Cabin Journal

Welcoming Winter

At the cabin this week, I went for a walk in nearby Wild Basin. It was a cold and windy day, with a few inches of snow on the ground, and the creek was beginning to freeze. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day.

Just to be on this familiar trail again was a treat because Wild Basin, the southernmost part of Rocky Mountain National Park and just a few miles from my cabin, has been inaccessible almost all summer either because of the fires or the pandemic restrictions. The icing on the cake was that the weather was what it should be  for November. Very little this year has been normal, including our hot and dry weather  that led to our destructive wildfires in October. Two weeks ago at the cabin, temperatures were in the 60s—at least 20 degrees warmer than the average for the beginning of winter here.

But winter, which our local weather expert defines as between October and May in the mountains, is finally taking hold here. At Wild Basin, Copeland Falls was partially frozen, the narrow channel of falling winter fringed by small ice sculptures. The pond below the falls was a sheet of pale green ice covered by a few inches of smooth and silky water.

Enjoying the soft snow underfoot, I walked along the river—a ribbon of water that looped gracefully and quietly between clumps of ice and rocks topped with knots of snow. The air was fresher and cleaner than it had been for months, maybe since last spring. It felt good just to breathe.

Although some areas of the park are still closed because firefighters are  checking on hot spots and determining the damage, some of the outlying areas, like Wild Basin, opened last week. Another place that had been closed most of the summer was Twin Owls, where smoke was visible in September and October from the Cameron Peak fire over the next ridge.

But last week, there was no signs of smoke unless you mistook the plumes of snow whipping off the high peaks for evidence of fire. But it was just the winds—our normal winter winds that can often gust at 60 mph—streaming off the back side of Longs Peak and the range of mountains that extends to Mount Bierstadt.

The weather forecast for this winter is not good: warmer temperatures and less snow. It’s not good for skiers, not good for water users and not good for the West as a whole, which is experiencing a severe to extreme drought. Could next summer bring worse fires?  

 Bring on the cold. Bring on the snow.

The Mysteries of Nature

Every year, like clockwork, a flock of turkeys appears around the cabin. This year I counted 10 of them, as they sauntered between my cabin and my neighbors’, making soft clucking noises. I’m happy to welcome them back, but where have they been all summer and, why do they only come down to the valley bottom in fall?

In the first years I bought the cabin, I was satisfied to admire all the wildlife and nature around me—the chipmunks, ground squirrels and birds, plus the occasional deer, elk, bobcat and bear—without wondering about their lives. But gradually, with a ring-side view of nature,  I started observing patterns and wanted to know more.

After years of being here, I noticed the ground squirrels go into hibernation in September while the chipmunks (left) wait another month before hunkering down for the winter. Yet, I just noticed a chipmunk this week. Why was it delaying its winter rest? I found a partial answer when I read that adult chipmunks hibernate first, followed by the young ones—those born last spring. Which raises new questions: why do the younger ones hang around longer? I can only presume it’s to fatten up as much as possible for the winter. But if their parents have already gone to sleep, how do the young ones know where to burrow down for the winter? And why do the chipmunks spend longer above ground than the ground squirrels?

Similarly, I read that the younger hummingbirds hang around our forests longer than the parents before migrating south. But how do they know the route, if their parents aren’t showing them the way?  It boggles my mind to think that somewhere imprinted in their tiny brain is a pathway to Mexico they’ve never taken before.

Meanwhile, the chickarees—the frenetic gray squirrels—don’t hibernate at all. Why don’t they join their rodent cousins in sleeping away the winter? For one thing, they can escape the snow and predators by living high up in the trees.

Every spring, the house wrens (right) arrive, filling the forest with their lilting songs, and build a nest that I observe all summer. Shortly after their young ones fledge, the birds disappear, sometime in late August. Where are they spending their winters?  According to a Cornell Lab map, they head to the southern parts of the U.S. and Mexico, so now I can imagine them enjoying the warmer weather.

Why do some birds migrate and others stay here all winter long? Can the Steller’s jays, the juncos and chickadees withstand the cold better than the wrens and swallows who leave for warmer climes? My best guess is that the year-long residents’ food source is the nuts and seeds, while the migrating birds depend on insects that die with the cold.

The moose also hang out all winter in Meeker Park, as long as their main food source—the willow bushes—are plentiful. If not, they gnaw at the soft aspen bark. Some questions I have no answers for. Why are there so few deer and elk when neighboring Estes Park is overrun with the elk? Why are there no raccoons here?

Still, the creature that creates the most wonderment for me is the pack rat that lives in my garage/shed where I store my firewood. Since I haven’t needed firewood this summer, I’ve not been paying close attention to the disturbances in the garage. But now that cold weather is here, I went looking for a missing hand saw to cut logs, wondering if the pack rat had made off with it. As I searched the darkest recesses of the garage, I found that the creature had set pine boughs on the floor next to a small structure it had built of foot-long sticks, including two green paint can stirrers—adding a little color to what could have been a drab assemblage. On the other side of the garage, beneath the stairs, it had woven a nest of pink insulation that likely came from underneath the cabin. On the stairs was another sculpture of sticks, which appeared to be placed so as to block access to the upstairs, possibly where the real nest is.

But the most amazing piece was on the wall where I hang paintbrushes and tools. On one of the nails the pack rat had hung an aspen branch that still had green leaves on (right). Amazing because a branch on the wall serves no useful purpose for this animal, unlike the nests and possible barricades on the floor.

This forces me to wonder if an animal, with a brain not much larger than a walnut, could create something purely decorative, with no purpose but to put a little beauty on a utilitarian wall.  And maybe to delight the human next door.

It boggles my mind and makes me wonder what else I don’t know about the animal world. There’s still much to be discovered.

Fire and Ice

A week ago Saturday, as I bicycled home, what looked like clouds of smoke to the north started ballooning up into something ominous and dark, with clouds reaching thousands of feet into the sky. It was the start of what became known as the CalWood fire, and that night I watched from my backyard as flames consumed hillsides of pine trees about 7 miles to the northwest.

All summer long I had been watching the progress of fires across the West, horrified by the pictures of forests and towns being consumed by fire. All summer long I had been breathing in the smoke from fires on the West Coast and on the western slope of Colorado. But this latest fire was hitting close to home. I knew these hills, had hiked and driven through them, and one of my favorite places to hike looked to be burning as I watched.

Two days later, under dry and windy conditions, another fire started, even closer to my home in Boulder. When I read the list of closed streets and canyons, and the areas of evacuation, I knew them all, could picture what was being destroyed. My route to the cabin, the South St. Vrain Canyon, was closed as it became the northern containment line for the CalWood fire.

Meanwhile, another fire, the Cameron Peak fire, in the county to the north had been burning since August, covering the whole Front Range, including Denver, with thick smoke that made it difficult to be outside.

With at least four wildfires burning unpredictably, I came to the cabin last week, hoping to find the sweet spot between the fires where I could breathe clean (or, at least, cleaner) air. But winds from the southeast carried the smoke from the CalWood fire into Meeker Park, and I was soon engulfed in smoke. The landscape (above) is beautiful and horrifying at the same time, because the smoke, like fog, softens everything, and the mountains, trees and grasses have a gauzy look. The sun setting behind Longs Peak (below) looks spectacular until you start to breathe the smoke, your eyes start tearing and your chest hurts. It’s not beautiful; it’s deadly.

But just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. A fire that started near the western edge of Rocky Mountain National Park, driven by strong winds, beetle-killed pines and extreme drought conditions, consumed 100,000 acres in one day. So powerful was the fire that it leapt over the tundra—a treeless and usually cold terrain at an altitude of 10,000 feet—and sparked fires in the trees below, before heading toward Estes Park.

As the fire, ironically called Troublesome, came down into the eastern side of RMNP, the tourist town was evacuated. I watched the videos and photos of streams of cars heading down the only two open roads under dark orange skies that made daylight into night.

The fires were close enough that Meeker Park was under a pre-evacuation order (meaning, get ready), and most of my neighbors at the cabin headed down into the valley to find shelter. I spent a frantic two days reading every alert that came across my phone and computer, trying to track the fire’s progress to see how close it was to the cabin, hoping that the forecasted snows would arrive before the flames.

As I write this, a blanket of snow has tamped down the fires for now, but fire experts say the fire is so hot that it’s still active, lurking in burnt trees and under the ground, ready to emerge again once the snow melts, the temperature rises and especially if the winds pick up again.

In normal years, heavy snows would be blanketing the high country, and any fire danger would have ended in September at the latest, but it’s almost November now, and those of us who live near the fire are being told to remain alert.

Last spring, it felt like my world went upside down with a pandemic that closed most of the local trails and parks. Although many opened again this summer, the season ended with the national forests and RMNP closed because of fires or the threat of fires. For the fires to be followed by snows that once more shut down our world could seem like irony or something more ominous.

Although right now it appears that I, and the other residents of Meeker Park and Estes Park, dodged a bullet, the gun is still loaded. The conditions that caused the fires—mainly a hotter planet—won’t go away with one snowstorm.

Something’s Blowing In

As the last of the aspen leaves fall from the trees, pushed along by strong winds over the last few days, I feel a shift in the world. It feels like the last few months of smoky and hot weather have ended and something else is opening up. Perhaps the jet stream that was holding everything in place has finally broken down, and new fresh air is coming in. Everything seems lighter, like months of stagnation have ended, and there’s a new world coming. It’s more than the arrival of winter, which has been delayed by our still warm weather and lack of moisture.

Like a tipping point, this time between the heat and dryness of summer and the snow and cold of winter is  brief. It’s like being on the top of the roller coaster, after you’ve slowly, agonizingly climbed up from the bottom, and you’re poised at the top, before the rush downward to something you don’t know. But at the top, there’s a pause, a hush almost, as if everything has been leading up to this moment.

This week, the path along Mill Creek in Rocky Mountain National Park was strewn with dried aspen leaves, as if laid down for royalty or for a wanderer to follow to some unknown but sacred place.  In the creek the bright leaves clung to the dark rocks, thick enough to form small aspen dams. Above me, the tops of the aspens danced in the wind, beckoning me to join them. I let them sway me, while keeping one eye on the trail, in case someone came along and caught me in the act of rapture.

The air was redolent with the smell of drying vegetation, while the wind gathered up the last of the aspen leaves and sent them soaring and tumbling through the air. For now, let the winds carry me where they will.

A Very Different Summer

I know it’s been a smoky and somber summer when the first thing I do when I see blue sky is reach for my camera to record this rare moment. It’s not only the blue skies that startles me but the sight of the aspen turning golden. Of course that also causes sadness, because it means the season of life is coming to an end here in the mountains. Already the summer birds, including the hummingbirds, have migrated to their seasonal homes, and the ground squirrels have gone underground for the winter.

I have to remind myself that the aspen aren’t dying; it’s just their outer appearance changing as their leaves drop. The trunks and limbs will endure as long as their root systems can dig deep into the earth and find water and sustenance.

As summer closes out, I realize all my usual summer routines have been disrupted. What I expected didn’t happen, and the unexpected made frequent appearances.  All winter long, I looked forward to my favorite summer hikes to high alpine lakes or to the tundra—places that exist above the normal human world. These are my touchstones, the places that take me beyond myself. But circumstances beyond my control—or anyone else’s—forced a change in plans.

First, the pandemic caused two of my favorite places—Rocky Mountain National Park and the Brainard Lake wilderness area—to restrict the number of visitors. It was difficult, if not impossible sometimes, to get permits that would work with my schedule.  Even when I was able to get an entry permit, smoky skies made it unhealthy to do long and strenuous hikes. And as I get older, I get tired more easily, so it takes longer to reach my destination—if I’m able to make it that far.

What do you do when the places you love become unreachable? I’ve had to find other places, and in the process my world has opened up. I’ve had to be willing to try different destinations  rather than stay on the same heavily trod trails. But I’ve also come to appreciate the old familiar hikes.  

I’ve found that I rather hike on trails that are less spectacular but less crowded than ones where hikers form a continuous line going up to the waterfalls and coming down. I experience nature best when I have a singular relationship, where I can pause on the trail to admire the view or a well-shaped tree without blocking traffic.

This week I returned to a trail that led to a lake I once rejected as boring. But I knew the area wasn’t as heavily used as the popular Bear Lake location and that the hillsides of aspen are enough to take your breath away (top photo). They didn’t disappoint. But more surprising was that the lake (Bierstadt) was just what I was looking for without knowing it—calm blue waters surrounded by dense pines and grasses. When I first got there, I was the only one there, and so for maybe 15 minutes I got to enjoy total peace and quiet.

Like everyone else in the world, I’m adjusting to a new world, with a lot of scrapes and bumps along the way, frustrations but also new discoveries—even new joys, especially a new appreciation for Colorado's deep blue skies.

Resilience Under Gray Skies

A few weeks ago, on a day when the smoke from wildfires was especially thick, I went out for a walk around Meeker Park, looking for something familiar and comforting. Weeks of white skies, uncharacteristic for Colorado, and lack of any moisture and wind made the landscape seem lifeless and unfamiliar. Even the birds were quiet or had left for cleaner air, wherever that might be.

In some places, the aspen, which didn’t leaf out until June—a month late—were starting to give up, their leaves turning yellow or brown, a month earlier than usual. In the meadows, the grasses were brown, and the tall angelica were reduced to the bare outlines of their starburst shapes.

Yet I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a black-eyed susan (left) flowering in the middle of this dusty road. It’s about as short as I’ve ever seen one and could get trampled easily by a car’s wheels, yet its emergence from the ground, in these least favorable conditions for growth, signaled some urge for survival, heeding some ancient need to keep its species going.  

I’m constantly amazed by the resilience of nature. A pine cone seed lodges among rocks, and somehow the tree manages to twist itself around and through the rocks and grow, reaching for the sun while digging deep in the rocks for water. Under those conditions, it might only live for a few years, yet it keeps going, even if it landed in the least optimal place to survive. Somehow the tree accepts its fate and still strives for life.

On my drive to and from the cabin, for the past month, I've passed a field of tall sunflowers.  No matter how dark the skies or how little moisture we've gotten, they are always standing straight up, their cheery faces looking toward the sun. My heart lifts every time I see them.

A few weeks ago, I saw a hummingbird on the ground, not a good place for a tiny vulnerable bird. It held one wing out at a strange angle, and I guessed it might be injured. Because it probably couldn’t fly well enough to hover over flowers and get the  nectar, instead it poked through the mud on the ground, looking for a meal of insects. If one door is closed, try opening another. Nature finds ways to survive.

Before our snow this week, the trees hadn’t received any real moisture for more than a month, and yet they endure. Some are more than 100 years old, and they know how to conserve for hard times.

Finding resilience is a lesson humans can learn, because it feels like we’ve squandered too much. So I’ll take heart from the trees, from the purple asters and yellow daisies clinging to life in the heat and smoke and from the blue dragonflies that circle the pond. Keep going. Dig deep. Persist in any way you can. Life is probably not going to get any easier.

 

Sitting Still, Standing Still

In the summer, it’s warm enough at the cabin to sit outside and meditate in the morning. I sit in the back yard, my back to the shed, and watch life unfold from all around me. My feet planted solidly on the bare ground, I become just another tree, part of this quivering, breathing mass of life: from the small bits of vegetation on the ground to the white-barked aspens surrounding me and the tall pine trees that cause me to lift my eyes to the heavens.

Breathing in and out softly, I hold still enough that the small forest animals get close; unless I move, they are hardly aware of my existence. As the young rabbit gets within a foot, so close I want to lean over and pet its soft fur, I watch it pull shoots from the ground, with the grass disappearing into its mouth. Chipmunks run over my shoes, while a woodrat nervously pops out from the shed and grabs a piece of grass, close enough for me to see its long gray tail, its knobby dark eyes and large ears. A hummingbirds buzzes me, staring me in the face, before it decides I’m not a flower. On the ground a family of juncos peck through the dirt, looking for some choice morsel—a bug?—to feed their young one.

A gray squirrel jumps on the picnic table in front of me, eyeing me with curiosity, while another squirrel emerges from underneath the cabin bearing wads of pink cotton—insulation, I realize, that it’s carrying to its nest in my neighbor’s shed. Already, the chickaree is preparing for its winter home.

Last week, I was at the family cabin in Wisconsin. My sister and I kayaked to one of the few undeveloped spots on the lake, where I swam along the shoreline of birch and pine trees. Afterward my sister and I stood knee deep in the water, wrapped in our beach towels, enjoying the feel of soft sand beneath our feet and the breezes that ruffled the lake’s surface.  As we stood there, a bald eagle that roosts on top of the hill behind us swooped down to the lake, alarming a pair of loons that screamed a warning and then dived into the lake.

Meanwhile, taking a cruise around the lake on the pontoon boat, my sister’s husband came by on his second loop. Seeing us still standing in the same place, he yelled, “Are you two stuck in the sand—or what?”

Yes, we were stuck, maybe even awestruck. While we stood still, the world revolved around us—the lake, the birds, the sky, the clouds. Sometimes the only thing to do is stand still and keep quiet.

Of Mice and Moths

I’ve been having a hard time sleeping this summer at the cabin. Usually the darkness and quiet tend to lull me into a comforting state. But all night I hear the small crashes of moths as they fly into the nightlight and the windows. This is accompanied by the sounds of mice running around, scratching in the walls, rearranging plates in the kitchen sink, and small thuds of unknown origin. In the morning I find the wings of moths—in the bathroom, under the dining room table, behind the kitchen sink—but no bodies.  I have to assume the deer mice  are killing the moths and eating their bodies but leaving behind the papery wings for me to clean up.

All summer long, I’ve tried to end this carnage, not just because I want my precious sleep back, but I’m tired of having to clean up the mouse poop and moth wings. I’ve put out three different live mouse traps, but, so far, only one worked. After I caught the first two or three mice and marched them across the road to release them, I realized that it wouldn’t take long for them to come back to the plentiful feast in my cabin. The next one I drove across the creek, hoping it wouldn’t be able to cross the creek, but these animals are smart. Several times I put out live traps with peanut butter, only to find in the morning that the peanut butter was gone but so were the mice. (The one below is checking out the mouse trap.)

I’ve looked for cracks in the walls and floors where they might be entering from the crawl space below and stuffed them with a mouse deterrent —a cloth with a sharp citrus smell they presumably don’t like. But either their portals are somewhere else or they are stuffing the cloth back in after they let themselves in, because the cloths are undisturbed.

Nor do I know where the moths comes from, because I never see them during the day. At night, when I open the door to the supply room, dozens of moths suddenly are whirring around me. When I enter the bathroom, they are clinging to the wallpaper,  floating in the water in the sink or hurling themselves into the nightlight and the windows where moonlight floods in.

The worst night was in July when I thought I could safely sleep in the attic and not worry about mice jumping into the bed with me, which one did in the downstairs bedroom in June. But when I got into bed, I found mice poop; it was also in the base of the lamp. And soon I saw mice scurrying up the chimney from the kitchen below and chasing each other around the attic. On top of that, dozens of moths materialized out of the darkness, swarming the lights and me. Needless to say, I hardly slept that night.

I found out that it's not the lamps or heat that attract the moths but the moon that causes them to hurl themselves against the windows. Apparently, moths navigate by moonlight, and their frantic fluttering shows the need to follow their instincts. I wish I could release them from their torment, just like I want the mice to return to their natural habitat. Maybe the pandemic quarantine has made me more sympathetic to the moths’ frantic need to get out. Maybe we’re all beating our wings against the windows looking for light or a way out of this nightmare.

Summer Disrupted

It’s been a summer unlike any other. It started out late but full of promise. With snow and cold temperatures in April, the pasqueflowers didn’t start emerging until May, but when they did these first flowers of spring were profuse—covering hillsides with their cups of purple light. Soon came the aspens and willows leafing out, then the purple lupine, columbines and wild roses.

But by July, all that was left around my cabin were the shrubby cinquefoil and drought-tolerant sulfur flowers.  Every summer gets warmer now. When I first bought the cabin, some 12 years ago, I enjoyed temperatures in the 70s—a welcome respite from the heat on the plains. But  with the temperatures in Denver and Boulder creeping up to the high 90s for at least the past month, even at the cabin it’s been in the 80s and uncomfortably warm.  At night, the cabin barely cools down.

From the cabin I can look east and see the huge cumulus clouds (above) developing, which occasionally produce destructive hailstorms on the plains but no rain for the mountains. With almost no moisture for several weeks, the heat and drought have taken its toll. On the east side of the cabin, the grasses that grew tall and profuse in past years are sparse. The rose bushes (left) that line the road in front of the cabin are almost bare. The yard around the cabin looks more like October, when all the vegetation has dried up, than mid-summer.

 

It’s not just the natural world that has been disrupted this year but also the human one. Because of the pandemic, I haven’t been able to get to my usual hiking trails and my favorite alpine lakes. To get in Rocky Mountain National Park, I need a reservation, and they are often booked several days ahead of time. But when I do manage to find an opening, the trails are less crowded, because the government limits the number of visitors. Meanwhile, other trails that don’t have similar restrictions are  packed with more people than I’ve ever seen, with cars parked a half mile down the road from the trailhead.

This week, while hiking up the Arapahoe Pass trail in the nearby national forest, a friend and I encountered a parade of people coming down. One woman told us the crowds forced  her to turn around, as there’s almost no room on this narrow, steep trail to step aside for other hikers—a concern now when state rules mandate keeping six feet apart. There was a time, not so long ago, when my biggest fear on this trail was fording the sometimes high streams. Now it’s making my sure my mask is on when I see someone approaching and trying to move off the trail as much as possible.

Still, on the trail the blue harebells, orange Indian paintbrush and purple monkshood were blooming on the hillsides. When I look at my photos from the past two months, I’m happy to see the red crossbill (above), a bird whose beak is crossed so it can pry open pine cones to get the seeds. In June I was lucky enough to see the startling pinkish-purple of a group of Indian paintbrush (above) at Brainard Lake and a profusion of columbine growing among aspen near my cabin.

Either because of the bare ground around the cabin or a population surge, I’ve seen more small critters this year than in the past. Chipmunks and ground squirrels come up on the deck (left) to check me out, while gray squirrels scold me from the trees, and voles, a small rodent that lives mostly underground, scurry through the short grasses. With equal parts dismay and an appreciation for their adorableness, I watch as the chipmunks and ground squirrels eat the tops off my dwindling flowers.

Some of the birds that kept me company in May and June have fledged and gone—the house wrens and the Western bluebirds—but the swallows still cut through the sky at alarming speeds and angles. Last week I watched juncos pick bugs off the ground to feed to their squawking babies.

Like everyone else, I want to return to a normal summer—with plenty of rain, cool temperatures, no crowds on my favorite trails nor worries about getting infected. But I have a feeling that the world has passed some tipping point and that life will never be the same (and probably never was). I need to accept that and enjoy  the natural world that still teems with energy and beauty—even if some of that life is eating all my flowers.

There Goes the Neighborhood

When I first bought my cabin in Meeker Park, only two couples lived on my road year-round. The rest of the cabins and houses were empty through much of the year, used as vacation homes in the summer and on holidays such as Christmas.

Then Louise, who had lived in Florida part of the year with her husband, divorced him and settled down for a full-time life in Meeker Park. It took another five or six years before a minister and his wife bought the cabin that had been owned for decades by a couple who came here from Kansas for the summer. At about the same time, two men from New York City moved here to take full-time jobs and bought the house by the creek, which had been vacant for most of the year.

Just in the past month, two cabins behind mine have been sold: one to a younger couple who plan on living here all year along and the other cabin to a woman who is moving from the nearby tourist town of Estes Park to Meeker Park.

It feels like some tide has turned. In my neighborhood, full-time residents now equal those who come just on the weekends or for a few weeks in the summer. Traffic on our narrow, dirt road sometimes can be heavy. And it’s happening all over Meeker Park, as I see new houses going up or old cabins being enlarged.

It’s not just more people but a new mix. In the old days, only retired people lived here, and seniors formed the web of support here, especially in winter. But some of the newer, young residents prefer to keep to themselves, and I can feel the loss of community.

I don’t know precisely what’s driving this population “boom,” but since the pandemic started, there’s been a rush of people leaving congested cities for more remote areas, where there’s more space to move around, even during a lockdown. When everything else is shut down—restaurants, stores, museums—nature is always available. For many people,  being among the forests or by the ocean has proved to be the balm for fears and anxieties about COVID-19. During the darkest days, how many people were cheered just by the sound of bird songs?

As the pandemic closed down previously accessible parks and open space, and restricted access to places like Rocky Mountain National Park, it started to become clear that, for those who could afford it, the easiest way to get outside and experience nature was to own a piece of it.

Even before the lockdown, housing prices were increasing in Estes Park and I’ve noticed in the past year more earth being scraped and trees torn down for new subdivisions in the gateway town to RMNP. Now I’m wondering if people being squeezed out of Estes are moving to places as remote as Meeker Park. It used to be that only the hardiest people would endure our six months of winter, because many homes were originally uninsulated and without plumbing, but a few years ago the county decreed that all homes needed to have septic systems, and new homes are built tightly for warmth. Then came satellite dishes for TV and the Internet, although you still can’t get cell phone service here.

Since I bought this cabin, more than 12 years ago, housing prices have doubled in Meeker Park. The dream of owning a cheap cabin in the woods is long gone, as is the fantasy of a place largely isolated and unconnected from civilization. When I moved here, I was looking for a place to escape the world, but the world is starting to catch up with me.