In the middle of its life, our fish house landed in the middle of the woods. Forty acres of woods. In a big mess of spruce blowdowns, crisscrossed over each other, littered with boulders right to our doorstep. Quite a change from our last front yard on the shore.
Well, I guess we’ve got plenty of work to do, I thought, eyeing that mess. Best get that cleaned up before we get stabbed in the eye, or break an ankle, trying to get in our house with an armful of groceries. The old man got out his chainsaw, I got my gloves on and we gave it to her. About a week of cutting, brushing, hauling and bulling everything into the fire, covered with sweat, sawdust and soot took care of that!
The next thing we had to deal with was the fish house no longer being on the shore where we were having clambakes. Now we had no place to have them. I certainly wasn’t about to cook here in the woods and lug it to the shore every day! We needed a building on the shore, that wasn’t our house, where our customers had some shelter, and where we had space to cook without tripping over each other, or the dog.
This 40 acres of woods is quite handy to have when you need to build something. It didn’t take us long to start cutting down trees, skidding them out to the road and get them milled into timbers and planks. We found a place on the shore we could rent and built our restaurant on the grout bank overlooking the cove. In six weeks we went from standing trees to a “finished” building. The clambake was in business again.
It was pretty crude and rude at that point. No windows in the dining room, the picnic tables we built and had on the shore, for seating, and the wind whipping through, blowing away anything not fastened down. The view, however, was spectacular, the lobsters and clams were fresh and delicious, so people came anyway. We did put in windows right off.
The old man bought an old lobster boat and wooden traps, so he was back fishing. Between the two businesses we were generating some income, finally. We were kept busy all summer, running back and forth from the woods to the shore. Our little house didn’t get much attention, but we were pleased to have it to come home to. We now had “a pot to piss in,” but I’m not going to throw it out the window!
With the coming of fall, the clambake was over for the season. Lobstering was good. Now we had time to see to our own comfort. We had a well drilled and put a hand pump on it so we at least had handy water. The fish house was in pretty hard shape. We fixed that up, covering the old shingles with boards and battens. We insulated the inside, finishing that off with pine boards. With the wood stove in the sauna and the coal and gas kitchen stove, we were cozy, warm and well fed all winter.
There wasn’t room for the boys in the fish house any more (there never was) so we decided to build a bunk house up the driveway a ways. If we were going to be doing all this building, we better get our own gear to do it. We bought a Ross Band Mill, a “portable” mill that runs on a track, and proceeded to make our own timbers and planks. Manhandling big logs onto the mill was quite a feat, with many grunts, groans and much panting on my part. It worked good and saved a lot of money, if not a lot of sweat. The bunk house got built.
Next, the old man needed a shop. You can’t be a fisherman without a shop. Well, maybe you could be but it wouldn’t be very handy. Back to the mill and that got done. Typically, our house was last on the list for any more improvements. No time for that will all these projects going and two jobs besides.
After a couple of years of this, we did start thinking about a little more room for ourselves. The family was getting bigger. A wife an twin baby girls got added to the list, which made seven of us, counting the boys and us, milling around in our tiny house most of the time. We had built the clambake, the bunk house and the shop, so I guess we could build us a house. We didn’t know much about building before this, but common sense and by the seat of our pants seemed to work just fine.
The first thing needed was a foundation, 35 ft. by 15 ft., for a two story house. That ought to be big enough. We butted it up next to the fish house, making a bit “T.” We had a trench dug, cement forms built and then made, and poured, 70 bags of cement with a one-bag mixer, a wheelbarrow and a hoe. Since we had our own mill, we can saw our own logs, we thought. After doing about 26 8″ by 8″s with a live edge for the first and second floor stringers, we soon realized we’d work ourselves to death getting the material together before the snow flew. We had no time to wait; we were bulging at the seams already.
We bought the rest of the logs. The old man just started laying them up on the floor, live edge on the inside, flat edge on the outside, spiking them together with a maul and 12-inch spikes. The boys helped him. Wherever we wanted windows and doors he just left a space. In a matter of a month or so the house was up and roofed over. We had a chimney built, made a hearth with an old wagon wheel rim and got a big woodstove.
By Christmas the old man sawed a door through to the fish house. Bare shell that it was, it didn’t take us long to start using it. We had Christmas dinner in our new house, on the picnic table, next to the woodstove.
That was 20 years ago. This house is now filled with 20 years of our life and many, many mementoes of those years, each with a story of its own.
Rusty Warren
Vinalhaven