Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [87]
The cabin would be made mostly from Maine wood, but it was not in the end an organic loaf made from local yeast and grain. There was too much progress to be gained, and money to be saved, by accepting the benefits of technology and global trade. For a cabin builder, this was a conundrum not easily solved. How might the balance be struck between the availability of low-price products whose provenance was unknown to me, on one hand, and social and environmental responsibility on the other? Was this balance something that could legitimately be delegated to government through regulation? For example, might the government forbid importation of nails or gaslights produced under inhumane or planet-damaging circumstances? Or must I investigate the sources of all the materials I used to determine their suitability and alignment with the ethical standards I subscribe to? There were no local sources for many of the items I needed. Are nails still mass-produced in the United States? I did not find them. Yet surely the use of a product made by slave labor or through the addition of toxic chemicals or processes implicates me in a crime.
No product more exemplified my inability and unwillingness to escape modernity than the rubbery material I would apply to the sheathing to prevent leaks in the cabin’s roof—something called Ice & Water Shield, which is manufactured by W. R. Grace & Co. Stoneham is metal-roof country. Through the trees, a driver often sees glints of silver that could be mistaken for ponds. They are in fact metal roofs. There is the occasional asphalt shingle roof, but mountain winters have schooled local people in more serious overhead protection, and the material of choice is steel. It used to be that they were uniformly silver, and many were the old tin roofs typically found on Quonset huts, chicken coops and third-world shanties. They now come in green, several shades of blue (including an electric blue) and red. Nearly all of these roofs have one thing in common: the dermis below the steel is Ice & Water Shield. It is stickier than flypaper and difficult to apply, and after my experience with it I named it Ice & Water Torture. But it is supremely effective. Nearly everyone in the hill country uses it because it so completely keeps water on the weather side of the sheathing.
Ice & Water Shield is made at plants in Chicago and Mt. Pleasant, Tennessee. Its ingredients are oil, asphalt, rubber, polyethylene and paper. According to Grace, the oil comes from a refinery in New Jersey, the asphalt comes from Illinois, the polyethylene from Texas, the paper from Finland and the rubber from Mexico. What is a cabin builder to do? I bowed to the prospect of dry ceilings and used Ice & Water Shield—many, many rolls of it. It is difficult to leave the world behind.
By the end of July, the cabin had a roof. The son of Bill Parmenter, my water wizard, installed it for me. He had the skills and specialized tools for bending and cutting metal, and I did not. The roof’s green metal surface warmed and shined in the sun. It was the green that I associated with Adirondack pulling boats, Maine warden camps and old spruce trees, demonstrating once again that I was both making shelter and trying to write a poem.
Paul had enlisted a plumber friend of his from Portland, who installed a reserve tank in the loft above the bathroom. It would hold water pumped in through a long blue plastic pipe from the well. Smaller black plastic pipes would carry the water down to sinks in the kitchen and bathroom, to a shower and, most impressively, a bathtub. Paul had retrieved a giant iron claw-foot tub that had been pushed aside in the basement of his church. It was dirty