Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [86]
The elimination of the natives was followed by the stripping of the forest. It was cleared for lumber and then used as farmland or sheep pasture. Hillsides were left bare, and billions of board feet of logs were floated down the region’s rivers to sawmills. The logs were turned into lumber and the lumber into houses and cash. A lot of it was shipped to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. It wasn’t until the widespread abandonment of Maine farms following the Civil War that a new crop of pine trees emerged on the fallow landscape. The old titans had grown mostly along the rivers, where they were protected from the wind by ridges that followed the watercourses. The logs that I was admiring in the yard at Lovell Lumber were part of the new succession of Maine pine that had grown up on the stone wall–threaded uplands that had once been farms.
The drop siding that Billy and I brought back from the lumberyard went up slowly, one board at a time. There was no rushing it. It looked good, but it was a task that required two men working methodically to accomplish. The upper edge of the boards was square with a groove; the lower edge had a cove that beveled into a tongue. The tongue of the board above fit into the groove of the board below. This created a tight seal against the weather. The challenge was fitting tongues into grooves over long spans. Sometimes we could just pound the upper piece down into the lower piece, but more often than not the upper piece needed to be worked in by putting a wedge behind the upper piece to help it find the groove of the lower piece. We began at the bottom of each wall of the cabin and stepped our way up to the top.
The wood was a buttery white and yellow and smooth to the hand. The long pieces flexed if turned flat to the earth and sky, and were stiff if turned with their edges down. At the mill, pine boards had come in several grades depending on the clarity of the wood, meaning the absence of knots, which are the vestiges of branches growing out of the tree’s trunk. I had bought a grade that was run-of-the-mill, meaning we encountered a fair number of red and occasionally black knots. Red knots were fine; black knots tended to fall out of the board. We trimmed the boards to eliminate big or troublesome knots and found that we had very little waste. The drop siding had been a good choice. It gave the cabin a finished but unfussy look.
I liked the idea of using local wood to build the cabin. There was a harmony and rightness to it. My wood wasn’t coming from Ecuador’s rain forests or Siberian clear-cuts. It came from the sandy loam soils of the watershed of which the cabin and I were now a part, and I was feeling very good about it. The owner of the sawmill had told me that the valley could continue to produce pine and his mill could continue to saw it into perpetuity with wise management of the resource. This also seemed a good thing. If a man knew and cared about the source of his lumber, just as if he knew and cared about the source of his food, wouldn’t it necessarily follow that a lot of mischief and wickedness would be avoided?
The feeling was real, and the question legitimate, but the ideal as it turned out was an illusion. I did a little checking on the origins of the other materials for the cabin. The gaslights I intended to install came from China—I could only guess under what conditions the Chinese workers had labored to produce them. The nails, manufactured by a Japanese conglomerate, came from China. The Japanese conglomerate owned a North American subsidiary, based in New York, which manufactured the nails in China and distributed them in the United States through another subsidiary, in Irving, Texas. The