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    Just a couple of weeks ago, all the way into the end of April, the snow pack was still deep here. But now the whole town of Farmington is walking around blinking and grinning, like a bunch of kids looking up from their video games, or better, like a bunch of troglodytes coming out of a cave, even if the cave was a lot of fun for a few months. Here on May 2, after a whole week of temperatures in the 70s and even 80s, then a few days of hard rain—three inches of hard rain—there’s still snow in the woods down by Temple Stream, places where it blew in under dense hemlocks, places the sun never really shines and warm breezes don’t play and hot rain doesn’t hit the ground right away. But even those old drifts will be gone soon, too.

    And the stream is coming down some from high water. A huge forked tree stripped of bark and minor branches spent last summer in the middle of the stream where Desi and Wally Brook comes in. It was moved by the ice this winter just so, and finally we have a nice bridge over the mouth of the brook, a deep, sandy spot, fine to wade through in summer but a couple of feet deep now, and still so cold. Great Blue heron down there this morning, lifting at my approach. A week ago a greater yellowlegs, tall shore bird with long beak slightly decurved, bigger than the lesser yellowlegs (duh), standing in the shallows energetically going after minnows, doesn’t even move when dog Baila starts splashing toward him—bird probably famished from flying all night, tired, too, cranky, let me eat, canine! The sleek and beautifully spotted thing just jumps across to the other side of the stream, last second, long legs dangling, makes Baila follow, jumps again, back to where the minnows are, resumes the hunt. Baila loses interest. The bird’s only migrating, no chance at a lasting antagonism, will get back in the sky after dark, continue on to northern Labrador for summer.

    And lots of other birds, returns. I heard the shrill note of a broad-winged hawk this morning, heard it again, couldn’t quite place it, just looked in the sky hoping for a reminder—and oh, yes, right—there he was, back again. And the crested Mergansers have been a morning feature for weeks, hiding up in muskrat’s den in the brook. Saw the male underwater like a penguin the other day, emerging. He saw me and jumped into the sky straight from under water. So I watched the brook where he’d appeared, a deep little hole, and pretty soon from under the bank here comes the female, same finish.

    Swallows are back, which means bugs are, too. Flickers on the lawn, so ants are active. White-throated sparrows galore (my daughter says they sing for her, and then sings me back the song: perfect). And a male wood duck, beautiful thing—only gives me a moment to peer at him through binoculars at a hundred yards before he’s too crowded and jumps, big fly-loop downstream. He’ll return exactly here when I’m gone and I’ll see him tomorrow, start him on the loop again.

    Back up to the house and I’m raking sand off the lawn, then repairing the fence with my Dad, who’s visiting, and who helped build the thing some fifteen years ago, back when my mom was still alive and my daughter hadn’t been born and Desi was still alive, and Wally a puppy and not dead. Time passing, healing all wounds. We could say causing all wounds, as well, I suppose. Best to blame an abstraction. The fence section along the road keeps the new dog in, all right, at forty inches high, but the plowed snow banks were a hundred inches this winter, huge mountains, nearly 200 inches total snowfall, amazing. Baila could just walk over the bank, four feet over the top of the fence, though she respected the boundary even in the abstract, stood up there all golden-retriever proud looking at the world going by. Oh, and the other night when I’d forgotten putting her out, simply exiting the dog yard via the convenient new snow ramp and coming around to the front door—woof-woof, let me in.

    All of that snow! Gone!

    All the damage, not. The fence wasn’t hard to fix, a few hours over two days with Dad holding boards, muscling boards, the same boards he’d helped nail up those fifteen-odd years ago when he was only sixty-six.

    I’ve got several little outbuildings here. One is my studio, an old saphouse not 8x16 feet, big enough for typing, anyway, and a few hundred books, woodstove. Another is the shop, old one-car garage with all my tools and plenty of machines and various dimensions of lumber piled everywhere. Contiguous with that is what my dad years ago named the Shack, a large shed with a too-flat corrugated roof. Every year I think: Will this be the year the snow takes it down? This year notable because I never had that thought, even when I saw the center pole pushing up the tin of the roof. And I was out there shoveling snow off the thing, just not thinking that thought, like that thought was not needed anymore after 16 years. Not even one day when I noticed the back half of the roof was sagging: I did not think that thought. But the sag—it was deep—was right over my little garden tractor and the roto-tiller. And what had happened was that I’d raked the back part of the roof for a couple of months of deep snows, not trying to get every flake off the thing, just trying to keep a nice clean roof-line, but it wasn’t a roof-line, it was a snow sculpture, a simulacrum of a roof line, like several feet of snow on the sagging actual roof, masquerading as a roof line while I didn’t think that thought.

    I thought that thought. The snow sculpture of a roof was too frozen to shovel any further. And it was way too late to move the garden tractor, because the seven-foot-high door of the shed was blocked by a good seven-and-half-feet of hard-packed roof snow. So I propped up a few key rafters around the machine with scrap lumber, of which I have an enormously great deal, much of it stored under the rafters of the shack, weighing as much as snow drifts (so note: the roof was getting pulled from below, pushed from above, suck of gravity relentless). I re-jiggered the placement of the trapped extension ladder to form a beam over the tractor.

    Then went away for two weeks. Ah, March vacation. Weather Channel, some motel: “Record snow in Maine.” Four new storms had dumped several new feet. My own headline ran through my head like a crawl at the bottom of my vacation: “Extension Ladder Used as Beam Ruined in Failed Bid to Save Small but Expensive John Deere Garden Tractor.”

    And then I thought of the bicycles. I hadn’t even thought to move the bicycles. And the garden tools, I mean, years of garden tools of every description. “Post Hole Digger Digs Own Grave!” Oh, and the wiring for my studio goes through the shack, Romex cable running along the peak “beam” which, in fact, was nothing but a 1X4. It’s all on a modern circuit breaker, so no fire to worry about, despite the cans of gasoline stored beneath.

    Okay, so worry: “Fire Destroys Writer’s Many Shabby Shacks: Fool in our Midst!”

    The Shack was built from scrap wood in the early sixties by a former owner, a very sweet guy whom I’ve met a number of times. He planted three or four cedar posts, laid a 1X4 along the top of the them, toe-nailed 2X4 rafters in place, laid a few furring strips as sheathing, dropped the corrugated tin on top of that. It shouldn’t have lasted twelve years. But forty-six years later, finally the winter fated to take the Shack down.

    Home from my vacation I found the Shack’s walls standing just fine. But the roof had fallen in, reversing its angle from convex to concave, with a bloop where the heroic extension ladder had indeed protected the tractor, only crushing the steering wheel. But I couldn’t get in there to assess the damage: too scary. Creaking sounds, cracking. Several tons of snow on the weak and inverted roof. The posts I’d put in place had been driven into the dirt floor at the bottom, had broken the rafters they’d held at the top. The scrap lumber stored up in there had come sliding and twisting down, all sorts of extremely tense relationships between the parts, explosive.

    I let a week pass, warm weather, and then, like a miner going into a dripping new shaft, I ventured in, propping what was left of the roof and all that snow with odd boards. Deep inside, pay dirt: our bicycles, which I rescued one by one like kids fallen in a well. Everything else would have to wait till a little later in spring.

    Which was this past weekend, first of May. All but a few shovelfuls of snow gone. Funny how light the roof seemed now, how slight the danger of it. The ladder was even a little free—I could wriggle it, aluminum clang reassuring. And under the ladder the tractor didn’t look so bad. I propped more posts, creak of broken rafters, managed to raise the roof an inch or two off the dear green machine. Having pulled the pin that frees the drive shaft, I was able to roll the little tractor backwards till it was out of the shed, steering wheel bent sideways, but no worse than that.

#
    But this is an elegy, an elegy for a shed, more space than thing, more eyesore than icon, more useful than I’d ever noticed or cared to admit: the Shack. Where did the snow tires go in summer? Shack! Where did I hang the 1968 calendar (open to August) I found in the attic? Shack! Where did I keep the wheelbarrow, the lawn cart, the bicycles, the garden tools? Shack, Shack, Shack! Where did I stand the old Franklin Stove when it was useful no more, but beautiful yet? Shack! Where did the increasingly natty roll of row cover for the garden go? Shack! Old chainsaw? Bags of hard cement? Kero cans? Gas tanks? Old Andersen window? Abandoned kitchen sink? Shack, baby.
   
    Shack!

    So, there’s my summer project, as if I needed one: Shack II. The front of the original is still standing, like the false front of a Hollywood set: not a bad wall, either, large barn door on expensive roller track, cedar-shingle walls, two pieces of outdoor art (one porcelain, one plaster). Maybe I’ll just leave that wall, build a new building behind it, try to re-use at least some of the corrugated tin, certainly as much of the lumber as I can, up to and including all the de-nailed and odd-bit boards I’ve stored in there all these years waiting for some project. Shack II: the shed that stored itself!

    But first I’ll have to get the roto-tiller out. Almost time to use it. Trouble being, the thing looks flat. Tough machine like that, squashed like a June bug. If you want to know what snow weighs.

Posted on Monday, May 5, 2008 in Permalink