Ray Baggs told me that he and his father had built the Adam’s Cove root cellar, had dug the huge space out and then built the interior walls by hand, stone by stone, with flat rocks they’d brought down from the nearby cliffs with their horse and sledge. I’m reasonably sure they built it in the fifties or earlier, dovetailing flat slab on top of flat slab, interwoven side to side to lock the stones in place. The walls are still remarkably straight and true today.
The Baggs had done the same kind of stonework on the 20-foot or more deep well inside the back corner of the house, in what must have been tremendously claustrophobic work: the well is barely a shoulder-width across, and all of it had to have been dug by hand, hardly room to even swing a pick, before they started with the first stones of the inside liner. It was long, hard work that had to be done if you wanted to have water in the kitchen, or if you needed to keep your vegetables from spoiling through the long stretch of the year that comes after harvest.
There was much more room to work in the root cellar than in the well, ten feet by ten feet on the sides and deep enough for plenty of headroom under the beams. But there was also much more rock to be collected and fitted, and then a small curb of concrete, mixed by hand and poured to form a cap on the rock walls, a short level foundation for the shed above the cellar.
The main beam was spoke-shaved by Ray out of a puplar trunk. The walls are made with spruce logs planed flat on two sides when they were too thick for the space they were meant to fill.
The root cellar is the preserve of daddy longlegs — not true spiders, but near kin, also known as harvestmen — legions of which scurry around the walls looking for prey, apparently happy with the near-constant temperature of the place, winter or summer. The picture below shows just a few of them, working their way across the massive cornerstone in the bottom corner of the root cellar. There were more, many more, before the light hit them (The shadow from the flash has essentially doubled up their legs.)
I like to sit in the shed above the root cellar to work, whether that work is on my own construction projects or just writing. It’s a remarkably calm spot, no electricity whatsoever, where you can let your thoughts drift a bit while your hands follow the simple mechanics of getting things done. The light changes through the day in a cycle that’s reassuringly familiar and never harsh. It is a respite from things technological.
It’s also, for me, a chance to reflect on the value of simple, hard, physical work
The Baggs built things with shared, basic knowledge, passed on by the doing. No outside help, no YouTube videos, no pre-cut lumber or power tools.
I’m not suggesting that there was a particular nobility to that. Not at all.
Just the knowledge that a project as large as a root cellar was needed, and that it had to be done, regardless of the number of hours it would take. And that it would — and did — get done.
I wonder if we would all be better people if we had more to do. A mix of more things, and different things, to balance out our time, using the calculating parts of our minds and our physical energy, and let us be less in thrall to technological distractions that charge us up emotionally but give us little or no physical release for the stress they’re creating.
Maybe we’d have less time for helplessly vibrating with anger in our computer chairs.
And maybe, just maybe, we’d live better, friendlier, more satisfying lives.
My grandfather and great grandfather used an immense root cellar. Money was very tight back in those days so they supplemented their incomes by taking in blades (saws, axes) to sharpen on their achaic sharpening wheel. The wheel started iff being about 16 inches in diameter. Its is now perhaps 8.
When I was little, before the house, cellar and property were 'turned under', I remember exploring that cellar. I'm sure that I could hear the ghostly sound of axes being sharpened on that wheel.