Thoreau Never Mentioned the Damn Bugs!

Two Days after my 30th birthday (candles, bourbon and stretch socks from six different states), death threats started arriving in the mail. They came from friends.

Vince DeWitt--who is only 4/64ths of this story--added the following postscript to an otherwise happy birthday letter: "I don't like to say anything, Hougan, but people are beginning to talk. They're using strange, vituperative words. Swindle, for instance, and land-grab. Now, don't get me wrong. I love you like a brother and, God knows, I hope I'm not out of line. But unless I get the deed within a week, I'm coming after you with Fletcher Weft at my side."

Fletcher Weft.

The mention of his name extinguishes candles in holy places and sends the thermostat into a nose dive. Fletcher Weft. Sleet, rain, hail, pain and the almshouse--that's what Fletcher Weft means to me.

Which is what he's supposed to mean. He's one of those rock-'n'-roll lawyers who negotiate record contracts for unusual bands on the brink of success or felony charges. This line of work has quite naturally made Fletcher paranoid and irascible as hell. His alarm clock, for instance, is one of those talking Sony jobs that, instead of clanging, coo the sleeper awake with the message of his choice. Fletcher's alarm clock, which springs into action at five A.M. on the dot, says, "Cock-a-doodle-doo, baby ... sue ... grab ... gouge ... take.... Cock-a-doodle-doo, baby ... sue ... grab ... gouge ... take...." Fletcher thinks it's cute and demonstrates the device for clients and relatives, who are, incidentally, asked to sign accident waivers before they enter his premises. Fletcher says it's a joke, but try to get inside without playing along.

Actually, this had nothing to do with Fletcher Weft. At least, that's what I told DeWitt. "Listen," I wrote, "take the deed, my wife, my camera, my kid and my copy of Gravity's Rainbow. Just don't bring that son of a bitch into the discussion." I sent him the deed, figuring he could pick up the other stuff whenever he wanted.

• • •

The deed's the thing.

Specifically, it is the thing that gives me/us/it legal title to that entity which has, over the past five years, come to be known as The Land.

The Land is 200 acres of relatively primeval wilderness situated about four miles northeast of Bucksport, Maine. It is bounded on one side by Moosehorn Stream, on a second side by Route 46, on another side by a logging road and on the fourth side by--

The fourth side is unclear. It seems the surveyor met an untimely death and never completed his measurements. Specifically, he perished at the hands of a hunter from Tenafly, New Jersey, who, upon seeing a bush rustle mightily, thought, "Pheasant!" and drilled the poor bastard before he could establish his human credentials. That's why the survey has two small drops of blood on the west 40 and why the property is described in the deed as "Fenner's Ledge, comprising 150 acres, more or less...." (Emphasis mine.)

In fact, the emphasis is Sam Cramer's. As Sam put, it when the time to sign the contract came around, "What's this 'more-or-less' crap? C'mon, Pete, tell me what this more-or-less crap is all about."

Pete is Peter Gilman, the realtor who sold us The Land when we still merely thought of it as "the land." We trusted Pete because he has a red, white and blue down-East accent and because he stutters terrifically. I guess we figured that anyone who stuttered couldn't possibly be a hustler. I mean, it took him so long to get a sentence out, he couldn't afford to lie about anything. His words had to be too precious for deception.

"W-wwww-w-well, b-b-b-boys, we really don't know. N-n-n-not exactly. Surveyor c-c-cc-caught it at point b-b-blank range. Died before he could t-t-t-talk. Terrible th-th-th-th-th-thing, in point of f-f-f-fact."

I was willing to let the matter drop (the tension in his speech was nerve-racking), but Sam pressed on (Sam is from New York).

"OK, but I thought you said it was two hundred acres. It says here in the deed that it's only a hundred and fifty acres."

"M-mmmm-more or less."

"Yeah, right: more or less."

"It's m-m-mm-m-more."

"Then why does it say it might be less?"

Pete winked. "Property taxes," he explained.

Sam and I looked at each other and nodded knowingly. "Property taxes," we chuckled. "Of course. Goddamn property taxes."

If I remember rightly, we slapped old Pete on the back.

• • •

This story actually begins in Greece. That's where the seeds of this story lie.

My beautiful bride and I were living simply (without electricity) on an Aegean island and writing dark verses in which the moon, the sea and the collapse of civilization figured prominently. That was 1967 and the collapse was due round about 1980.

At the time, it looked as if there were almost no time left. America's doom was what philosophers sometimes call a given. Natural resources nearly exhausted. Currency unstable. Prices rising. Domestic conflict spreading from the ghetto to the campus to the slurbs. A panoply of ecological disasters on the horizon. Nixon in the wings, ferocious with ambition. Megalopolis. Megaton. Meat analogs. Right-wing mania. Carcinogenic food additives. Protective reaction strikes. Oil spills. Automobile take-over. Vietnam. The Sound of Music. Gypsy moths. Junk food, junk furniture and junk junk. Dutch elm disease. Population explosion. Credibility gap. Technology berserk. Depression. Famine. Decadence. Catastrophe. And death. Indeed, it seemed as if beyond the New Frontier lay the Stone Age.

Anyway, that's the way I saw it from Mykonos. As I remarked to my wife, quoting Lenin, "What is to be done?"

And she replied, without a moment's hesitation, "We've got to get it together."

She was right, of course. In fact, I suppose 10,000,000 people, more or less, came to the same conclusion via the same analysis as we did, and about the same time. Getting it together became, on a popular level, the biggest national priority since the Louisiana Purchase. Individual solutions, of course, differed vastly. For some, getting it together meant Buckminster Fuller, and for others it meant the guru Maharishi. Others turned to Colombia, vanishing in search of the $1,000,000 coke connection, while tens of thousands tattooed themselves to death or dementia with Biphetamine this and dimethyl that. Some learned to chant and others learned to scream, primally. Brown rice got a few, and so did the automata at the Progressive Labor Party. But for us, getting it together meant ... stereo in the woods.

It was my wife's idea. Why don't we get it together with a bunch of friends and buy some unspoiled land somewhere? Start a community--with a defensible perimeter--away from the smog, future-rush, poisoned food, depression, death and catastrophe? Grow radishes and keep cows. We could have dozens of kids and never send them to school. Shapiro has his doctorate in history and he could teach them. And DeWitt. DeWitt could teach them impossible scales and benevolent chords. That's all they'd need to know: history, music and the evolution of radishes.

And, when the final technoecological spasm dismembered the remainder of civilization, we could secede and establish the Artists & Writers Dope Co-op for Self-Defense. After the revolution, we would all have a horse, a dog, a cat and manure on the bottom of our shoes.

And if catastrophe should cheat us by failing to arrive, we'd still have a tidy little real-estate investment in prime recreation land. Whatever happened, we'd be covered.

We wrote to everyone we knew. We put it to them fairly, tempering our private enthusiasm with objectivity.

Did they want to die a slow adrenal death from the concussive effects of an exploding population or did they want to ensure, for themselves and their loved ones, an eternity among sylvan glades, coping daily with manageable challenges and thriving in an atmosphere of brotherhood and epiphany? The choice was theirs. All they had to do at this stage was to promise $1000 when the money was needed.

The responses fell into two general categories. The first category was composed of letters from friends who had, it seemed, a pathological fear of death by tick. As one demurral, from a friend living on the Lower East Side, put it: "You can be walking through the forest, a tick lands on your head, sucks the blood out of your neck, and you're dead in a matter of minutes. When they find you, you're nothing but a dried husk, a cocoon rolled by the wind through fields of poison ivy. Ticks," the letter explained, "are like crab lice, except that, gorged on human blood, they can grow to a length of 18 inches and reach the height of a dachshund (though this is rare)."

The letters in the second category were more enthusiastic. Steve Shapiro, fresh from grad school and unemployed, wrote a stinging critique of private property but promised his every dime. So did another friend, who'd just returned, disillusioned, from a foundation-sponsored mass vasectomy program in India ("To tell you the truth, I've become a coitus interruptus man"). Two girls I'd known in college actually sent personal checks for $1000 each. I have no idea where they got the money or why they trusted me with it.

But with letters exchanged and some money in hand, the scheme took on its own momentum. Sam Cramer, who writes detective novels and does a terrific imitation of Maurice Stans, agreed to spend a month in Maine "scouting around" for property.

Our requirements were reasonably well defined. We wanted a minimum of 20 acres per person as close to the sea as our budget would afford. There had to be a road bordering the land and, if there was water on the property, we had to have all the relevant rights. And the mineral rights. We didn't want to awaken some morning to find a strip mine growing around the greenhouse.

The greenhouse. An essential part of the fantasy. After the beerskeller, recording studio, sauna, houses, maze, bowling green and corral would come the greenhouse. And in it we would grow wild herbs, flowers and the ultimate hybrid answer to Panama Red, tons of it flourishing ever upward in scientifically prepared soil. Sequoias of robustly flowering hallucination.

Indeed, our plans for The Land developed along mythic lines that transcended the ordinary dimensions of preutopian reality. On an ego trip measured in light-years I came to think of myself as an amalgamated avatar of Joseph Smith, Christopher Wren and the entire Lewis and Clark Expedition. I would take my compañeros into the woods and we would wait out Armageddon in all the bucolic elegance that prudence and a wind-driven stereo set could provide.

What I didn't want to do was to establish a commune. My only experiences with communal living had been unpleasant. It seems to me that communes are inevitably low-rent affairs, doomed by the exigencies of household chores, dishwashing and the defenestration of Kitty Litter. No matter how compatible the people are, nor how good their intentions, the most savage aggressions emerge when it becomes obvious that some son of a bitch is not doing his or her fair share of the dishes. Or consuming unjustifiable amounts of milk.

To succeed, a commune must be composed of humanoids totally devoid of eccentricities or bad habits. If we established a commune in Maine, it would be only a short time before some communard insensitively suggested that my addiction to Marlboros and Tuborg constituted an unhealthy strain on the collective budget. I'd be forced to counter that Ms. X spent at least as much on hair conditioners, rinses and shampoos--stupid vanities. And what about DeWitt? Unlike the rest of us, who were, in barely varying degrees, on the edge of bankruptcy, he had music royalties arriving regularly. Would he gladly share his income with those less fortunate than he? He would not. Touch one dime and you'd have Fletcher Weft descending in a Mystère jet with Federal marshals on his flanks.

No, we'd have a community rather than a commune. Everyone would be financially independent and responsible for his or her own scene, except in matters relating to the general weal--such as property taxes, legal fees, surveying and the establishment of a water and drainage system. The expenses would be shared equally.

• • •

But how do you find a site for utopia? Our budget was limited (about $8000) and, for the time being, mostly theoretical. We knew, moreover, that once the land was obtained, it would be some while--perhaps years--before we could disengage ourselves from our city lives and, with money we'd have saved, move to the woods and settle down in houses we'd have built by ourselves.

We chose to look in Maine for a variety of reasons. It was physically beautiful, coastal and within striking distance of Boston and New York. At the same time, it was not within the spreading megalo-politan area of what might be called New Bosadelphia. Maine's population was less than 1,000,000, and declining, so the land was inexpensive. The people who remained placed a higher value on environmental beauty than on second cars and good television reception.

It was Sam who found what became The Land and summoned us back from Greece. He'd spent $300 and a month in rooming houses on the Maine coast before locating a property that conformed to both our budget and our whims.

The place he found was within a rough triangle defined by the esoteric coordinates of Bangor, Ellsworth and Bucksport. The Penobscot Bay reaches up into that triangle and then branches into a complex of tidal marshes, rivers, streams, lakes and duck ponds surrounded by forests. It's an underpopulated region fringed with moldering resorts, collapsed mansions and dying industries. The people tend to be either rich or poor.

We met Sam in the Jordan House (four dollars per night in winter) and, after an evening of cigars and excited conversation, spent the next day checking out The Land.

Actually, we didn't see the ground itself. A foot of snow had fallen prettily the day before and everything was blanketed in white. On snowshoes borrowed from the electric company, we trod the acreage, singing boisterously to warn off any hunters who might be in the neighborhood. Moving with the dexterity of giraffes wearing motorboats on their feet, we pointed at cloven tracks and fumet, making knowledgeable remarks about their origins.

"Bear."

"Or deer."

"They look fresh, too."

"Could be rats. Or tick tracks."

"No, too big for tick. Probably deer."

The Land itself was impressive. Huge and quiet, jammed with trees of every kind and size. There were caves and, where the stream bent, a swimming hole sheltered by red pines. In the middle of the property was a meadow the size of a football field and, off in one corner, down by the county road, a marsh stippled with alders. The stream--our southern boundary--was 40 feet wide, deep, icy, clean, clear and crossed in two places by wooden bridges. The ground sloped gradually up from the stream (Thoreau mentioned a stream with the same name in The Maine Woods) to the undefined northern boundary, a boulder-strewn ledge that towers over the surrounding countryside. The view from the ledge had all the characteristics of a Grandma Moses painting--church steeples and barns, snowy hills and forests receding toward the ocean. It was, in fact, an almost sentimental view, a postcard vision of New England Genesis. But what might have been unacceptable in art was perfect in nature. We decided to buy it.

• • •

There were last-minute hassles as we made the money arrangements by telephone. One of our number dropped out with the announcement that he needed his money for tuition. Someone else took his place. DeWitt suddenly announced he wanted only a half share--$500 worth--and this necessitated an extra commitment by three others. But, in one way or another, the money required arrived at the bank in time for the transfer ceremony.

Pete Gilman said we were making the best decision of our lives, "Just wait'll you s-s-s-see the p-p-property in the s-s-s-summer, boys, when everything is in b-b-b-b-bloom!"

Indeed, the only disquieting note was sounded by the local lawyer we hired to do the title search.

"How much you say you're paying?" he asked.

"About forty dollars an acre," we said with smirks.

"What's on it? A gold mine?"

"Uhhh, no. Just trees."

"Well, what's the house like? Pretty fair condition?"

"There's no house. Just, uhhh, trees."

"Just trees," the lawyer repeated, residual skepticism draining from his voice.

"Yes."

"Just a bunch of trees." He said it with dull finality.

"Does it sound like we're paying too much?"

"Well, let's just say it looks like old Pete has struck again."

Our hearts sank. The room grew still. Our lawyer seemed to be lost in meditation, swiveling lethargically in his chair.

Finally, he sprang to his feet and rushed to a map on the wall. "Come here and take a look at this," he said, "just take a gander at this little baby. You have any idea in hell what this could be?" His knuckles rapped topographical lines.

We took a gander and shook our heads.

"Betcherass you don't! Not a notion in hell." He returned to his chair, sank into it and removed his glasses. After a pause so pregnant that I was about to leave in search of a midwife, the lawyer said, "That could be the biggest goddamn aluminum smelter in the Western Hemisphere. The biggest, bar none. I've had talks," he said, "with Alcoa." When he mentioned Alcoa, his voice sank reverentially and his eyebrows rose to form a seagull's shape with his widow's peak. "With Alcoa," he repeated, voice suddenly hoarse.

I had visions of The Land smothering in the midst of an American Ruhr Valley, a wasteland bristling with smoke-stacks and choking on slag. "My God," I said, "we've got to stop them."I felt sick.

"Stop them?! Do you realize how much money there is to be made? Do you have any idea? Why, the amount would be ... would be ... untold!" He paused for breath and effect. "But it won't happen. And do you know why?"

We shook our heads.

"The environmentalists," he hissed. "The whole Rockefeller-Washington Post--Ralph Nader crowd down in Bar Harbor. They've put the kibosh on it. But I'll tell you something: It won't always be like that."

"It won't?"

"No. And that's where I hope you boys will come in."

• • •

As it turned out, his hopes were shortlived and in vain. What the lawyer proposed was for us to join him in securing a ten-year option to buy on the property that will someday house the biggest aluminum smelter in the Western Hemisphere. When the environmental nuts are routed--"Progress waits for no man," we were told--we could sell the option for incredible wealth estimated at ten times our original investment. All we had to do was put up our $8000 and our lawyer would start "talks" with Alcoa.

We declined and he charged us $400 to do a simple title search that showed The Land had been in the same family since George III bestowed it on Charles Fenner. I didn't know whether to pay him or to get a warrant for his arrest, but, to keep the thing amicable, I paid him.

Matters did not get simpler by virtue of ownership. By the time we signed the contract, two of us had paid $1000, two of us $1125, two of us $500, one of us $1250 and one of us $1500. The individual amounts were proportional to the cultural pessimism of the contributor rather than to his income. As it happened, our wealthiest contributor chipped in the least money--a potential source of bitterness, that, but more immediate problems had priority over potential ones.

The new deed, for instance, could not reflect the degrees of ownership--that would have to await a complete survey and subdivision of The Land. In the meantime, to obviate the need for eight signatures on each document pertaining to the property, the title would be held in my name alone.

This was madness. As Shapiro put it, on learning of the arrangement, "Now, let me see if I've got this straight, Hougan. I gave you $1125 to buy the land so we could hold it in common and build a community on it--and you come back from Maine with a deed that's got only one name on it. And that name, lo and behold, is yours. Now, that doesn't look good. I mean, on the face of it, and all things being equal, it doesn't look good at all. In fact, it looks like a felony and I want you to know I'm calling the bunko squad."

The other contributors reacted in much the same way. As soon as they saw the lone name on the deed, they got silly smiles on their faces and reached for the telephone.

"I underestimated you," DeWitt said. "I thought I was dealing with Dr. Spock and it turns out I've got Augie March on my hands. I think I'd better call Fletcher--"

"DeWitt, listen to me, you've got me all wrong. It's a matter of convenience--"

"No, no, no, it's OK, I'm just calling him to check things out. It could be perfectly normal, for all I know. But my rule is that if something happens with money that isn't allowed in Monopoly, get on the phone to Weft, Cohen, Weft, and Polanski. And, as far as I know, this isn't covered in the rules. I mean, a few days ago, I had ten percent of Boardwalk--right?--and today I can't even get a room on Baltic Avenue. So I'd better call."

Weft--"Call me Fletch, for Chrissake! We're on the same side of the table, aren't we?"--was relatively conciliatory over the telephone.

"All we really need out of you, Hougan, is an affidavit stating your legal intent--in other words, that you're holding the property as a proxy for everyone else."

"OK."

"And a will, of course."

"A will?"

"Yes, it's very important."

"What are you talking about? A will! I'm twenty-five! I'm in my prime! Listen"--with the phone next to my chest, I thumped the latter--"you hear that?"

"Yes. What was it?"

"My chest. I hit my chest."

"Well, that's what I mean. You've gotta be careful. Sixty percent of all accidents take place in the home. And if something happens to you, God forbid, I at least want my client to have the consolation of knowing that he's covered."

"I don't want to make out a will. It's like building a voodoo doll of yourself."

Eventually, in the course of a long phone call, Fletch turned into Fletcher and Fletcher into Weft. His conversation lapsed more and more often into Latin, until I gave up.

"OK, Weft, OK. I'll make out a will. But if anything happens to me, I want you to know it's on your head. Coincidences like these are always happening to me. I think of somebody and I get a letter from him the next day. I make out a will and--"

"Terrific! Have it in the mail by Monday: You never know. And remember: It's Fletch. We're on the same side of the table, for Chrissake!"

My Grecian fantasy was obviously getting out of hand. My best friends (nay, my flock) suspected that I'd conned them out of their life savings. To convince them otherwise required not just my word but a sworn affidavit appended to my last will and testament. Being my friends was not enough; they demanded to be my beneficiaries as well.

And so they were, or thought they were. I made out the will as required and mailed it to Weft. But shortly thereafter, in a fit of pique, I made out a second will to supersede the first. In this latter will, I left the entirety of Fenner's Ledge to the Salvation Army with the prayer that it should establish a halfway house for "notorious women" native to Maine. If something happened to me, my friends would have reason to regret their mistrust and true cause for mourning.

• • •

Two years passed and when, despite the existence of the wills, I had not been struck down by freak accident, disease or contractual murder, I tried to contrive a way in which each of us could hold separate title to that portion of the property that was our separate due. Since nothing had been built on The Land since we'd acquired it, I began to suspect that people felt a natural reluctance to invest further money and energy in property to which they held no clear and legal title.

But how do you divide 150 acres (more or less) into 64 parts--the number required by virtue of the different amounts that we each contributed?

A survey of sufficient complexity would require Federal funding, helicopters and the entire staff of National Geographic. Some contributors, moreover, wanted direct access to the county road, proximity to the ledge and abutment on the stream. Others wanted Caves & Stream, Road & Caves and Road, Caves, & Ledge. It was impossible. Unless one introduced tunnels, cloverleafs and a monorail, there was no way to gerrymander the map in such a way that everyone would get both the acreage due him and the points of interest he required.

Nevertheless, I persisted in the notion that a map could be drawn to meet our requirements. And, with the use of Möbius strips, such a map was drawn, though there seemed to be no way in which it could be translated into reality without the intervention of antigravitational technology.

Such is the feral strength of our belief in private property.

For a year and more I tortured my mind, burning out brain cells right and left in a doomed quest to discover a way in which we could all hold legal title to our lots in life. My living room became a litter bin of geographical surveys, crumpled graph papers, compasses, protractors, rulers and drafting equipment of every description. When I was not plotting the ultimate map, I was drawing floor plans of The House I would build on The Land "next year."

No two plans were ever alike, though they had certain features in common. All of them, for instance, had at least one bathroom the size of a basketball court and living rooms so large that Saint Bernards would have to be stationed midway between the couch and the fireplace to rescue voyagers on the way to the kitchen. While none of these houses had closets, many of them had billiard rooms, libraries, drawing rooms, darkrooms, solaria and pantries ample enough to accommodate a women's handball game. Six thousand square feet was nothing where these imaginary houses were concerned. I was confident that, with local materials and help from my beneficiaries (as I now thought of them), we could erect mansions in a matter of weeks for less than the price of a good new car. The whole secret, as I repeatedly told my wife, lay in the use of rough-sawn pine and something I called "local stone." As I later learned, the local stone was mica. Have you ever tried to build with mica?

While I deliberated over the site and layout of my New England manse, my friends, were not idle. Over the period of a year, each visited Maine to gather impressions of his property.

Those impressions conformed to the seasons. Those who went in winter returned with visions of Xanadu, as I had. Those who went in fall and spring expressed reservations about the wild state of the property but remained enthusiastic. "Just needs a little straightening out," was a typical comment.

Steve Shapiro visited The Land in late July and reported his observations in a two-A.M. phone call. I remember it well.

"Hougan! Wake up! It's Shapiro!"

"Great, how are you?"

"Terrible. I've been eaten alive. I'm dying."

"Where are you?"

"The Land. I saw The Land today. I got lost. Hougan, it's terrible ... a monster. My skin is falling off."

"Get a grip on yourself. What are you talking about?"

"The Land, goddamn it, The Land! It's a death trap. Snakes, spiders, wasps, mosquitoes in clouds like thunderheads.

It's a garden of poison ivy!"

"Uhhh, what did you think of the view?"

"What view? You can't see anything. You can't see two feet in that jungle. It's like the lower Zambesi. I hacked my way to the top of the ledge and ... and ... nothing. Nothing at all."

"Look, it just needs a little straightening out."

"Straightening out?!"

"Yeah, that's all. A little thinning. Listen, did you see the stream? Whaddya think of old Moosehorn Stream?"

"You mean Dead River?"

"No, I don't mean Dead River. What's this Dead River crap?"

"That's what the locals call it--Dead River. We saw it, all right. I almost puked. It just sits there. It doesn't move at all. Just sits there like green oatmeal, patrefying."

"Shapiro, for Chrissake, it's a trout stream!"

"Trout stream? Nothing could live in that mess. It would kill Godzilla. Hougan, you haven't seen it in summer. You don't know what it's like, It's vicious. God knows what's evolving in that slime! And the mosquitoes! They could carry off children in their beaks."

"You're exaggerating."

"We've been burned."

"What?"

"We've been burned!"

"Steve, believe me, you're getting hysterical. All the place needs is a little straightening out and someday it'll be a great place to raise kids."

"Kids!" The place isn't fit for a colony of soldier ants, let alone kids."

"You're hysterical."

"We've been burned. Goodbye. I'm getting gamma-globulin shots."

"Shapiro--

"I'm getting gamma-globulin shots. Goodbye."

• • •

Shapiro's "Summer Report from the Dead River and Environs" was confirmed by others: The property was an agricultural nightmare, a botanical Frankenstein's monster.

Since its ownership now suggested more culpability than opportunity, our plans for sophisticated surveys and separate deeds were jettisoned. We decided to diminish individual responsibility for ownership by forming a corporation. On a whim, we named the corporation Mam-moth-Steelboom & Amalgamated Forklift Company, Inc.

Mammoth-Steelboom, as it was affectionately called, was incorporated on October 4, 1971. The incorporation papers cost $250 and were worth every cent. For that sum we received 64 stock certificates, a wad of legalese and a really keen corporate seal with the company name surrounding a large question mark flanked by aphids rampant. We wanted to have the company motto ("Caveat emptor") embossed on the seal, but there wasn't room.

My first act as president of M.S. & A.F. was to sign over the property deed for one dollar and "other valuable considerations." The other valuable considerations were my peace of mind.

The Land thereby became the corporation's only asset. Each investor was given one share of common stock for each $125 he or she had invested. Each shareholder automatically became a member of the board of directors and, of course, an indirect owner of The Land.

The advantages to this scheme were many. Besides getting to play around with the corporate seal and to flourish the impressive stock certificates, members of the corporation were protected.

That is, The Land was held by no single individual. All members of the corporation had equal access to, and all the rights of, the whole property. If someone wanted to build a house, he could do so anywhere on The Land, leasing the acre beneath the house for one dollar per year with a 99-year lease (renewable). All construction had to be approved by a majority of the shareholders (a formality that ensured none of us would ever build a Dairy Queen) and those wanting to sell their shares had to offer them to other shareholders before going to the open market (thereby curbing any speculative impulses that someone might harbor).

The act of incorporation effectively solved all our real-estate problems though residual personality conflicts surfaced at the end of M.S.&A.F.'s first year. In a board-room struggle waged in the darkest corners of the White Horse Tavern, I was--there's no other word for it--purged from the presidency for what DeWitt and Shapiro termed my "flagrant disregard of corporate assets and insensitive public-relationsmongering aimed at establishing a personality cult."

By these accusations they meant that, in a moment of inebriated élan, I'd broken the corporate seal while attempting to frank my record collection with the M.S.&A.F. insignia. This was, while true, relatively insignificant: I replaced the seal at a cost of $6.95. The charge that was more difficult to rebut was the one about my "insensitive public-relationsmongering."

What that accusation referred to was a lamentable news article published in the Bucksport-Bangor Bugle Telegram, a bi-weekly news sheet distributed to 750 residents in the vicinity of our land. DeWitt and Shapiro suggested that my choice of name for the corporation was unfortunate and provocative. The article to which they referred is herewith reprinted in its entirety:

Mammoth-Steelboom, to Locate Here!, by Nellie P. Style, Staff Correspondent

(Augusta)--The State's attorney general's office announced today that Mammoth-Steelboom & Amalgamated Forklift Company, Inc. has filed papers to relocate its national headquarters in Bucksport next year.

While Mammoth-Steelboom's chief executive officer, recluse Wisconsin industrialist J. R. Hougan (above), could not be reached for comment, state labor-department officials privately expressed hopes that the construction giant's move to Bucksport will alleviate the area's worsening employment problems. Just how many jobs Mammoth-Steelboom will create is so far unknown, but the town's aldermen are confidently predicting a new vitality for the old community. As Bucksport alderman Henry Collier told this reporter, "Happy days are here again!"

"Above" was a photograph of the "recluse industrialist" replete with bow tie and pompadour, a picture taken for my high school yearbook more than ten years before and one that has haunted me ever since. It was a photo taken when the world still turned at 45 rpm. It hinted broadly of Clearasil, loose-leaf binders, penny loafers and the most reluctant virginity ever endured. Looking at it, my hand instinctively brushed my cheek--site of so many bacterial battles--and in the back of my head, a band the size of a single brain cell began to play a percussive rendition of Bony Maronie.

I remembered the words compulsively and with about as much enthusiasm as might otherwise have been summoned by a reminiscence of past root-canal work, a tax audit or a freeway collision in which everyone was killed. And, no matter how much I resisted, for days afterward my mind burbled--exactly like a broken record--the inane formula:

I've got a girl called Bony Maronie, She's as skinny as a stick-of-macaroni!

It was as if I'd contracted an upper-mental infection, a condition that aggravated my loss of office and the corporate seal. The more I tried to shake the song, the more firmly it gripped; it seemed that I could do nothing without the tune's banging away at my consciousness. Even my dreams suffered its dreadful accompaniment.

And so I concluded my 30th year: a documented recluse industrialist and deposed construction king, a man whose adolescence wouldn't leave him alone, a sort of utopian James Ling operating exclusively in an imagination obsessed by the throb of four-four time.

• • •

While I moped in this self-pitying state, The Land reached a kind of fruition. After more than five years of hassling crowned by Shapiro's coup d'état at Mammoth-Steelboom, we decided to bury the hatchet. In The Land.

The idea was to build a common structure, a facility that each of us could use whenever we visited Maine. It was hoped that by working together with our hands, we'd renew amity, stimulate further development and create, as DeWitt put it, "the kind of place Fred Astaire might visit in times of political crisis."

Accordingly, we each took leave of work, gathered whatever tools we had and journeyed to Maine for a summertime house-raising. Sam, who said he'd built a bookcase in 1968, was the logical choice as construction boss, and, considering the others' lack of expertise, he performed admirably. At least he correctly identified a wing nut on two occasions that I personally know of, and at no time did he allow the beer to go flat or disappear.

The house we decided to build--my own designs were rejected as "premature"--was budgeted at $2600, a figure that seemed reasonable in view of free labor, a reliance upon local materials and the structure's simple design.

Our insistence, however, upon using stone and wood harvested from our own property made a difficult job dangerous. After three weeks of attacking the forest with machetes, axes, chain saws and, at one point, tire irons and bicycle chains, the score stood:

Mammoth-Steelboom 27, Forest 16

The 27 were mostly red pines, identified by their distinctive needles and cones, but the number also included at least one telephone pole, identified by its distinctive wires. The 16 was a mixed bag of anatomical parts sacrificed to the Tool God in His manifestation as Hammer and Saw.

Architecturally, the dwelling that resulted defies conventional analysis, though DeWitt is correct when he says that it somehow suggests "early dust bowl or late Gogol." In fact, the cabin is a rather standard two-room affair, an edifice that brags of having been hewn from the woods that surround it. Massive pine logs rise from a modest stone foundation to create a rectangular living space that is, according to our handbook, of the sort much admired by impoverished families of the Great Depression.

If the structure lacks a certain panache, the fault is not so much with the design as with the execution. In our enthusiasm as master builders, we neglected to let the logs season. As a result, they dried out in place, shrinking a little here, a lot there and none at all in the vicinity of the telephone pole. The over-all effect of this process was to make trapezoids of all the doors and windows and to cause the beams to thrust out in space at crazy angles and uneven distances. Indeed, the cabin looks as if it had seen a ghost, a metaphor to which DeWitt alluded when he remarked, "I get the feeling that our beams are standing on end, if you know what I mean." And I did.

There is a dust-bowl ambience to the place, a depleted pizzazz that speaks of inbreeding, corn likker, rickets and the Good Book. It is a place that seems to have been created expressly as an environment for hating "Darwin and everything he stands for."

Sitting in the bunk room, contemplating the floor's way of undulating toward the kitchen, I try to summon a sense of pride, an exultation at ownership. "It may not be much," I keep telling myself, "but it's mine. I built it with my own two hands. With these two hands I wrested shelter from the forest primeval. Where before there was nought but wilderness, today there is this." And so on, through all the clichés of rugged individualism. And yet, even with its inaccuracies, the pep talk is inadequate to its task.

What has been wrested from the forest primeval is a hovel, not a shelter. An architectural page ripped from The Hell-strom Chronicle, the structure is neither aesthetically pleasing nor functional. A weekend within its porous walls is a time devoted to mending sleeves torn on nails rippling with tetanus, freezing sojourns to the outhouse and incredible, paranoid battles in the dark with spiders the size of a baby's fist. Where the roof was to have formed the topmost part of an A, the beams have thrust in a direction that causes our neighbors to speak sardonically of the first "K-frame." The tradition in which we follow is not so much one of rugged individualism as of voluntary poverty incompetently executed on weekends.

And yet, despite all this, the cabin exerts an irresistible attraction. It pulls us away from the cities with astonishing regularity and we arrive at its warped front door, separately or together, bearing gifts: stained glass for the windows, rugs for the floor, a weaving, a painting, a broom, a Franklin stove. Odds and ends accumulate. There is talk of plumbing, and Shapiro arrives late in the autumn with a load of weathered barn boards and insulation.

Suddenly, The Land has a center. The cabin imposes a ramshackle order on the woods. Its hazardous angularity shapes the wilderness around it. A track begins to form and, before the trees are wholly bare, there is a path leading to its door.

Inside, a party, music and conversation, the tinkle of ice in jelly glasses. Sam, standing in the smoke and firelight, surveys the dilapidation of the cabin. Looking around, he rocks gently back and forth, swayed by the breeze of whiskey he has consumed. His eyes are crossed by opposite emotions: Self-pity and tragic triumph alternate in each.

"You OK?" I ask.

He smiles with the pathos of Stan Laurel, putting an arm around my shoulder, whether for support or from affection isn't clear. "To you," he says, raising his glass. "It was all your idea. There was nothing here and, by God, look at it now."

We do.

"Well," Sam adds, his glass still held high, "all I can say is--and I mean this sincerely--Hougan, may all your tics be facial."

"Yeah," I reply. "Who says nobody lives happily ever after?"