Big Jim

Figure 1.

In the summer of 1955, the year my father quit his job with the Bankers Trust Company in New York City and bought Big Jim Pond Camps—the year, that is, when my father took a flier and did what he had always wanted to do, which was own and run a hunting and fishing camp in Maine—he discovered after just a couple of months at Big Jim that substantial as the place may have looked to the casual eye, it was tender and vulnerable as a newborn baby, in need of constant coddling and attention if it were not to succumb to the heat, humidity, rot, rust and decay of Maine summers, the crushing weight of winter snows, the rank growth of alders that kept marching, marching against

this tiny beachhead of cleared land, threatening to engulf it if they were not constantly beaten back.

Take the main lodge, two stories high, built of full logs, nobody knew when exactly, but a long time ago, around the turn of the century. Downstairs: one big, open room, forty by twenty-two feet, the guests' dining room. Upstairs: eight little bedrooms, supposedly for the help, but so stifling hot in the summer and icy cold in the fall that neither my parents nor any previous owners had ever asked a cook or waitress to occupy one of those rooms. Then, sticking out the back, an addition that housed the kitchen and sticking out the side of the kitchen, the back dining room, where the owners and the help ate.

This whole gangling structure perched on a narrow shelf of land between the water and the hill that rose steeply behind it and every other building at Big Jim. All eight guest cabins, also built of full logs, stood within just a few footsteps of the shore. If that potbelly of a hill had ever added a few inches to its girth, it would have pushed Big Jim's lodge, camps, shower house, ice house, woodshed—every last stick—out into the pond.

Rain and snowmelt poured down the hill in the spring, soaking the soil, rotting the camps' underpinnings, tilting them ever so slightly year after year toward the water. Don Yeaton, Big Jim's year-round caretaker, and I crawled under the lodge, drove blocks and shims between sagging foundation posts and the joists to keep the floor from bouncing up and down like a trampoline. We replaced rotting posts and sill logs, first in Camp Four, then in Seven, then Three, then Eight, then started all over again.

The roofs were covered with green roofing felt. Pine needles collected on them, held the moisture, rotted the felt, which expanded with the heat, contracted with the cold, pulled at the nails that held it down. We climbed up on the roofs with gallon cans of black roofing tar, smeared the leaks, hoped the black goo would hold this roof together until next year, when we'd get around to laying a fresh layer of green roofing felt.

I tried to convince Don and my father that the camps needed standing-seam metal roofing or—second best—asphalt shingles, something permanent, or good for twenty years anyhow. But Big Jim didn't have either a lot of time or a lot of money. Green roofing felt was a lot cheaper, a lot quicker and easier to lay.

I realize now that the impermanence of those roofs was just right for Jim Pond. Big Jim's camps were, after all, camps, temporary dwellings, not as permanent as a house, not as impermanent as a tent, but somewhere in between. You make camp, and you break camp. Camps are not forever, much as I may have thought they were.

That first summer and the next and the next one after that I worked with Don at Big Jim, then over the next decade a few more summers plus a couple of autumns and winters, too. Don had gone to work washing dishes in a lumber camp when he was...