The Village Idiot: Honest Abe didn’t sleep here
“They made the whole thing in Vermont, then took it apart and shipped it here piece by piece,” Bob told me. He was showing me his new weekend house, a log cabin which Sue and I had watched going up all summer on a nearby hill. Bob is one of those hardworking CEOs who walked away with multimillions when his company went bankrupt. “I guess you could say I’m a self-made man,” he likes to tell visitors.
Calling this place a log cabin is like calling the QE II a cabin cruiser. The peeled log beam spanning the front door is 136 feet long and two and a half feet thick. The logs that form the walls are five feet around. A wide, shallow groove has been carved into their undersides, so when they stack on top of one another their sheer weight makes the log-to-log connection airtight. No plaster is needed between the timbers to keep out the elements. All electrical wiring and plumbing had been drilled into the logs after they were taken apart but before they were reconstructed, so that no outside drilling or holes or wires are visible.
Three deer-antler chandeliers hang from the hand-hewn log ceiling in the ballroom. The floor is tiled in brown leather with animal skin throw rugs scattered around; the heads of moose, elk and caribou line the walls. You expect to bump into Teddy Roosevelt at any moment. The kitchen is a rustic throwback to the days of the pioneers — granite countertops, Viking range, matching Zero-Kings refrigerators, Calphalon pots and pans hanging over the butcher-block island with vegetable sink. If Donald Trump ever runs for President and says he was born in a log cabin, this would have been the one.
The second and third floors have balconied bedrooms that overlook the ballroom from the inside, and also have dormered windows overlooking the valley. Lincoln’s birthplace could have fit easily into any of the bedrooms, with plenty of room to spare for studying by candlelight.
Though our county may have more charming stone fences than any county on the planet, stone masons were busily placing new, old-looking ones all over Bob’s property. From the glassed-in rear deck the view went on for 20 miles.
“See that,” Bob said as he pointed to a mobile home about a half-mile away. He wrinkled his nose. “There ought to be a zoning law against that. Why can’t people build things like this,” he said, waving his arms around his house, “things that fit into the environment?”
Vardon and Verbena Frasier live in that trailer. Verbena used to work in one of Bob’s factories. She lost her medical insurance and 401(K) when Bob’s company folded. Vardon drove the school bus until he couldn’t pass the physical. Bad heart. The environment is way down on the list of their worries.
Until the bankruptcy Bob paid himself $8 million a year plus bonuses. “She’d have been out of a job anyway. If we hadn’t gone broke we were going to take the entire business to Mexico. To avoid the high cost of American labor,” he told me. Verbena made $22,000 a year.
“Why don’t we keep the American jobs here and bring in extremely low-paid Mexican CEOs to run our companies?” I asked Bob. He thought that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
“Thank goodness you’re not running a business,” he said. “We’d all go broke. Did I show you the waterfall in the master bath?”
(Jim Mullen is the author of “It Takes A Village Idiot: A Memoir of Life After the City.” He also contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly.)