Your Scribe visited the cabin over the weekend for the first time in months, and I was panicked when I saw from a distance that a huge tree had fallen on the property.

But getting closer - I was walking because of snow on the dirt road - I saw that it did not hit the cabin.

The good news is that there was no damage.

The bad news? There isn't any.

The tree did not hit my gritty but fragile structure, so I plan to be overjoyed for the next fortnight.

In sum, the cabin made it through another winter.

Also on the plus side Saturday was that I met a neighbor.

That would be Nick, who was strolling past the property with a rifle over his shoulder about mid-afternoon Saturday.

Since I am a born-again NRA fanatic when I am in Cabin Country, I waved at him and he came over.

He grows beans in the west pasture in the summer. In the winter, he shoots woodchucks when he can find them.

Also, he is rebuilding his house. It burned in the winter of '05, and he has a crew working on the place now.

And you thought that the insurance companies were slow to react to Katrina!

We talked. He's a good guy.

Your Scribe had made a dumb move earlier in the day: I forgot my snowshoes.

So when I walked down to the river, I sank up to my nether parts in snow that I should have known would be there. (An aside: This is in New Sharon, between Augusta and Farmington. And with many trees blocking the sunlight, it's usually May until all the snow is gone.)

But the trip to the river was worth it.

It was exciting to see the water so high and moving so fast.

In summer there is a 10-foot drop from the bank to the water. On Saturday, the water came up to within a foot of the bank.

I fished for awhile, inspired by numerous tales of how trout are starving in during April. But the trout of the Sandy River, and those wretched yellow perch that tend to find my hook, evidently organized a food bank over the winter because no one was biting.

I stumbled back to the cabin through the high snow, no doubt looking like a harried Harpo Marx after slugging a fifth of home brew.

But there was Nick, and I enjoyed talking to him.

I felt badly that he lost his house to fire. In fact, he said he had to jump out his second floor window to escape the flames. He was in his night clothes at the time, and it was February.

But he survived (with minor burns) and now we are buds.

He offered to cut up the offending tree in the middle of my driveway. He didn't want money for it, but I said that I wanted to pay him something.

Not that I am loaded. As a career journalist, I can hardly make the tolls from Portland to Augusta.

But there's a lot of work involved, and my chainsaw skills are about as evolved as my snowshoeing.

He will have deserved the money if the work actually gets done.

And if my luck holds this spring as it did over the winter, he just might give me some woodchuck to chew on. I've never tried that kind of 'chuck.

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