Charles Gaines - A Family Place: A Man Returns to the Center of His Life

Copyright 1994, 2017 by Charles Gaines

Foreword by Dave DiBenedetto

Afterword by Alexander Bridge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Tom Lau

Cover photo credit: iStockphoto

Print ISBN: 9781510717886

Ebook ISBN: 9781510717916

Printed in the United States of America.

To Patricia

To Latham, Greta, and Shelby

To Hansell Gaines Burke and Margaret Shook Gaines

And to Hestia

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

I have known and worked with Charles Gaines since 1995, but I had not read A Family Place until my second child, Rose, was born in the fall of 2015. I was a big fan of Gainess other books, and I had edited a number of his magazine stories. When a colleague learned that my wife and I had purchased our first house, she loaned me her well-worn copy and made me promise not to lose it. That night, when the kids were finally sleeping, I flipped to page one and immediately found myself wanting to reach for a pencil. If it were my own book, I would have underlined pearls of wisdom and sentences that sparkled on nearly every page. This was prose that was too good to read once, and I wanted to come back to so much of it. Before I was through the first chapter, I went online and found a copy, which wasnt easy. The book was no longer in print, and it seemed that those who owned A Family Place werent willing to part with it. In the meantime, I couldnt stop reading. By the next evening I had blazed through it and was eagerly awaiting the arrival of my own copy to start anew.

At its most simple, this is a book about a family of neophyte carpenters building a small house from scratch in the wilds of Nova Scotia, and for that drama alone its worth reading. Those who appreciate the satisfying thud of a hammer on a nail will find much to love here. Adventurers who dream of lighting out for parts unknown and staking claim on a piece of unsettled land will be energized by the chutzpah of lugging your wife and three children to the North. But at its heart, this is a book about leading a family through the buffeting winds and storms of life, even when you are the one generating those storms.

Gainess seemingly quixotic quest to build a cabin in the wilderness came after he watched the family unit he had fostered begin to disintegrate. Most of the people that had crowded into our house and family garden just a few years before were gone by now And the garden was empty, its blooms untended, its fountain dry, its walls crumbling, he writes in the book. With an unflinching honesty, Gaines unfurls the hubris that led him astray, that caused him to no longer tend his metaphorical garden and which brought his thirty-year marriage to the precipice of divorce. And he details his climb out of that dark hole.

To be sure, lifes problems cannot be solved just by buildingor buyinga house. But it can offer a fresh start. As Gaines writes, At any given time, we are the sum of all our new beginnings, including every house we have moved to or built. For better or worse, dream husks pile up around us after a while in any house, and a move from one to another can be an act almost as optimistic as having a child a blind jump to a place where life just might be better, richer, and more precious than it is where we already are; where, at least, the dreams are fresh.

In my own case, Gainess book hit me like a balled-up wet towel. With the stresses that come with raising two young children, the new pressure of mortgage payments (not to mention leaking pipes, broken garage doors, faulty HVAC units), and a job that kept me at full throttle, I realized I wasnt taking the time to appreciate my own garden. And thats the magic of an exquisite piece of art. We take from it what we need and revel in its beauty.

A Family Place has much to give.

David DiBenedetto Editor-in-Chief, Garden & Gun

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank the residents of East Tracadie, Nova Scotia, for the generosity and kindness with which they met the Gaines familys appearance among them. Particularly, I want to thank Ralph DeCoste for his help in researching the historical part of this book, and for the example and friendship of his family, I also want to thank Dan Green for his determined vision.

When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not

be for the present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such

work as our descendants will thank us for; and ht us think, as

we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones

will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that

men will say, as they look upon the labor and wrought substance

of them, See! This our father did for us!

John Ruskin

There are no events but thoughts and the hearts hard turning ,

the hearts slow learning where to love and whom.

Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

T his is a book about family and finding a place in the world where family is important. Seventeen summers ago, when our three children were still children, my wife, Patricia, and I took them on a two-week driving tour of Nova Scotia. The purpose of that trip was to isolate ourselves from everything but the healing joy of family closeness. Last summer we all returned to Nova Scotia to do the same thing. This time we did it by building a cabin there for ourselves, with our own hands, and by rebuilding with our own hands the family that would occupy it.

For three months before our first tour of Nova Scotia we had lived in Alabama while the movie of my first novel was being filmed there. Up until the modest success of that novel and the invitation to move to Alabama as coscreenwriter for the film adaptation of it, Patricia and I and our kids had lived a quiet, determinedly rural life in New Hampshire. We went to bed early and got up early together to eat breakfast around a wood stove. We skied together, climbed mountains together, cut wood together, and weathered storms together. When Patricia learned from my agent that the movie rights to my novel had been sold, she and the kids strung balloons inside our little rented house on Lake Sunapee and threw me a surprise party. We believed then that we had good reason to celebrate.

But the three months of filming in my hometown of Birmingham opened a Pandoras box for Patricia and me, and it was years before we could close that box again. We told ourselves we had been shut up in the hills paying bills for a long time, and would soon enough go back to that, and that a little fun never hurt anybody. In no time, I went from a one-Pop-Tart-a-day dad whose biggest weekend kick was a canoe float with my kids on the Contoocook River to a high-handed, big-appetite experience chasera caricature of the country boy gone Hollywood. And too often the glitter, and the odd, bogus sense of power and prerogative that making a movie gives youthe sense that you are somehow part of an occupying force in a small, backward countrymade us feel like someone had walked up out of the blue and painted big, red S s on our chests. For the first time in our married life we decided we could leave the dishes for someone else to wash. We flirted with movie stars playing versions of ourselvesand with losing everything that mattered to us.