Cabin Journal

Empty Cabins

Last November, I had the rare opportunity to follow my curiosity wherever it took me around Meeker Park. It was the short period of time between when the summer visitors leave and the snowstorms began. Without deep snow on the ground and the fear of trespassing where people still lived, I was able to wander through the woods and down small, winding roads to see what I might find.

 

If you drive the main roads around Meeker Park, you see maybe 20 or 30 cabins along the road. But dozens more are hidden in the woods. Finding them feels like an adventure from one of the books in which I buried myself as a child, such as Grimm’s fairy tales, where a walk through deep woods leads to an enchanted cabin inhabited by elves, fairies or witches.  

I’ve yet to meet an elf, but some human presence lingers after the summer folks have boarded up their houses for the winter, even if it’s just the melancholy sound of the wind chimes or the pile of wood standing ready for the next time the cabin owners come, or the outhouse door blown open by strong winter winds.

With no humans around, I feel free to linger, to stop and admire the sunlight on the rough pine exterior, the decorative touches like a painted red screen door and red-checked curtains (above), or a pathway made of stones (right). I can admire the compact and tidy shapes of these cabins, some with screened porches.

A place like Meeker Park is rare in Colorado because many original cabins are still standing, which is not true in the tourist town of Estes Park down the road, where most of the old lodges and cabins have been replaced by modern hotels. Meeker Park often feels like a place that time passed by, leaving it in some perpetual state of rustic pleasure. It’s like discovering Brigadoon, a window onto a past that no longer exists.  

Each cabin is different, some dating from the early 20^th century and hand-built, including the stone fireplaces. Every cabin has its own flourishes, like door handles made from deer antlers (like on my cabin, which was built in 1939). Because these cabins have been around long enough, nature has grown up around them, so the cabins seem part of the landscape, a natural extension of the ponderosa forest.  Some have sunk into the ground and are slightly tilted, while logs can be a bit crooked and windows off center, so the cabins seem organic, as if they’ve grown from the ground. 

Especially in the winter, these cabins hold secrets, stories of people long gone. I know some of the stories, like the nearby cabin that was owned by a childless couple who willed the cabin to their caretaker, whose children now rarely use it; or the cluster of cabins bought by a group of airplane pilots who built a swimming pool, now long gone; or the couple who lived across from them—several years ago she died of cancer, and soon after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and moved away.

But now, as the winter winds blow snow off the cabin roofs and the snow piles up around their foundations, sealing their doors shut, the cabins hold onto their secrets even more tightly.

 

Oh, I’d Rather Be a Squirrel

I was at the cabin last week doing a three-day meditation retreat. When I became exasperated with trying to catch and calm my wandering and frenetic thoughts, I let myself be distracted by the animal antics in the front yard. The Steller’s jays (below) had come calling, squawking for bird seed or just to let me know they’re here, hopping from tree branch to porch and back again.

Not many animals stick around for the winter months, but the gray squirrel (right),  like the jays, remains active all year long. The squirrels are just as frenetic as my thoughts, bounding across the crusty snow of the front yard, climbing up and down the ponderosa pines, from which they drop pine cones that cause a loud clattering on the roof and porch, a noise that always rouses me. These mountain squirrels, also known as chickarees, never stop moving. They use the fences around the property as a super highway, so they can move even faster, unimpeded by snow in winter or grasses in summer.

They dart under woodpiles and the porch and carry pine cones back and forth between the trees and my neighbor’s shed, which must be where their nest is located.  The only time they stop is when I appear to get in their way, and they’ll give me quite a lecture, in that hectoring tone, about how they don’t have time to be interrupted; they have lots to do. In fact, they move so fast, I have only a few photos of them, mostly taken when they stop to eat. Otherwise, all I capture now are their tracks in the snow (below).

Who cannot love these squirrels? They are determined, hard workers, with no time for extraneous thoughts about the meaning of life or possible end of the world. I can’t help but envy these animals, even as I know their lives are precarious. They have to constantly be looking for food while staying alert that they’re not food for something else.

The squirrels are easy prey—liable to be snatched by a coyote, bobcat or red-tailed hawk at any minute. But, on the positive side, they are ignorant of the current political situation and blissfully unaware of the polarizing divisions in this country. They don’t feel obligated to listen to the impeachment hearings or trouble themselves about climate change.  

All they need to do is follow their single-minded pursuits of staying alive. They are just purely in the world, whether it’s two feet of snow in the winter or green fields of flowers and grasses in the summer, whether the winds are blowing strong or the air is calm and quiet.

 Scamper on, my little chickaree.

 

Silence and Light

Unable to get to the cabin for almost two weeks because of the big snowstorm, I was anxious to get up there and see the reported accumulations of 2 feet of snow. But the warming days and high winds in the meantime had reduced the snowpile considerably, especially in the fields exposed to the sun and wind.

The two Highland cattle (below), which have been pastured in Meeker Park for at least two years, must have been happy to have the grasses become accessible, even though they are tough animals, bred to withstand the cold and winds of Scotland.

On my walk around Meeker Park, I nodded to them as they stood side by side in the late afternoon sun. In the places shaded by trees and north-facing slopes, the snow was still high. Yet what struck me more than anything—the wind patterns on the snow and the ice on the river and ponds—was the quiet.  We are so accustomed to a backdrop of noise in our culture—constant traffic outside and constant electronic sounds inside (computer, phones, etc.), that when we encounter the absence of noise, it’s startling.

Suddenly, I can hear the jay call from across the valley or the muffled sound of the creek under the ice. It’s the kind of silence that settles on you, wraps you in a comforting blanket, as if you’ve been longing for this without knowing it.

Walking back, late in the day in a valley where the sun drops behind Mount Meeker at 3:30, I was touched by the lingering sunlight. It was the last light of the day, precious because I wouldn’t see the sun’s rays for another 16 hours, when they would creep over the foothills from the east and into the valley bottom.

I wanted to reach out and hold onto this tender light as long as possible as it brushed the pine trees on the hill and the grove of aspens in the valley bottom; as it caressed the brown grasses that weren’t felled by the snow. Even the cattle seemed aware of the preciousness of this last light; the two stood facing west, as if paying homage to the last bit of warmth before their long night began.