The Finn came by skis to Pine Knot one bright morning in March. By this time the laborers were making headway on the chalet. The fireplace was framed and waiting for the granite stone Johannes Koskinen had promised William would be ready by spring.
Johannes reached for William’s hand in greeting. William took it but was slightly disappointed by the fact that he came without a horse and sled filled with the rock he needed for the chimney and hearth.
“Where’s the granite you promised, Koskinen?” William asked.
“Follow me,” Johannes said. William strapped on snowshoes and followed him into the woods. They passed a stand of sugar maples in a swampy area near the camp. Louise and Ike had slashed trees with their axe, and nailed buckets made of birch bark underneath to collect the dripping sap. In the evenings they came out to collect the buckets of sap and boil it down to make sugar.
“Where there’s spruce there’s granite,” Johannes said in his broken English. Unsure what he was talking about, William just nodded in agreement and kept walking.
Finally they came upon an area on Long Point where the bedrock was visible. It was swampy, and there were stands of larch and Black spruce trees. The Finn motioned to William to follow him to a clearing where an outcrop of granite stood. There he showed William what he had done. Before the last frost he used an auger to drill small holes in the granite. He filled the holes with water and plugged them with hemp. When the water froze it expanded, putting pressure along the seam of the rock. Johannes lifted his sledgehammer in the air above the granite and split it in pieces.
It took more hammering to get enough rock for the fireplace but by the end of the week Johannes, using a horse and sled, brought enough back to Pine Knot for the men to finish the fireplace and chimney.
Now it was time to start on his parents’ and Ella’s cabin. William was making good progress. But he had only enough men and time to complete these three buildings and close the dining area with windows. The glass would be arriving from Saratoga by rail to North Creek and a stage was bringing it to Blue Mountain. He had workmen frame the windows with limbs he had found while scouring the forests. Where possible he made the frames decorative, and continued the designs on the rails of the porches. He liked the idea of designing with the forest’s supplies. It allowed him to explore and not have to rely on the mills too much for the finished wood products. Indeed, in some cases he left the bark intact which provided the primitive feel to the cabins William desired.
Pine Knot was coming along, but it still wasn’t done to his satisfaction. He wanted to install benches, gazebos, and window boxes, all reminiscent of the English gardens of his youth. That would have to wait. He needed to make good progress or his father would abandon him as the builder and hire it out to someone else.
Every day William learned something new about the local environment that he incorporated into his plans. One morning he found Louise and Ike by the shoreline pounding away at strips of ash wood they had soaked in the lake for two days. Louise was pounding a strip with a hammer and then handing it over to Ike who used an adz to smooth it out.
“My father uses the adz on the bark of his longhouse so that it repels the rain,” Louise told him.
William liked the way the tool shaped the wood. “This would work well on our siding,” he said.
The mix of cultures at Pine Knot meant that collectively people knew the elixirs the forest provided and taught each other. While Ike and Louise collected the sweet sap of the maples, the Scandinavians tapped the birch and added it to their drinks. Bark, William came to find out, had many uses besides siding. The lumbermen chewed on the sweet birch bark to cleanse their palate and that of slippery elm to quench thirst.
Johannes showed William how to collect the white chalky substance from the outer bark of the paper birch, betulin, he called it. “It makes a good preservative when mixed with pine pitch and beeswax,” he said. William immediately sent word to his father to have beeswax delivered and had the men mix up great batches of the substance. They applied the concoction on the exterior of the logs of the buildings.
He was enjoying himself so much amongst these people who made their livelihoods from the woods that he almost forgot he was a Durant. He slipped into the role of husband to Louise and commander to the woodsmen that were building Pine Knot. Reality struck when a letter came from his father with instructions for him to build a small boat.
“It is only April yet your mother has already started complaining of the insects that she envisions in her head will be swarming Pine Knot when she arrives three months hence,” he wrote William. “Make me a floating house that I can launch out on the water, away from the biting insects — with your mother and her companion Margaret on it.”
Where his father got the idea for a floating house William had no idea but it was an unwanted distraction. He didn’t want to waste the good wood he had handpicked for construction. His reserves were starting to dwindle. It was then William recalled that one day while walking in the woods he had come upon an area that was victim to a forest fire. The pioneering birch grew well in the open canopy and he used the bark for the ceilings of the chalet. The charred remnants of the White pine trees could be recycled for the boat. He called the floating house barge the Barque of the Pine.