Deep in these Maine woods, where the summer nights are cold and ancient pine trees caress the sky, Jane and Jack Schultz nurse a grief that is at once profoundly public and private.

On July 7, friends of their son Thomas B. Schultz, killed in the explosion aboard the Pan American World Airways jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1988, dedicated a cabin at Pine Island Camp to his memory. The camp, on a small island in Great Pond, near the Belgrade Lakes resort area in southern Maine, is where the younger Mr. Schultz was a camper and a counselor for six of his 20 years. It is where he made some of his best friends and spent some of his happiest times.

The cedar clapboard and pine trim cabin dedicated to Thomas Schultz will, of course, be seen mostly by other campers and by few outsiders who read of the crash of Pan Am Flight 103. In that way it is a small story, the story of 30 friends who razed an old cabin, raised money for materials for a new one, and built it with their own hands.

In another way it is a large story, the story of how people find strength in what remains and convert sorrow into something productive.