This  beautifully written account of a year spent building a small post-and-beam cabin in the hills of western Maine tells a deeper story about brotherly bonds, home, and nature.

 

City-bound for a decade, and attempting to rebound from a string of personal setbacks including a job loss, the death of his mother, a health scare, and a divorce, Lou Ureneck decided he needed a project that would engage the better part of him and put him back in life’s good graces.  Being in nature had always made him happy, as had working with his hands, so he settled on building a cabin in the woods with his younger brother Paul.  It would also be a chance for these two brothers, who were quite different in temperament and sensibility, to reconnect with each other and with their shared history after a long separation.

 

As foundation holes are dug and frames and rafters raised, Ureneck eloquently reveals his own evolving insights into the richness and complexity of family relationships, the satisfaction to be obtained from physical labor, and the pleasure and emotional healing that can come from nature. Along the way, he also writes vividly of the landscape of his childhood, the New Jersey shore where he caught crabs and trapped muskrats in the swamps, as well as exploring the rich history of a backwoods corner of Maine that was once a thriving community of subsistence farms.

 

Inspired by Ureneck’s popular New York Times blog, “From the Ground Up,” Cabin is a moving and resonant account of two brothers building their way to the far end of middle age, and of the need to root oneself in a place one can call home.

Excerpt From the Book

I chose a Friday in April to spend my first night in the cabin. There was still no roof cover, and the walls remained unsheathed. In other words, it was a frame, open to the weather. I drove up from Boston, arrived an hour before dark and spread my sleeping bag on the deck. I heard a commotion of splashing on the pond below. It sounded like slap, splash—slap, splash—slap, splash! I had to have a look.

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Reviews

“Readers with cabin fever of their own who may be looking for a "how-to" book may draw an idea or two from Ureneck's story. But a broader audience interested in the bonds of family and how they evolve may come away with even more.” -- The Associated Press


“Like a shelter magazine with a soul, this memoir is about how a man rebuilds his life, assembling lumber into a gorgeous home. Divorced and approaching late middle age, Mr. Ureneck, a journalism professor at Boston University, feels depression rolling in. He realizes that a cabin in Maine would deliver him back to the natural world that has always been sustaining. “Trees filtering sunlight or water rushing over mossy rocks — they had worked their healing power on me before,” he writes. Based on the blog he wrote for The New York Times, the book chronicles the two years it took him, his brother and nephews to build the cabin and the attendant strengthening of their relationships. While some details should have been laid to rest with the blog — the culling of the list of backhoe operators is one example — Mr. Ureneck’s account is enriched by pleasing vignettes and family history. For him the construction is meditative and restorative; reading about it feels similar.” -- The New York Times


“A modern-day Walden with a midlife twist.

I had been city-bound for nearly a decade, dealing with the usual knockdowns and disappointments of middle-age,” writes Ureneck (Journalism/Boston Univ.; Backcast: Fatherhood, Fly-fishing, and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska, 2007). “The notion of building a cabin—a boy’s dream really—seemed a way to get a purchase on life’s next turn.” The author was not consciously attempting a Thoreauvian experiment in self-sufficiency. Rather, he was trying to save himself from the wreckage—a painful divorce, the loss of his mother and uncles to death and disease and a major career change—of a life gone awry. Loneliness and despair threatened to engulf him; the only family members who remained were his two grown children, both of whom lived apart from him and his younger brother Paul, a man absorbed by his own trials. Heartsick and confused, he bought a piece of land in the woods of western Maine. There, Ureneck, along with his brother and his brother’s sons, spent the latter part of 2008 and all of 2009 constructing the cabin, “employing, as much as possible, old-fashioned wood joinery rather than nails.” At first, this “experiment in mental health” was the author’s way to enjoy the two things that had been constants in an otherwise fragmented life: Paul’s company and a love of the natural world. But as the project evolved, Ureneck realized that the cabin-building process—selecting the timber to use in construction; digging and laying in the foundations; assembling the wood pieces together; securing the final structure both inside and out—was allowing him to not only confront and resolve issues from his past, but also giving him the opportunity to build a mature relationship with a beloved brother he felt he had let down in youth.

Ureneck’s story is simple, but it rewards abundantly by affirming the unexpected possibilities for renewal that life offers.” -- Kirkus


“Ureneck is no stranger to the outdoors: his first book, Backcast: Fatherhood, Flyfishing and a River Journey Through the Heart of Alaska, was a satisfying and illuminating look at the connections between internal and external landscapes. This follow-up is a continuation of Ureneck's personal journey that will thoroughly satisfy fans of his earlier work. Following a job loss, a divorce, his mother's death, and other bouts of "coming to terms with being the generation within the family that stood between the children and death," Ureneck decides to build a cabin on a piece of "rugged Maine hillside" and make it "my own in the way that the landscape of my boyhood had been my own." Enlisting his brother Paul, an experienced builder, to help with the construction, Ureneck spends two seasons building his simple cabin, and his detailed, almost day-by-day account of that time deftly combines the physical ("Post and beam carpentry owns a vocabulary every bit as rich and arcane as that of nineteenth-century seamanship"), the philosophical ("Has the departure of nature from our lives impaired our ability to make moral decisions?"), and the familial ("When you get around to reassembling your life... it's good to have someone at your side who remembers how the parts once fit together.”  — Publishers Weekly



“This superb writer masterly weaves short imagery to describe his feelings, putting the reader there with him. I was rooting for him through the whole book because, make no mistake, how he handles losses creates suspense.”

— Ken Allen, Maine Sportsman