WALDO, Maine — To get to Lee Stover’s cabin in January, you have to walk half a mile or so into the woods, passing old gravel pits, towering white pines and freshly made animal tracks etched in the snow.
You know you are getting closer when the first building appears — a weathered wooden shed that shelters his red Massey Ferguson tractor. Then you spot the elaborate fence that guards the large garden plot, sleeping under its white winter blanket. Up a slight hill is his sawmill and the tall piles of new lumber seasoning in the fresh air.
Stover, 70, a retired forester, has lived on this land year-round for 16 years and has loved it all his life. His father built the log cabin from trees he felled nearby back in 1954, when Stover was just a boy who helped peel off the bark by hand. They built it strong, to last — and it has. The sturdy logs have darkened with age but have withstood the storms of more than half a century. Inside, the 255-square foot cabin is heated only with a wood stove and lit with LED lanterns and an old gaslight system when the sun goes down. Stover jokes that when he wants running water, he runs down to the nearby spring with a bucket in his hand.
“This is home,” he said. “There’s a fair amount of effort just living [here], but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
The 110-acre former farm property came into his family in the hungry days at the beginning of the Great Depression, when his grandmother agreed to work the fields and do housekeeping for the farmer. He lived there until he couldn’t anymore and then left it to her. No money exchanged hands, Stover said. His parents, both from Belfast, raised their two sons in northern Massachusetts, but they came back to Maine often throughout the year.
“I remember coming in on snowshoes and cross-country skis,” the retired forester said. “My father liked to come here because there were no ringing telephones. He could come here and do what he wanted.”
For Stover, life in the woods got under his skin so he studied forestry at the University of Maine. He was hired by Georgia-Pacific Corp. to manage the paper company’s vast timberlands in Washington County and put in 25 years there. He and his former wife raised their two children in Calais and always planned to retire in Waldo. They moved there in 1999, working hard to clear part of the grown-over land and to mill lumber together with the sawmill. The marriage ended but Stover stayed, working the sawmill alone. He stayed even when others may have chosen to move back to the comforts and conveniences of town.
“I have no fear,” he said. “I’m not concerned. You can always walk out with your snowshoes.”
That desire to stay remained strong even after Stover narrowly survived a heart attack in June of 2009, during a crowded contra dance in Belfast.
“I had a pressure in my chest. Then the lights went out,” he said.
His heart had stopped. The contra dance caller saw that Stover had collapsed and asked the room of dancers if there was a doctor in the hall. A nurse practitioner, an emergency medical technician and others sprang forward to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
“Despite the CPR, I was beginning to turn gray,” he said.
Then the Belfast police arrived with a defibrillator and started his heart again, saving his life.
After that, he was rushed to a hospital and underwent quadruple bypass surgery. Doctors implanted a device in his chest to regulate his heartbeat, and he began two months of rehabilitation.
By August, he was back in his cabin. Today he continues to work his land, sawing lumber from logs he harvests on his property with the help of his tractor and years of experience and keeping warm by putting wood into the stove. When asked whether he ever gets anxious about living alone, a fair way from the road or from neighbors, he tapped his small black cellphone. His daughter lives in nearby Lincolnville, and she and her dad have a deal.
“I call my daughter once a day. If I forget, she’ll call me,” he said.
Because he lives alone and works alone, he makes a point to seek company elsewhere. Stover serves on the board of directors of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association and is chairman of the Waldo Planning Board. He still helps out at the monthly Belfast Flying Shoes contra dance and visits his daughter and her family at their home, which was largely constructed from trees that were cut and milled at Stover’s Waldo property.
“I only half-jokingly say when I’m going to their house that I’m going to visit my trees,” he said.
One day, he knows he will probably have to move in the winters from the cabin to a different house, one that is warmer and located closer to the road.
But not just yet.
“I do it because it’s what I want to do,” he said of living in his homestead. “I do it because it’s me.”