The work was harder than anything I had ever done. I was 16 years old and I weighed perhaps 95 pounds after 2 weeks of not eating enough. I had never built anything more complicated than a cornhusk doll. I did not know how to use a fro or set a mortise or mix lime mortar. I had read about these things in Silas’s journals, but reading about them was not the same as doing them. But I had no choice. That is the thing about having no choice. It simplifies your options considerably.
I dismantled the porch over 3 days. The nails were rusted and many of them bent or broke when I tried to pull them, but I saved every one I could straighten. The boards were weathered but mostly sound. I stacked them by length against the cabin wall, just as Silas had described. Then I walked to the cave mouth and looked at it.
The entrance was perhaps 8 feet wide and 6 feet high, narrowing as it went back into the dark. Silas’s stone footings were still there, half buried in leaf litter and wind-blown soil: 2 courses of flat limestone carefully laid, forming the base for walls that had never been built. I cleared the footings. I measured the distance from the cave mouth to where the cabin’s front door would be if I removed the porch entirely. 22 feet. Silas had estimated 20.
