Cabin Journal

Two Paths Diverged

    After the cabin inspection, I mailed the sellers a list of what I wanted fixed: the two roofs, the chimneys, some cracked panes on the windows, the plumbing in the bathroom sink, where the water wasn’t draining, and upgrading some of the electrical outlets. While I waited to hear back from them, I flew to Chicago to help my parents move from the suburban home they had lived in for almost 20 years to an apartment in a retirement community. 
    It wasn’t hard to see the divergent paths our live were taking. They were preparing to get rid of all the stuff they wouldn’t need any more: yard equipment, including ladders, shovels, bottles of lawn fertilizer, rakes, saws. (All things that I could use at my cabin, and I did manage to save two pairs of outdoor/garden gloves, one pair that I use to load wood into the stove at the cabin.) My father had been a photographer all his life and had lots of old camera equipment, including slide and movie projectors, but what  would he still want or need at the age of 86? It was a sad process for me, seeing them get rid of parts of their life and sad because they would be moving away from the hometown where I had grown up. 
    While my parents were constricting their lives, I was expanding, adding another dwelling to my existence. But there was another difference. One of the reasons they wanted to move into a retirement village was because they were feeling lonely. A lot of their friends and family had died, and they lived in a neighborhood full of younger families indifferent to an elderly couple who might occasionally need to have their sidewalks shoveled in winter or other small tasks. My father once asked his neighbor, a young man who jogged every morning, if he could throw his paper onto the front door as he ran by. The man refused. It wasn’t the same neighborhood I had grown up in, where people looked out for each other, especially the elderly. The retirement village would provide them with an instant community of people their age, who they would join for dinner, for movie night, for water aerobics classes.
    At the same time, I was getting a cabin where I would spend two days during the week alone. It wasn’t so much that I didn't want or need human contact but more that I needed someplace where I could hear my own thoughts, which most of the time seemed to be drowned out by the world.   I wanted someplace where my spirit could relax, and I wouldn’t have to work to keep a calm mind. And I wanted to be closer to nature, in a place that was wild, where bears and mountain lions roamed, where the landscape was natural—no lawns or sidewalks, and a “yard” that consisted of pine trees, grasses, wildflowers—and where I could see the Milky Way at night.

     Meanwhile, my parents would be moving to a community where the landscape had been artificially constructed—five or six five-story buildings surrounded by walkways bordered by carefully arranged bushes and a few saplings. Their new apartment looked out over a pond where no trees yet grew. The retirement village itself sat on a busy strip of malls and large office buildings. It was a setting that not only felt unnatural but unreal.  I didn’t want their life and I knew for certain they didn’t want mine. But I wished my parents well in their new life while I prepared for my own.

A House Made of Trees

    Most houses are built on concrete foundations, but my cabin, I was to find out, is literally supported by trees. 
    For my home inspection, the inspector, Joe Sabol, had me accompany him, unlike most inspectors, who prefer to work alone. This was a chance for me to get to know the bones of the house, even though I felt a bit intimidated because I knew so little about how houses work. I’ve never quite grasped the concept of electricity and never cared to know the details of my house’s plumbing. Yet a 560-square foot cabin seemed knowable. 
     When Shoney and I drove up, on a warm May day, Joe was already there, and almost the first words out of his mouth were that that roofs, on both the house and garage (right), were “shot.” Not something you want to hear, and yet how expensive could a roof be for such small buildings? (More expensive than I thought, it would turn out.) And the chimneys (the one in the living room with the wood-burning stove and the one in the propane stove in the kitchen) were caked with creosote and would need cleaning. I was starting to get the impression that the owners had not really  maintained the cabin. 
    For the next 3 ½  hours, Joe took me through every facet of the house, more complicated than I had imagined, showed me how the compost toilet worked, which electrical outlets were not properly grounded and which ones I should use to plug in my computer. He told me the old Coleman propane heater in the living room had a defective valve outside and shouldn’t be used. He showed me how to light the propane stove, which was connected to a propane tank on one side of the house, painted a pale green to presumably blend into the landscape, although a previous owner had put up a “modesty screen” between the house and propane tank, so the view of a ugly metal tank wouldn’t mar the mountain view (see above on the right). Joe took us outside and showed us where the “pipes”—more like plastic tubing— from the kitchen and bathroom sinks went into the ground.  This was the extent of the house’s “plumbing,” and I worried (still do) about dumping soapy water directly into the ground.
    Despite the problems that  needed fixing, everything in the cabin seemed solid, Joe said. Most amazingly, he pulled back the flagstones from the side of the house, which I had assumed were the cabin’s foundation, to reveal what was really holding up the house: tree stumps, each about three feet across, in rows. “This would never be built like this today; it wouldn’t meet code,” he told me, “but it’s been sitting here for almost  70 years and it hasn’t moved.” In this dry Colorado air, the tree stumps hadn’t deteriorated since 1939, when the cabin was built, and the only thing to watch for, Joe said, was insects eating the wood. Besides that, the cabin had the most stable foundation a house could have: the Rocky Mountains, pure bedrock. There were no shifting, malleable soils like at my home east of Boulder, where basement walls separated and cement driveways slowly cracked, with plates moving away from each other like small continents.
    Slowly, I was getting to know this cabin. Apart from having to get a new roof and get the chimneys cleaned before winter, it was all ready to go, although I still wasn’t sure how much furniture the sellers would leave us. It had a refrigerator, and I could buy an electric heating plate; it had a toilet and comfortable outhouse as a backup; it had a wood-burning stove for heat plus electric baseboard heaters. I could plug in my computer and go to work—on top of tree stumps.

Dream Meets Reality

    After I decided that this was the cabin of my dreams came the period of agonizing. After years of wanting a cabin in the mountains, dreaming about it, I was suddenly faced with the reality. How would this work? Could I afford it? Was this really what I wanted? Dreams in the abstract don’t include the complications of real life. I had a good life in Boulder, a home that I loved, that offered its own view of the mountains, one from the plains east of Boulder where I had an all-encompassing view of the foothills and high peaks. From the hill behind my subdivision, I could even see Mount Meeker; in fact on a clear day I could see all the way south to Pikes Peak, more than 100 miles away.  
     My plan was to live in the cabin two to three days during the week. But if I went to the cabin each week, I wouldn’t have time to visit all the other places in Colorado that I loved: Leadville, Buena Vista, Redstone, Ouray. Many of those trips had been over extended weekends, driving long distances to spend two days in a beautiful place where I needed a week to explore everything I wanted to see, while seeing whole chunks of Colorado fly by through my car windows. It seemed my choice was between more quick visits around the state or getting to know one place really well. I realized that I had a strong desire to settle down, to deepen my knowledge of one place, as well as of myself. To just sit—a phrase from my Buddhist teachings that now seemed to have special resonance.
    In the midst of trying to decide if I should make a bid on the cabin, my sister posed a question that helped me make my decision: “Imagine your life without the cabin.” And when I did, it felt like I would be stagnating or going backwards, that the cabin represented some challenge, a way to deepen my spiritual life, a chance to experience something that felt missing from my life, some touch with the wilderness and my own mind. Buying the cabin seemed like a stretch, both monetarily and emotionally, a bold move that would take more courage than I thought I had. But not to do it seemed the worse choice.
    Because the asking price was more than I had budgeted, I made the bid for a much lower price than the sellers had asked, thinking that would give me room to bargain. So it was a surprise when they accepted my bid. When I got the news, it felt almost unreal, as if things were falling into place too easily, while at the same time it felt like it was absolutely ordinary and exactly what I had expected. I alternated between feelings of euphoria—that this would change my life in some good way that I couldn’t anticipate—and anxiety about all the details—finding a building inspector, a water surveyor, even things as trivial as how I would eat without a stove to cook on. It was like stepping into the unknown, yet it felt right.

A Closer Look

    On my first visit to the cabin, it would be safe to say I wasn’t aware of my surroundings,  had no sense of the bigger layout, had barely checked out the cabin before leaving. But when I came back with Shoney, about a week later, somehow she gave me the space or permission to let myself experience the place and to explore.  Following her lead, I let myself walk around the property and discovered what I had been looking for all along.     
     But first we explored the inside, which felt authentic and a little worn, a jumble of furniture—each piece, as I would later find out, with a story to tell. It seemed appropriate that each person who had lived here had added something to the mix, and fitting that the cabin came with the furniture, because it was organic, it belonged here, had grown up with the cabin. In the small living room with two big windows, one of which framed the view to the south of the tall ponderosas, was an ugly green-flowered couch and two chairs, and a pine wood dining table appropriately nicked and worn. In front of the couch was a narrow coffee table that appeared to be a varnished slice of pine tree, and, on the other side, a lamp whose base had been carved from a tree trunk into a curved elegant shape, topped by a shade consisting of four transparent pictures of local mountain scenes, so at night the light illuminated a white-capped Mount Bierstadt. Later, I would find out it was sculpted by a man who lived in Meeker Park and that the lampshade had been made by one of the cabin’s first owners.
    The bedroom was small, just large enough for a pine bed frame and matching dresser,  and a view behind the bed of the backyard, of the slim aspen branches and water pump. It felt cozy, like a safe retreat. And there was an attic, too, up narrow stairs on one side of the bedroom, with sloping walls on each side of the narrow room, and  two beds and a dresser. I had always wanted an attic, something that felt like an escape from the real world, up above the rest of the house. Maybe it was because, as a child and the eldest of seven children, I never had any privacy, never had an escape where I could read and dream without being interrupted. But this felt like someplace I could hide, lay on the bed and look out at the tops of the aspens.
     The kitchen had the old knotty pine walls, a cracked  green linoleum floor with a braided rug in front of a stove that was half propane-fueled and the other half  wood-burning. It seemed an oddity, as if from a time when propane was the newest fuel but people weren’t quite sure they could trust it, so combined it with the old standby of burning wood. Later, friends who saw the stove waxed nostalgic about it,  remembered one used by their grandmothers. Even though the house didn’t have plumbing, the kitchen had a sink so water could be brought from the outside pump to wash dishes, although I wondered where the water that went down the drain ended up. And there was even a bathroom, a strange, too modern looking, plastic compost toilet in one corner and a small sink next to it. 
    The cabin was primitive in some ways yet simple—and appealing for that reason. And it seemed ready to go, everything I needed was here. It felt like it was waiting for me, that all the previous owners had added something to the cabin, and now, maybe it was my turn.
    In the side yard, pasqueflowers were growing, one of my favorite flowers with their translucent purple cups that fill with sunlight. In the Boulder foothills, they start popping up from the earth around March or April but here, at 8,500 feet, spring didn’t start until May. 
    I followed Shoney down the road, past two more cabins. And when I turned to look back, I suddenly realized that Mount Meeker loomed to the west. For months I had been looking everywhere for cabins that had views of this massive mountain, and here it was, right above me.  And just this short walk down the road gave me a new perspective. I could suddenly see the whole picture, how the cabin was on the edge of this park,  halfway between the denser woods on the hillsides above and the fields below. I could see the cabins scattered around the edges, a small community of people who lived on the edge of this wilderness.
    I was falling in love with this place, not just the cabin but the whole landscape.