THE CABIN IN THE GARDEN
In March 1845 Henry Thoreau borrowed an ax, walked out to a plot of woods owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and began felling the "arrowy white pines" on the shore of Walden Pond. "It is difficult to begin without borrowing," Thoreau later wrote, confessing his dependence on community at the start of his experiment in self-sufficiency.
Through April, Thoreau worked at the frame of his cabin, cutting pines and hand-hewing them for joists, studs, and rafters. He bought a shanty for $4.25, dismantled it, and hauled it to his building site for floorboards. During this time, he also dug his cellar, a hole six feet square and seven feet deep. He claims to have dug it in two hours without sweating.
Finally, at the beginning of May, inviting friends to make an occasion of the event, he raised his house. On Independence Day, as soon as he enclosed and roofed it, before he completed the fireplace or plastered, he moved in.
He finished the cabin in mid-November just ahead of winter cold. The cabin was ten by fifteen feet with a garret and the cellar. It cost him a total of $28.12 1/2. Of that total $3.90 went for nails, $4.00 for fireplace bricks, and $4.00 for split shingles for the sides and the roof. He lived there two years.
On a particularly bitter day several winters ago, I visited the replica of his cabin constructed at the Thoreau Lyceum outside of Concord. It felt warm and snug, and I admired it greatly. When I returned home and retreated to the drafty, camping trailer parked in my woods that I've used as a writing shack for the past twelve years, I admired it even more. As I shivered in the glowing light but pale warmth of a small propane heater, I questioned the need to suffer for my words. This past winter, I stayed home from the woods and promised myself I'd build a cabin both comfortable and convenient when the weather turned warm.
I began clearing a section of overgrown forsythia hedge at the back of my garden in mid-May. I hewed no beams from it, but I did run the long, whippy branches through the woodchipper and turned them into mulch for the blueberries. Then, recognizing my own dependence on the economic community, I went to the lumberyard and bought floor joists, studs, plywood, and a window. I spent $190. Fortunately, my intentions were less ambitious than Thoreau's; I planned only to visit my cabin, not live it, and therefore I was building mine half the size of his.
I chose not to dig a cellar. Instead, I dug four post holes. Each was three feet deep. The task took me about two hours, and I sweat doing it. The next day, I put the joists together and nailed the plywood floor down. I worked entirely by hand, cutting everything, including the plywood, with a handsaw and driving the nails with the hammer my father used when he was a carpenter 40 years ago.
That done, I made a trip to Genesee Hardwoods and purchased roughsawn, hemlock planks for siding. They ran me another $100, and I consider them a bargain. I raised my walls myself then rested for a week.
When it was time to shingle, I called a friend, not to make something of the morning, but to make up for my ignorance. My friend, however, a man as distinguished in his character as Thoreau's friends, made the day an occasion, for when we finished--in a mere hour and a half--we gathered with our wives for coffee and watched a June downpour prove our work good.
Since that day, I've insulated the cabin and put up the wallboard, but I still have much to do. I've yet to make a door, and I must arrange for heat and light before November's dark chill. But I have months for that. Meanwhile, I've moved in my chair and desk, and I'm feeling very snug.
Thoreau said he went to the woods "to front the essential facts of life." He did that, and while he was doing it, he wrote two books, the interesting but relatively unimportant A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and the immortal Walden. Though I do not expect the same results Thoreau got, I've come to my cabin in the garden for the same reason: to measure life in words, hoping, as Thoreau hoped "when I come to die [not to] discover that I had not lived." Thoreau died quite peacefully. His last words were "Indians. Moose."
What discovery I'll make at my grave side I do not know, but I do know this: To make this place for words, I will have spent far more of my life than Thoreau spent for his. On nails alone I spent $28.
Copyrighted 2001. All rights reserved.