Viewing Jasper Mountain 18

WHEN THE snows came, transforming the landscape (which happens rarely here nowadays), Jasper Mountain took on that hoary aspect which I associate with those Japanese woodblock prints set in winter - such as Hokusai's print of hunters warming themselves by a damp bonfire.

My poor little boat has been used only twice in almost a hundred days, and I found myself numbingly cold on both occasions. Floods have destroyed one of the creek bridges and shifted the other off its foundation. I found one end of it bobbing in the current, the other snagged in a tangle of blackberries. The weather so penetrated my bones on this short outing that I left the bridge in the creek for the next three weeks.

With personal energy and initiative out-of-doors so circumscribed, I turned my attention indoors.

Shelving for books, some forty-eight lineal feet, was needed. The usual approach, nowadays, is to acquire pressboard cabinets, knocked down, from a giant discount store. These are tolerable painted, but are often left nakedly wood-chip-ish in appearance, due to the difficulty of finding a moment in which to upgrade them, all the available labor time having gone into tapping the tiny nails into the shelves through the sides and back, and cursing as the nails curved in the unpredictable "grain" of the glued and pressed sawdust. The "finished" product then spends its tenure in the household squatting in the darkest available corner, where no one can look at it directly or acknowledge its existence due to its irredeemable ugliness, and the whole time it gives off unhealthful vapors.

The alternatives are: "steel" shelving, ugly, cheap, sharp-edged, and bendy; or expensive cabinetry, which, if sufficiently sturdy must be built-in, at tremendous cost if hired done, otherwise consuming time one doesn't have, and requiring tools one cannot afford, if undertaken by one's self.

Early in our tenure here, there was a surplus of used planking and even beams, and these were put to use for what we cheerfully called "vernacular" architecture. We built walls, ceilings, shelving, tables, and cabinets utilizing found materials which could stand either to take a deep brown stain or a coat of daubed spackle, followed by a coat of flat white paint.

The effect is cheering and calming, and visitors often use the word "cozy," and if this sometimes said in a tone which we might take as patronizing, we don't mind, as we have done what we could with what we had, a satisfying activity.

This year I ran out of the old materials and of time to cadge old materials from others. For the new shelving, then, I would need new material, which, to match the interior style of the house, should be wood, painted white. I found that pine boards cost much more than I expected, but I could live with that; an abused resource should cost enough to reduce the demand.

In the old days, I would have put all the bits together with fourpenny box nails, but we now have the self- tapping "wallboard" which are a blessing. In a way, I hated to paint over the attractive built-in pine bookcase I'd created, but it ran the length of a long, dark hallway, and the white would help prevent further loss of light there.

As soon as the drop cloths and tools were put away, I stood in the hallway and admired my (admittedly a bit crude) handiwork for some time. I hadn't chosen the least expensive or least difficult solution for my project, but I had chosen one I found satisfactory; so much so that I couldn't tear my eyes away. It looked as if it belonged, and would last perhaps as long as the house.

Beyond my time. A statement.

As a civilization, we of the West have begun to lose this capacity for the average person to make statements. I'm reminded of that moment in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano when the protagonist's car breaks down, and a crowd of the great mass of unemployed gathers, which he views with suspicion until one of them wistfully says, as nearly as I can remember it from a distant read: "Maybe I could look at it for you. I used to be pretty good with my hands."