How?” I asked. He was chewing his crackers.

“With a metal rod,” he said.

I made my disbelief clear—and showed no deference, as I might have done to local knowledge in other circumstances.

“You’re putting me on, right?” I said.

“No. Done it many times,” he said.

The next day he was back with a length of steel wire, which he had bent so he could hold the ends lightly in his hands and have it stick out in front of him. He walked through the woods, and sure enough the wire turned and pointed down.

“Water’s here,” he said.

Yeah, sure, I thought.

“Okay,” I said, calling his bluff. “Why don’t you dig the well there.”

He brought his backhoe into the woods and hit water at five feet, but it was brownish, as if minerals had leached into it.

“I wouldn’t use it,” he said. “But I knew it was there.”

I asked if we should try digging somewhere else. No, he said, this was the only place where his steel wire had told him water was accessible enough for a surface well. So I hired a well driller to give me an artesian well. He arrived in a big truck with a drilling rig that reached nearly to the treetops. For three days the truck roared as the drill rig pounded and turned a bit into the bedrock. It was followed by a pipe casing that eventually would bring water to the surface. At 330 feet deep, the bit found a bedrock fissure with water—two gallons a minute, not a lot but enough to supply the cabin. The bill: $3,400, which was about $3,000 more than I had planned to spend on the dug well.

“Too bad about that,” Bill said.

As I considered the siding I wanted for the cabin, I drove around to look at the variety of siding materials and styles on the houses scattered along the town’s half dozen roads. I encountered the typical range of housing stock of rural Maine: farmhouses, camps, cottages, log cabins, house trailers, shacks, modular ranches