Camp Medawisla

'THIS IS THE STONE I LUGGED ALL THE WAY DOWN Mount Katahdin," says Randy Coulton, leaving his comfortable chair to point to one of the smaller boulders in the fieldstone-fireplace wall that, with its arched firebox, dominates the small, colorful living room of his lakeside camp. "If you think carrying anything down Mount Katahdin is easy, then you've never done it. But it was important: This place is our retreat and an expression of things we care about."

The cabin is without question a reflection of the personalities of its owners, Coulton and his partner, John Caravetta. Surrounded by tall pines, its screened porch mere feet from the edge of the lake, the cabin is furnished with Indiana hickory, wicker, and twig furniture, Indian rugs and blankets, slag-glass lamps, snowshoes, miniature birch-bark canoes, Zane Grey novels, antlers, and dozens of framed prints of cowboys, Indians, canoes, wildlife, and scenic vistas. A bar made of varnished logs, accompanied by stools all built from the same cherry tree, fills one corner. There are canoe paddles and faded board signs and felt banners hanging from unpainted wooden walls. In the New England camp tradition, it is a colorful celebration of all things rustic that recall Native Americans, the great North woods, hunting and fishing, and lazy summers by the water.

For Coulton and Caravetta, the water is "Medawisla," the lake of the loons, where they have remade a tumbledown shack they bought in 1990. The 140-acre lake and the cabin are located in the "Southwest Kingdom," the eastern flank of the White Mountains in western Maine.

For five years, the couple had visited friends who owned a camp on the lake. "Their place was shaded in the mornings, so we'd sneak over here to swim in the sunshine," Caravetta says. "It hadn't been used for ages and was nearly a ruin. We wrote a series of letters to the elderly owner, offering to buy it, but never heard back. Then, after she passed away, her son found our letters in a drawer and contacted us."

When they bought the cabin, Coulton and Caravetta knew they wanted to expand its footprint, add a fireplace, and introduce creature comforts like heat and running water. "We love the quiet, low-tech quality of camp life," says Caravetta. "But we also like to be warm and comfortable."

The men own several far-flung Maine businesses: Ogunquit's Village Food Market and the Fancy That Cafe, as well as the Kamp Kamp Moosehead Lake Indian Store in Greenville, which is about 150 miles northeast of Ogunquit. For them, Camp Medawisla, in a quiet corner of the state, is purely for rest and relaxation.

The new owners were granted what is known as a one-time 25 percent allowance, which meant they could enlarge the cabin by one-quarter of the square footage of the existing structure, whose lakefront site puts it under the jurisdiction of the federal Environmental Protection Agency. "Since the camp's location on a point means the lake is on three sides," says Coulton, they added 150 square feet of space to the side of the cabin that does not face the water. There, they designed a new kitchen and bathroom. "We reused the old kitchen cabinets and the electric stove," says Coulton. "We didn't want anything shiny or obviously new, and it was nice to incorporate things that were part of the camp's history instead of ripping them out." Caravetta's father, a gifted amateur carpenter, built new cabinets to fill in where needed. They insulated the walls and installed easily drained plumbing pipes and a heating system. "We've spent lots of winter weekends here," Coulton says. "It's very peaceful. During our first winter, one storm left icicles that completely covered all the windows. It was weird and beautiful."

Coulton, who manages the Greenville store (Caravetta is the food specialist and spends more time at the market and cafe), now sells rustic antiques and collectibles there. "The store up there was an institution; we've added new and used log furniture and accessories. Once I started filling the cottage," he says, "I couldn't stop."

Coulton points out that rustic furnishings were, until recently, humble in origin; many objects were made for the tourist trade and downright kitschy. "Those sentimentalized pictures of Indian maidens, braves in canoes, and stags on cliffs were mostly calendar art, made to go into poolrooms and barbershops. I collected miniature birch-bark canoes when they were cheap. They were your basic tourist memento, but now you can't touch them." His favorite pieces today, he says, are the Indian rugs, some of which are Navajo-made. "It's a preservation thing for me," he says. "I want to keep stuff in a traditional New England camp, used the way it was intended to be."

"Traditional" is one word to describe the couple's approach to camp life. "It's about being disconnected," says Caravetta, "and about simple pleasures. In the summer, Randy swims every morning at 5, and we go for a sunset cruise around the lake every evening."

They cruise aboard a classic runabout, restored by Coulton's father. It was originally "built from a Popular Mechanics plan by a man in Wells in the 1940s," says Coulton. With the throttle way down, the two men slowly make their way around the perimeter of the lake. "Everything here has to be quiet," Coulton says. "We want to hear the loons."

FURNISHINGS AU NATUREL

Rustic Americana can be defined as items - buildings, furniture, decorative accessories, and collectibles - made of twigs, logs, sticks, roots, tree stumps, branches, animal horns, and antlers. The style, most often identified with Adirondack and Maine camps, also draws on the Southern root and twig, the Swiss and Scottish antler and horn, and Western and cowboy traditions. Historically, objects were made by untrained artisans and craftspeople, including park rangers, subsistence farmers, and prison inmates.

More than furniture and a furnishings type, rustic is also a statement of lifestyle. A slap in the face of the overcivilized mainstream, it first appealed to late-19th-century Americans nostalgic for the frontier and reacting against industrialization. Like the comfortable and homey furniture fashioned from peeled saplings and woven bark that the Old Hickory Furniture Co. in Shelbyville, Indiana, has been making since 1892, a rustic home makes no attempt to hide its closeness to nature.

And rustic design has never gone out of style. No longer confined to vacation camps and National Park lodges, it is used, if on a small scale, in modern houses that need a link to the past as well as in the thousands of new log homes built every year. And rustic is a boon to collectors: It makes happy use of fish creels, snowshoes, taxidermy, old camp signs, souvenirs, colorful blankets, Popsicle-stick lamps, animal hides, and any other object whose gnarls and twists remind us of freedom and a disregard for convention.

Regina Cole is a freelance writer in Gloucester. E-mail her at coleregina@mac.com.