Cabin Journal

Hanging Onto Summer Like It’s Life Itself

    Last week, I accompanied a friend carrying the ashes of her friend to Lake Isabelle. In May, this young, vibrant woman had been hit head on by another car and died instantly. It was another reminder of how none of us know if this will be our last day or moment.
     At this time of the year, I want to hang on to every day, not let one day slip through my fingers. Having spent an entire winter and summer at my cabin, it’s startling how different the two seasons are, as if the cabin was two different places. It’s like night and day. If night is the absence of light, winter is the absence of summer’s riches: the golden light that bathes everything in some heavenly glow, the heady smell of the pine trees, the abundance of animal life (birds flying, while rabbits, chipmunks and ground squirrels scamper through the yard), and the wind softly stirring the aspen leaves and the tall grasses.
    In summer, I want to drown myself in the sensual world. Even things like the squeaking of the screen door and the creak of the water pump contribute to what is almost a sensory overload. It’s enough to just sit on the front deck with friends and family, with meandering conversations that have no clear beginning or ending. Hours can go by with nothing significant happening except for the two hummingbirds getting in a fight at the feeder.
    In winter at the cabin, with no insulation, I’m aware of the thin shell between me and the cold and wind. There’s a slight edge to everything, as if I have to keep the cold at bay, constantly stoking the fire. It’s not that life is terribly hard up here but that it seems barren, empty. In winter, the only wildlife I see are the blue jays and the chickarees, and the earth is mostly brown except when we get a good snowfall. The rest of the time, the strong winds blow any snow away.
    Winter has its own beauty, of course—the ice on the creek, the tracks through the snow, the white bark of the aspen trees. But there’s a clear division between myself and the natural world in winter. That’s why it feels so good in summer to shed that armor, to lose myself to the world around me.
    In the Buddhist philosophy I study, the aim is to live every moment, aware that it’s temporal, that my life could end tomorrow. So there’s the challenge: balancing the awareness that everything dies, and the ensuing feelings of sadness about that loss, with the utter appreciation and gratitude of each moment, especially now, especially in summer with all its riches.

 

My Landscape Begins to Change

    For the year since I’ve owned my cabin, the cabin across the field from me has been my mainstay. When I get up in the morning, it’s almost the first thing I see. When I sit on my deck, I’m facing the rough-barked cabin, built in 1934. When I sit at my table and work at my laptop, I often look up to admire the rustic, compact building with the red screen door and the tall grasses that grow in the field (below).
     It’s become part of my landscape, and because I’ve never seen anyone there, it exists in my mind without people, except for the original owner, Bill Waite. He’s been dead some 20 years now, lived almost to 100, but the stories people have told me have kept him alive for me. He was a war veteran who came to Meeker Park to die because of injuries sustained in the war (which one I’m not sure of) but lived another 40 years or so. Through winter and summer, he lived alone in this cabin that’s probably not more than 300 square feet, with no insulation and no bathroom or outhouse. People describe him in one word: a “character,” although I’ve often heard “curmudgeon,” too.
    This week, I met the current owner, who lives elsewhere, and he told me he intends to put the cabin up for sale. Maybe I’m just another curmudgeon, but I’m not happy about sharing what is essentially my front yard with someone else. I had gotten used to having space around my cabin, some separation from the other cabins that dot this valley. Now I have to imagine that there will be people coming and going or sitting at the outside picnic table, the lights on in the cabin at night.
    It won’t be an easy cabin to sell. Whoever buys it will be someone who doesn’t mind roughing it and will put up with not having plumbing. I’m hoping it’s someone like me, who doesn’t need all the modern conveniences, who can live without a TV and likes silence as much as I do.  
    We’ll wave to each other from our front porches, have occasional conversations about the weather, about whether the chipmunk population decreased this summer, and how we’ve never seen so many wildflowers. Then we’ll go back to our respective cabins and pick up our books and continue reading.

    At least, that's my plan.

Put the Camera Down

    In Rocky Mountain National Park last week the stream that saunters through Moraine Park in great sweeping arcs was spilling over its banks, and the valley was thick with green grass. At the end of the valley was the cirque of rugged mountains with slivers of snow. I couldn’t stop taking photos of this spectacular landscape. 
     To make matters even more interesting, a small herd of elk appeared (below), handsome in their rich dark brown coats and with several young elk among them, including a baby from this year’s crop. Maybe it was because of their youth or the fact that it was a beautiful summer day, but they moved through the park at a fast clip, sometimes running, and it was a joyous thing to see this exuberance. I started quickly taking photos, trying to frame the shots as best I could while they moved, but at a certain point, I realized I was missing the action, that I was so busy trying to get the perfect photo that I wasn’t enjoying this spectacle of nature, the sight of these long-legged, wild creatures running through the tall grass. So I put the camera down.
    We are a nation of photographers; anyone with a cell phone can take a picture. But sometimes I wonder if we choose the photo over the experience. I remember being at the Grand Canyon once and watching as a busload of tourists got off a bus, walked over to the rim, took a few photos, and then got back on the bus. There’s no way a 4-by-6 photo is able to capture the feeling of looking down and across miles of ancient rock.
    A few weeks ago, I was out for a walk on one of my favorite trails east of Boulder. I stopped to get picture of new milkweed flowers, pink against the backdrop of field of deep green grass, and discovered I forgot my camera. I almost felt a little panic, that I would miss getting the picture of one of my favorite landscapes—flowers and grasses--and by the time I came back next week, the flowers would be gone.
    So without my camera that day, I slowed down, stopped in my tracks and admired the milkweed flowers, the swallows flying over Boulder Creek, and the multitude of wild rose bushes along the path. In some ways, it was a deeper, richer experience because I didn’t have the camera to fall back on, didn’t have the luxury of later sitting at home at my desk closely examining the flower on my computer screen. I had to absorb it all right then, cram it all into my brain: how the wind pushed and pulled at the grasses, how the swallows fly in small, swooping lifts. Maybe some dark winter day, that memory will pop out in all its glory.

Finding the Elusive Peace and Quiet

    My dream of owning a cabin in Colorado started a long time ago as a child at our family cabin in Wisconsin. I spent the happiest days of my childhood on the lake with my family, and the dream of owning a cabin in Colorado came partly from a desire to recreate that time, although I wasn’t sure originally what that encompassed. 
    There’s the superficial similarities—both are old cabins with walls of knotty pine. And there’s the fact that I’m a born nature lover, happiest when I’m in the north woods or mountains or on a lake. (That's me, around age 2, right, at the lake.) But the longer I’m at my Colorado cabin, I realize that both cabins have a quiet and peacefulness that I can’t find anywhere else. It’s not so much an absence of city noise but an almost palpable presence of peace and well-being. Maybe it comes from the Rocky Mountain bedrock or something in nature almost undisturbed by any restless human energy. 
    Someone recently asked me if I would ever want to live at the Wisconsin cabin. Unfortunately, a place that was once a refuge for me has become a place where city folks think the north woods are a perfect place to bring their motorboats and Jet-skis, and drive ATVs on the dirt roads. The ring of small cabins around the lake has been replaced by large, suburban-type houses whose owners have torn out the natural vegetation of blueberry bushes and native grasses and put in  huge lawns, which must be fertilized and applied with herbicides that leach into the lake. In the last decade, an invasive plant called millefoil has taken over, threatening to choke whole sections of the lake. The frogs my brothers used to catch are gone.
    Over the years, the original family cabin  morphed into four family cabins, as the original family members grew up and had families of their own. But now the first cabin, built around 1948, may be sold off after my uncle died this winter. It turns out the next generation, those in their 20s and 30s, aren’t really interested in spending time at the cabin. It’s a different generation from mine, one that finds more fulfillment in TV, movies, texting, and the Internet than in swimming in the lake, taking canoe rides, or picking blackberries in the woods.
    I don’t know what makes me sadder—that there’s not another generation to love the cabin as much as my siblings and cousins did; or that the place I loved so much no longer exists. And yet I’ve found a place in Colorado that offers me a quiet refuge. And for that I am most grateful.

Living with Uncertainty

    On the drive to the cabin yesterday, I noticed that spring has slipped into summer. Gone are the days of wild weather, storms moving in and out every half hour, the grass growing an inch every day, getting a deeper green every time I saw it. Instead it feels like summer is settling in,  everything has calmed down, gotten lazier, more easygoing. The sound of the grasshoppers is almost hypnotic, and I want to fall into that state of summertime ease, but I can’t. 
     My cat stopped eating a few weeks ago, after an operation to get rid of stones in his bladder. At first, I thought it was connected to his having to wear a collar around his head, which got in the way of his food bowl. But even with the collar off, Ajax still spurns the food we put down for him. Most frustrating is that all the medical tests show no physical reason for his lack of appetite. He gets skinnier by the day, while we offer him bits of rotisserie chicken, rich canned food, sips of chicken broth and pudding. Ajax sniffs at the food, takes a lick and then walks away. Does he want to die? Is something in his mouth, gums or throat causing him pain? He can’t tell us, and so we’re operating in the dark.  
    What I want more than anything is for him to be well, to wake up in the morning and hear him crunching the food in his bowl, instead of worrying about how I will get him to eat. I want someone to figure out what’s wrong and then I want to fix it.

     Instead all I get is uncertainty, not knowing if he’ll waste away or if one day he’ll suddenly start eating again. I know this is my lesson to learn—to live every day not knowing the outcome. It feels like a balancing act, like I’m on the trapeze, trying to staying focused on keeping him going without falling into despair or anxiety.