The cabin (2019)

Growing up, my cousins Mark and Joe called me their “third brother.” That didn’t stop them from using their fraternal facial code to cheat me at cards, but we seemed like brothers to many people who met us. Here we were walking out of the Washington Monument around nine or ten years old. Mark is behind. Joe is looking back at me.

There are many pictures of us fastened together like this. Here we are as teenagers on the top of Mt. Katahdin, teasing our adult cousin Larry. Twenty seven or twenty eight, Larry spent probably half his vacation time that year showing us mountains in Maine and New Hampshire.

Together and apart, we all wore the same belt, which we had discovered in a general store near the farm, maybe even before my father died. They weren’t really belts. They were cow collars—leather straps that go around a cow’s broad neck with a ring for a lead rope.

I still wore mine in college, although I became suspicious my cousins had lost theirs. Before I could question them more closely, I lost mine.

The idea of building a log cabin at the farm emerged on a phone call. We knew exactly where we wanted to build it—a flat spot deep in the woods and above a waterfall.

Joe asked the question we were all thinking. It was the same question we had about the stone wall. What made us believe we knew how to do this? Well, we did have a book. Written by Appalachian high school students who wanted to preserve the backwoods knowledge of their parents and grandparents, it appealed to our own Southern heritage. It was kind of our club bible.

We were sure—or maybe only I was sure—that we could build the cabin in two weeks. One visit. Next summer. That same Thanksgiving we tried to finish the wall, we cut two dead trees near the waterfall. They were crooked. They were also rotten. We carried them back and laid them at the site where they continued rotting, unused, across the four years it took us to finish the cabin.

What drove us across those four years changed as we grew older, but the first summer our primary incentive for building a log cabin was spending all that time alone in the woods with sharp tools. Joe was twelve. I was thirteen. Mark was fourteen. When they arrived at the farm, we collected everything on the front porch. Axes and hatchets came first.

We also laid out two machetes for cutting branches. We added chisels and an old woodworking tool called a drawknife, which we didn’t know how to use but looked dangerous. We each contributed several knives—Swiss Army knives, hunting knives, fishing knives, and a deep-sea diving knife that I could never get sharp and had no function whatsoever except how it looked strapped around my leg. Sitting on the summer grass, we packed a tent and three sleeping bags, food, pots and pans, and the Foxfire book. We left wearing backpacks bristling with axes, carrying knives on our belts, and holding a hatchet or a machete in our hands.

The site was a twenty-minute walk up the hill behind the house. The path crossed a swamp called Moss Meadow and then followed Moss Meadow Brook up to the waterfall. We set up camp. Decorated with dirty fingerprints, the Foxfire book spent the days spread open on a log and the nights kicked under a sleeping bag in the tent. The other side of the waterfall was a wildlife management area, so except for the house that held my mother and my sisters we could walk in any other direction for several miles without seeing anyone. There we were, out in the middle of nowhere, with sharp tools that we made sharper and sharper every chance we got.

When we weren’t cutting things or sharpening our tools, we were walking back down to the house and negotiating to use the chainsaw. It was an old red Homelite that my father had bought at Sears.

My mother drew the line here, which I understood even then but still argued about it relentlessly. We had to identify what we needed cut and come get her. She would stride up there, carrying the saw, and cut where we told her. After checking that we each had all our limbs, she hurried down again. She had many other things to do, and this happened on her schedule, not ours.

I have managed many projects since then. I wasn’t much different at thirteen, except I had fewer skills—and less emotional self-restraint. I set goals in the morning and became intensely frustrated by evening at how few of them we had achieved. By the end of that first week, we hadn’t built even one layer of notched logs. On Friday night we lay quietly in our tent, flashlights off but not quite asleep, when we heard leaves crunching and branches breaking and heavy breathing that came closer and closer. Only when we heard aluminum tent poles clanking together did we realize it wasn’t a bear. It was our cousin Larry. He had driven from Boston after work and hiked up in the dark to spend the weekend with us. I knew my mother would let him use the chainsaw so I ran down the next morning and came back with it. Now we had an adult dedicated to using the saw for two entire days. Now we would make progress.

The challenge with cutting trees in the woods is simple: There are other trees there. We started Larry in a stand of trees next to the pool below the waterfall. But when he cut down the first one, it tipped over and got stuck in the branches of a tree next to it. We let the saw idle and talked about it for a few minutes. We decided to cut the tree it was stuck on. The second tree. Which Larry did. Then both trees fell over together and got stuck in a third tree. The saw was still running, so we cut that one down. All three trees fell over and got hung up in a fourth. By the end of Saturday, we had about ten or eleven trees all stuck in other trees that were still standing. It looked like a tornado had touched down right in front of us.

We spent all day Sunday trying to unlock the trees from this wild, tangled mess. We kept thinking we could slide the top tree down off the pile by pulling from the cut end at the bottom. My mother came up with a pony in a harness, and we attached him to one of the cut trees. But the force of falling had driven each cut end a foot or more into the mud so the pony had to strain against both the ground and the tangle of interlocking branches above. He pulled one free. Our hearts leapt. But he couldn’t do anymore. At the end of the day, Larry left for Boston. My mother left also. She had a long list of chores that I wasn’t helping with.

“Could we use the pony by ourselves tomorrow?” I asked.

“No.”

“Could we drive the Jeep up here?”

“Absolutely not.”

The three of us made dinner outside the tent. We watched the tangled mess as we ate. We all felt defeated. The next morning, Joe asked if we had pulleys and suggested setting up a block and tackle. We went down to the house and collected heavy rope and block-and-tackle pulleys that had been on the farm when we bought it. As we walked back loaded with all this new equipment, Mark remembered a movie he had seen where Tarzan pulled a vehicle out of the mud using a block and tackle and a pole. Joe and I teased him mercilessly for suggesting something from a Tarzan movie, but he insisted on trying it.

We set up the block and tackle. Mark made a thick hemlock pole about eight feet long. We selected a tree at the top of the pile, and he stuck his pole in the mud, just beyond the cut end of it. He tied the rope to the top of his pole, leaving a few feet dangling. Then he tipped it down toward the cut end of the tree. It looked like a huge fishing pole. We tied the dangling rope to the tree and stood together at the pulling end of the block and tackle.

by Isabelle Smith

Wouldn’t our weight pull more than our strength? We all had our cow collars. Fastening them around the top of our thighs like a swing seat instead of a belt, we tied them to the rope. Then we counted off and hurled ourselves backward at the same time. The block and tackle closed. The tree moved. No adults. No pony. No Jeep. Acting like a lever, Mark’s pole had lifted the cut end out of the mud and yanked that top tree four or five feet down the pile. We had to set this all up several times for each tree, but it worked. Within two days, we had the whole mess untangled and each tree cut to the right length. We only did build two layers that summer. But we had solved a hard problem completely by ourselves. And we had a pile of logs waiting for next year.

Each year we grew bigger and better with an ax. We didn’t need the pony to pull the logs anymore. We just carried them ourselves. The wall went together the way you would expect, like Lincoln logs—except every log had a bulge somewhere and was thicker at one end than the other. Here’s what the wall looked like after two more summers of work.

We were halfway finished. The hole marked where we planned to cut out the door.

Our approach to this kind of carpentry was, “Measure once and cut many times.” A new log would go up on the wall. Then we rolled it in place and marked the width of each notch. Carrying axes, two of us straddled each intersecting side, facing the log we were fitting, and began cutting the notches. The third person supervised or sharpened a tool or told a story. If that third person was Joe, he made us laugh. Sometimes we sang.

The person at one notch would stop swinging their axe. “You ready?”

“Hang on.” The person at the other end kept cutting. “Ok. Now I’m ready.”

Then we would roll the log into place and check the fit.

“Left notch needs to be deeper. Right?”

Then we might roll it back to cut only the left notch deeper. Checking the fit again, we might cut the right notch deeper and then the left notch again before we realized the problem was a knot in the middle of the log that held it off the log below. It was a little like fitting a rock into a stone wall. And when we finally had the fit right, however much rolling back and forth and cutting it had taken, we still used the family phrase, “Like it had eyes.”

Around this stage, about halfway done, Larry told us he didn’t like the site we had chosen. The waterfall was too loud. We laughed pretty hard. It seemed like something he should have mentioned a few years ago. And we loved the roar of the waterfall. That wall of constant sound enclosed our world up there. We couldn’t hear airplanes or trains or trucks or even people approaching. We could just hear each other and our axes and all the mosquitoes around our heads.

We made more progress every summer. But what progress we made was never enough for me. We always could have done more. Any setback—the chainsaw not starting, an axe handle breaking, some log we couldn’t fit on the wall—exploded in my brain. When the reaction to frustration or defeat was to quit for the day, when my cousins wanted to walk back to the house and swim in the pond or go into town, I just could not accept it. “You are the only person bossier than I am,” Mark told me recently. He paused, trying to find the right words. “You did assert yourself dramatically on several occasions.” Joe was often able to calm me down, but not always. I suffered a passion, a rage, about finishing the cabin that I couldn’t control and couldn’t explain.

When my family spent time at the farm between their visits, I often disappeared with my axe to finish fitting a log or to drop a few trees by myself. In the weeks before Mark and Joe arrived, I made out the shopping list—nails, chimney sections, lumber, hinges, and so on. My mother, ever tense about money in those days, bought it all willingly. The third summer, we finished the wall. The fourth summer, we built the roof. The three of us drove the Jeep up there with a load of lumber and shingles, which involved creeping up the rough, rocky trail and then gunning it across the muddy spots, slipping and sliding and catching on dry ground just before we got stuck. We also framed the doorway and built a door. Mark and Joe came back with their family that Thanksgiving, and we drove the Jeep up there again, this time carrying a wood stove that Larry had given us, the chimney, and three beds that I had made out of planks and two-by-fours. And then it was finished.

“Thanks for all the help this weekend,” I said as we walked back down to the house. We were passing the stone wall around the cemetery, clanking with tools.

“Don’t say that!” Mark cried. “It makes us feel like it’s not our project too.”

We used the cabin together precisely once, the following summer, before Mark left for college. The drinking age was eighteen then, and he could buy beer. We kept it cold in the pools beneath the waterfall, a string tied to the plastic rings around each six pack. The deeper each six pack sank, the colder it got, but we often lost one or two cans as we pulled it back up. They would sink down between the boulders at the bottom. As the week went on, we were never sure how much beer we had. By the end of the week, getting a beer meant someone taking all his clothes off and diving and then coming up gasping with one or two cans at a time. Lying around in our own house, a house we built, was fun for a few days. I loved being with them. But it felt strange to be there with nothing to do. The cabin bored me now that it was finished. I would lie in bed and look at all our mistakes on the wall, and I hated how we had put on the roof.

I often wondered what my drive to finish this project meant. Why all that passion and intensity? When the project began, it was about accepting the hole my father left in the family. It was something to do as if I still had him. But as we felled trees and fitted logs, I didn’t find him around the cabin. Where I still found him was not in my projects, but in his. My mother and my sisters had this same experience. As he gradually faded away, we could still find him by simply walking over his bridge on our way between the house and barn. Later, Emily got married on his bridge. It was her way of having him at her wedding.

Thinking about the stone wall we built around the cemetery, Emily wrote recently:

I remember coming to realize as I grew up that having a cemetery on your property with your father buried in it inside a wall that your family built was not actually everybody’s experience, or even really anyone else’s experience.

Grief gave us things to do. Grief also drove a deeper awareness of death. In those early years, I first contemplated the simple fact that if you make something, you leave it behind. When the project of building the cabin began, it was about my father’s death. By the time the project ended, it was about my own. Finishing the cabin was about living with the idea that I would die. I too must build something and leave it behind.