Cabin Journal

Looking for Spring

In Wild Basin last week, with two to three feet of snow on the ground, I went looking for the creek. Last summer, the St. Vrain was rushing, over-exuberant and spilling over the banks, but in this winter of heavy snows, only the distant sound of rushing water reveals its location.  Copeland Falls was completely hidden, disguised as a white hillside (below). It’s only my memory that knows where the falls are, that can picture them under their disguise as they were last summer: a thick, clear curtain of water plunging over the boulder (below, the falls last June).

It’s good to remember these things now in the deep of winter, when spring seems a long way off. How long will it take for the sun to melt the almost four feet of snow behind my cabin, where it’s sheltered from the desiccating winds and sun? To get to the water pump, I’ve had to shovel a path through the snow, which keeps getting filled in with every new snowstorm.

Along St. Vrain Creek last week, everything was subdued, except where the creek  managed to break through the ice, forming a blue eye that provides just a glimpse of the dark cold water underneath the ice. In another section of the creek are strange holes, like the kind Alice went down, surrounded by piles of snow. What created these?

Way above this valley is a deep blue Colorado sky. But down here everything is covered in white: the rocks, the trees, the creek.  If I can listen hard enough, somewhere under these piles of snow lie spring.

Cabin Fever

I recently came upon a large coffee table book that illustrated, with beautiful glossy photos, “cabins” around the West. But these were new and large homes that happened to be made of wood. Real cabins don’t have cathedral ceilings or swimming pools or hot tubs. Real cabins fit into the landscape, are almost hidden by the pine trees and bushes that grown up around them, and don’t stick out like a sore thumb.

Few places in Colorado have such a concentration of old cabin as the area around Estes Park. The cabins are a relic of tourist days, starting from the 1920s and ‘30s, when the automobile brought tourists in huge numbers to Rocky Mountain National Park and the surrounding areas, including Estes Park (and Allenspark/Meeker Park) on the east and Grand Lake on the west side.

Places such as Aspen or Telluride, as lovely as they are, don’t have many cabins. Because they were started as mining towns, the typical house is Victorian. A well tended Victorian house, gaudily painted in green, purple and orange, is a thing of beauty, but it does not blend into the landscape.

Grand Lake attracted wealthy people, many from Denver, who wanted their own summer places and built huge, multi-storied cabins. But the ones around Estes stayed small, serving tourists who arrived for two weeks, maybe a month, with fishing poles, walking shoes, piles of books. These city folks had a yearning for mountain living at simple levels: cooking their own meals (preferably trout just pulled from the creek), playing card games at night, singing around the campfire.

My search for a cabin was a sentimental journey to re-create childhood summers spent at a family cabin in Wisconsin, built in 1948, with a knotty pine interior, a fireplace made of local river rocks, and sitting above a spring-fed crystal blue lake. When I first saw my cabin in Meeker Park, with its knotty pine walls and fireplace made of granite rocks, I knew I found what I wanted, although I still miss the lake. My Colorado cabin, built in 1939, is even older than the Wisconsin cabin and sits on old tree stumps. For someone who loves trees, I couldn’t have a better foundation.

What’s the attraction of cabins? Each one is different. No one, as far as I know, has ever platted a subdivision of cabins. They uniquely reflect the owner or at least the first owner’s design choice. Made of local materials, stones and trees from the forests, they blend into the landscape. Walking through the woods and spotting a cabin tucked against the side of a rocky face or almost hidden among a stand of ponderosas doesn’t feel like a break from nature but an embellishment, as if one of the ponderosas had a red trim, just to add a little color to the forest.

Because a lot of the old cabins are uninsulated, it’s a thin membrane that separates you from the natural world. Not only the winds enter freely, but in summer I can hear the rain thrumming on the roof. Because it’s so small, I’m never more than 6 feet away from a window and views of the trees and mountains. There’s no place in the cabin where I can get away from what’s going on outside, even if I wanted to.

Hugging the front of my cabin is a large ponderosa, from which chickarees (gray squirrels) pause in their climb up the tree to glare at me inside at my computer. I smile back, happy to be so close to the wild world.

Feelings

When I’m out rambling around, it’s not until I can “feel” the day that I know I’ve finally turned off the incessant thoughts in my head and that my senses are in touch with my surroundings. Maybe it’s akin to a dog sniffing the air: what’s going on? what’s out there today? What does the day feel like?

On my walk last week, with no new snow for a week or so, everything felt kind of worn out and tired.  The snow was dirty and covered with pine needles and small sticks. On the road, the snow had melted, then turned to ice and slush. In some places there were huge drifts while other spots had bare ground. In the field, the grasses were all matted down in strange hummocks, looking like some strangely tilled farm.

Yet on a walk two weeks previous, with similar snow conditions, it felt different. It was a warm day for winter, 45 or so, although windy. The big December snowstorm and all the holiday hoopla had passed. The “crowds” that were staying at their cabins over the holidays had left, and it was quiet again. I saw no one on the road. So the day felt like “afterward,” the downtime, when nothing much is happening, no bad weather to withstand or plans to make, just enjoy the warm sun and being lazy.

On my walks, whenever I start to feel my mind wander, I like to stop, check in with my senses: smell the pines, feel the warm or cold air, or hear the juncos or a car down the road. What does it all add up to? What’s the mood of the day? Sometimes a gray day, with no sounds at all,  feels sad and subdued,  Or maybe there’s clouds building up to the west, the wind has come up, so there’s a sense of expectation, maybe a change in the weather. Other days, the sun is slanting from a new direction, and the magpies are afloat; it feels like the earth has turned a corner.

“Enough with these feelings,” I can hear my dad grumble. But getting a sense of your surroundings is a grounding, a way of staying alert. It’s what animals and native peoples do, who need to be constantly aware of their surroundings, alert for possible danger but also for possible rewards. Feeling the day means I’m in the world, and that’s a good place to be.