Back after four days, lunched and addressing the stack of planks and plywood dropped by the mill while we were gone. No time like the present to get a start on laying the subfloor.
As we hauled a few of the two by tens over to the piers Emil explained, "The long ones aren't cut from my timbers. If it sounds like I'm apologizing that's 'cause I am. Not so much to you as to the cabin and myself. Life's filled with compromise and there's nothing wrong with it. Help's make the world go round. And in my case, saved a couple of trees. Still, using other people's lumber just doesn't feel right.
"Over the months I've sweat bullets about how the cabin's base'd be laid out. Has to be solid as the bedrock beneath or it'd drive me nuts worrying about the cabin falling over every time I took a step. The idea I'm going with is to use the floor framing to tie all the posts together. Make the whole thing like a twenty legged table. This afternoon we'll see if we can get the banding done."
Soon as we started I could see why Emil had placed the piers where he did. Six inches short each way of a full twenty-four foot by thirty-two foot base. The three inch thick, double two by ten banding brought it nicely to full size. Slowly and carefully, with me bracing each pier and Emil driving pole barn nails, we ran that double band of the inch and a half thick planks flush with the post tops and overlapped like bricks to cover all the seams. Surprisingly, we were done by three o'clock. Not wanting to waste daylight we more slowly finished the interior rows with more two by tens. When done it looked like the striping of a football field. Each of those insiders had to be hand trimmed for a snug fit against the banding. Nailed tight to the posts with sixteen penny and toenailed the the banding with eights. By dinner we were already penciling out locations for the joist hangers.
As I sit here and write up our labor I realize how much more interesting the work was in the doing than on paper. A few hundred words does no justice to the thought Emil had put into his structure or the care we took with every cut and placement of each nail. Yeah, his cabin's wasn't much more than an oversized box but it was a box he intended to live in for the rest of his life. And while he was living there he'd recall most every nail he'd bent and pulled. Hard to live with those things unless you knew every mistake was made honestly and corrected whenever possible. Get Emil to describe his cabin and you'd soon realize the man was living in a story he'd written in wood and steel. Like he'd said earlier, there's a lot of art in this world and not all of it is on display.
"Took a while to not drive every nail die straight. Used sink them that way every time, as though it'd be a sin should one not be perfectly true and vertical. Then one day I gave it some thought and realized, should they be driven at slight opposing angles to each other they'd have a stronger grip on the wood. There's almost always a better way and sometimes that better way seems to make no sense. It ain't easy for a bullet-headed German like me to be imperfect in a perfect way."
We did little that evening but clean up, cook, sit and eat 'til the sun dropped below the tree line. Lucky for me, Emil'd figured out a simple way to heat water for what we called a shower. At the hardware in town he'd found a pair of oversized, thin-walled aluminum canning pots with lids. Spray painted them flat black. On sunny days we'd pump a couple of gallons in each, lid them up and let the sun work its magic. Wasn't ever hot by any means but also didn't strike terror in our hearts when wetting down.
Yeah, we cleaned up dressed in our birthday finest. No way to get around it. There wasn't much privacy in Emil's camp whether bathing or working. We saw each other as we truly were. Over the years I've come to see the best way to learn a person is to work with them. Particularly grunt work, as it bares the soul. How you swing a hammer and carry your weight through the day, 'specially when things aren't going as they should, says more about a person than a mouth. Sure, we all have our secret side. So long as it stays secret and does no harm, it doesn't matter. But who we really are can't be hidden from the person on the other end of the timber. No doubt Emil had me pegged better than I did. Made me a little nervous now and then I might come up short in his eyes. When we talked of it, Emil laughed,
"Ha! I wouldn't give those worries any weight. Come tomorrow you'll be more concerned you're going to die. Maybe even wish for death. And with luck you'll take me with you. Back in basic training our drill sergeants had this punishment they called the dying cockroach. Won't say any more about it now than get used to the idea of gravity not being your friend."
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