Walls

The other day I helped a friend wash his walls. These are the walls of his house, the core of which is a log cabin more than 100 years old. The cabin is now his living room and kitchen, and the walls are made of flat-cut, hand-hewn cedar separated by chinking that fluctuates in width. Bud has been in this house for more than 30 years, and he knows some of its history (give him a chance and he'll show you a whole long list of previous deed-holders), but he doesn't know exactly who built the cabin or when, the only clue being a name written on a log in the kitchen which matches a name in the abstract, dated to 1909.

Bud thinks his cabin is an example of some kind of Swedish-style log cabin, and that a broad adz would have been used to flatten the sides of a log top and bottom, with the craftsman then straddling the log and cutting the remaining rounded sides off with a downward motion (no matter how dangerous this may sound). About two-thirds of the way around the living room, cleaning rag in hand, I realized the logs were, of course, much older than the cabin itself, much older than a mere 100 years.

The logs are massive and have many faces - visages of hardened pioneers, weathered ranch hands, burly lumberjacks. They are chiseled and marred, grooved and uneven, full of small craters where knots have popped out. And in places they are burnt. Many years ago, after freeing the logs from paneling and layers of wallpaper that had been nailed up rather than glued, Bud wondered about the blackened areas and worked at removing them. A neighbor told him the black was charring, the result of fire, and that the logs were probably salvaged from a forest fire, just as the logs in his house had been.

We started our work by the wood stove and moved around the room counterclockwise. I led with the vacuum cleaner, and we both worked with rags and cans of Scott's Liquid Gold. It's not that the walls were so dirty, but the logs have so many ridges and ledges and dips and rises that dust easily settles in. And the logs were dry. But by the time we were done their sandy brown color had turned to rich chestnut, and their lines and markings and swirls and movement were more distinct. While moving around the room we also cleaned other woodwork, cabinetry, a bookshelf, and the rafters that cover half the living room, holding up a loft. A few cobwebs and some old dead flies had been vacuumed up, and a few cat toys were booted from behind the sofa. We opened windows and a soft spring day wafted in, feeling right at home.

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