Cabin by Lou Ureneck

Author:Lou Ureneck
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-08-08T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

THE FRAME

I had been stubborn about salvaging the timbers because I knew that no part of this cabin would give me more pleasure than assembling its frame. In an odd way, the urge to raise those timbers was rooted in my need to put my life back together, or at least the pieces of it that had felt broken. I don’t know how I had connected these two impulses, to build and to reorder my life, or how a spark was made to arc between them, but there was no mistaking the satisfying inner hum I felt the moment I brought the work of the cabin, and especially the assembly of the frame, into my thoughts.

It surely was not because I was a born carpenter. Not even close. Neither did I grow up with barns or timber frames. I was a boy who had grown up in coastal South Jersey where there were farm stands and chicken coops, but not barns, and certainly not the stands of big-circumference trees in which were packed the beams to build them. My boyhood timber was scrub pine, swamp cedar and spindly sassafras. I can’t even recall precisely, down to the actual barn, the first time I saw a timber-frame structure. It must have been in a book or magazine, which is not surprising when I think 130 of the extent to which I had taken from books the ideas about how I might live my life. Books had been my surrogate parents.

My first recollection of an encounter with an authentic timber frame coincided with several crucial vectors in my life: the attempt to make a start as a husband and father, a yearning for a life in the country and a deepening appreciation of an aesthetic whose principal virtue was simplicity. I suspect, too, that my response was wrapped up in some spiritual way with my life then as a reader and the discovery of Tolstoy and his projected self, Konstantin Dmitrievich Levin. I was about twenty when I first read Tolstoy, and each time I finished reading one his stories, I felt as if I needed to recover from the stun of an electric shock. Never had literature spoken so directly to me or had life so fully opened up on the page. The beauty and intimacy of the land, the mix of the vast landscape and the Christianity of the gospels, the mysticism of Mother Russia and the wonder of it all—the sunshine, the rain, the snow, the grass bending before the breeze and of course the Great Man’s ability to put all of this into language (at least as it was conveyed to me in those Victorian translations by Constance Garnett)—was a crucial part of me trying to form myself as a young man. I was looking for a code, and his books provided it. For about two years, as I read my way through his novels and stories, I was drunk on Tolstoy.

There was Levin pulling on his

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