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which is not true in the tourist town of Estes Park down the road, where most of the old lodges and cabins have been replaced by modern hotels.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.

 

The End of Rustic?

A friend who has lived in Meeker Park for several decades has been bemoaning the changes he sees around our small valley and in the nearby tourist town of Estes Park. Many are small changes that outsiders wouldn’t notice, but he catalogs each one as a sign of a disappearing culture, a way of life.

On one of the historic ranches down the road, the slightly decrepit wooden post over the entry road has been replaced by a modern, overly large metal sign. Nearby, a long-time tourist resort, the kind that once offered horseback rides as well as small family cabins, has been turned into a yoga and tai chi center. Most offensive to him is the new dollar store in Estes, a cube of metal and glass with a garish yellow neon sign, sitting above and looking out of place on a road with older hotels and houses.

I’m more accepting of human change—what is known as “progress”—than he is, but I can’t help mourn the passing of what I call rustic. The original cabins and hotels, mainly built for summer tourists, were made of materials from the surrounding area—logs from ponderosa or spruce trees, and granite rocks, still emblazoned with lichen, used for fireplaces and the bases of cabins. The original cabins had no insulation, so the wind, as did the mice, found cracks to enter.

My cabin (left), built in 1939, has knotty pine walls and a granite rock fireplace. The foundation consists of tree stumps that have somehow lasted these almost 80 years. The cabin feels like an extension of the outdoors, as if it were part of the natural world, not something foreign or opposed to it. Real cabins blend into the landscape so well it’s hard to see the cabin for the woods sometimes.

But it's getting harder to find rustic cabins and tourist lodgings. Many cabins, especially in Estes Park, have been modernized or enlarged in the past few decades. In fact, the YMCA museum in Estes has preserved an original cabin, circa the 1950s or ‘60s, as a piece of history (right and below).

The interior of these old cabins was plain and simple, consisting of a table and wooden chairs, a couch, bunk beds and a sink for washing dishes (an indoor toilet and showers were optional). The table was the heart of the cabin, not just where you ate but also where you played cards and Monopoly, wrote postcards and letters.  A worn wooden book case held old popular hardcover books (like Nancy Drew or the Bobbsey Twins) and some dated National Geographic magazines.

In those days, you wouldn’t have been distracted by a TV or wi-fi, because your main purpose was to relax in nature. During the day, if it wasn’t raining, you were outside fishing, hiking, drawing or sitting on the front porch with friends and family. As a child, you might be throwing rocks in the river, chasing chipmunks or creating art projects from sticks and leaves.

When Rocky Mountain National Park was first established, the Park Service razed most of the historic lodges in the park, presumably because they weren’t part of nature.  But one historic lodge is still standing and operating, just down the road from my cabin. Built in 1917 of logs and sticks (what is known locally as “stick” architecture), the Baldpate Inn (top) is rustic perfection. Snuggled into the hillside, you ascend worn wooden steps to the lobby and restaurant, where the wood floors creak and the ceiling, made of wooden beams, sags slightly. Everything feels soft and malleable, like a place you could sink your body and mind into.

On warm summer days, people sit on the porch (right), rocking back and forth in the old wooden chairs, enjoying the sunlight filtered through the aspens and watching the hummingbirds gather at the feeders. Nothing to do but just enjoy the day.   

But being lazy and living a simple life doesn’t come easy these days. Just down the road are modern hotels that have hot tubs, king-size beds, flat-screen TVs and wi-fi— everything needed to keep you comfortable and entertained.  If your motel room doesn’t provide enough distractions, the town of Estes Park is full of them: miniature golf courses, shopping, restaurants and almost weekly festivals.

It’s not just the loss of old rustic buildings that my neighbor and I mourn, but the passing of a slower and more thoughtful way of life: one where you could waste a whole afternoon throwing a fishing line into the creek or propped against a ponderosa reading a good book.

Neighbors Lost and Found

This month marks nine years since I first settled into Meeker Park. In a way, not much has changed: Mount Meeker still dominates the landscape, Tahosa and Cabin creeks still meander through the valley (although the 2013 flood did alter their courses somewhat), and all the cabins that were here when I came are still standing (although a couple have been enlarged and a lot of septic systems have been added over the years). But the community has changed. Over the years, people I thought were an integral part of Meeker Park have disappeared.

One of those people was Gary. Shortly after I moved in, I was sitting on the front porch when he bicycled up the driveway with his grandson and introduced himself. Eventually I got to know his wife, Bonnie, also. They were friends of my immediate neighbors to the east—Virginia and Bob, who had moved here some 15 years ago after Bob retired from a life of farming on the plains. I would often see Bob clearing the small ditches that kept the water running to the homes along the road.

Then Bob developed Alzheimer’s and lived out his remaining years in a nursing home in Estes Park.  Several years ago Bonnie developed breast cancer and died soon after. Two years ago, I stopped seeing Gary around and found out that he too had developed Alzheimer’s. His children moved to him to Kansas, his home state, where he died shortly.

Each death felt like a tear in the social fabric of this community. This older generation, many in their 70s and 80s,  formed a network of friends and neighbors that supported each other and welcomed newcomers. They knew the history of the Meeker Park, could tell you who lived in each cabin and how long and  when they left and who replaced them. In some cases they had family roots that went back generations. They knew when the hummingbirds arrived in the spring and when they left in the fall and knew where to find the best patch of columbine in the summer. 

Meanwhile new people have moved in who have chosen not to be part of the community. Two men who live at the end of our road made it politely known that they didn’t wish to interact with the rest of us. A woman who moved into one of the cabins behind me also likes to keep to herself.

I understand, as there are times I use the cabin as a refuge from the rest of the world and retreat into a solitary existence, even if just for a few days. At the same time I mourn the loss of the web of people who know and support each other. Meeker Park can easily and quickly become isolated from the rest of the world through huge snowstorms, like the one in May when Meeker Park got three feet of snow, or like the flood of 2013. After the flood, when destroyed roads and downed phone equipment cut us off from the rest of the world, I got to know some of my neighbors better, as we shared what little information we had and frequently checked in on each other.

One of those neighbors was Mandy, a widow from Kansas who spent her summers here. Last winter, she died of cancer—another piece of the fabric torn. But this week I met the couple who bought her house, the pastor of a local church and his wife who seemed eager to get to know their neighbors. Tom even offered to plow our road in winter.  

And so another piece is added to the our little web, strengthening the community just a bit more.

Your GPS won't do any good

This week, on my walk, I found the Mr. Rooter service man tromping through the snow near my cabin, trying to find an address. He had gone down several driveways and across the creek with no success.

“Who are you looking for?” I asked. He gave me the address.

“No, I mean who’s the person?” Numbers don’t mean much around here, because there is no logical structure to the neighborhood.

He was looking for Deb, who lives up the hill a way and behind the house we were standing in front of. I pointed the way, and off he went, another victim of Meeker Park’s incomprehensible and off-the-grid layout. Neither GPS, Google nor Mapquest do much good around here, partly because there is no cell phone coverage but also because there are few official streets.

Meeker Park has one county road, which the government plows in the winter and repairs when needed.  The rest are cobbled together from bits of people’s property to create the semblance of a road that offers access to four or five houses. Someone may decide to give it a name, something whimsical like Blue Jay Lane, or for the first person or family who lived on the road. My road honors Bill Waite, a solitary and private man who lived at the cabin next to mine (his old shed, above) for 40 years and was reportedly horrified when he found out the county had named a road after him.

Nothing is on a grid, and property parcels come in every shape and size imaginable, with no rhyme nor reason. It’s a nightmare for surveyors and title companies because property lines blur and overlap.  My neighbor’s plans to put in a septic system took several extra months because the title company’s search for the owner of the property that abuts theirs turned up 200 conflicting claims. The company said it was the most challenging title search it had ever done. It turned out the “road” that connects all of our cabins is actually private property that belongs to one cabin owner, whose property is not even contiguous with my neighbor’s property.

In trying to figure out how this could have happened, my neighbors discovered that all the property in our neighborhood (encompassing about 10 cabins) was originally owned by one woman, who started selling off bits of property in a messy fashion. If one man said he wanted to build his house on this slight hill and only wanted a small piece, she sold it to him, and if someone else wanted the property that extended along the river, they had a deal. At some point, what was left was sold to the last buyer, who ended up with a small, strangely shaped bit of land.

All this has resulted in directions to outsiders that go something like “When you go over the creek, you’ll see a house on the right that has a child’s swing set on the side. After that, turn right where you see signs nailed on the tree. The top one says ‘McIntyre’s Manor.’ After that, you’ll come to a green house on the right, with an old washing machine in front.  We’re right across from that house, the one with the red door.”

Old-timers have their own way of giving directions, usually involving people who have lived here a long time: “It’s past Mrs. McGovern’s place.” Lillian McGovern died long ago, and there’s been one or two new owners of the ranch since then, but her name is indelibly stamped on the property, partly because she was a long-time and admired figure. She and her ranch have become part of accumulated history. It’s different than the city and suburbs, where people move in and out too fast to leave stories or imprints, and there are not enough old-timers to remember.

I’m glad to live in a small part of the world where the human connection is more significant than technology, where humans (and animals) and their footprints still matter.

A Death in the Community

When I bought my cabin, I wanted a place to experience nature and solitude. Yet, at the same time, I wanted a community. Not friends necessarily but a place where people were connected to each other, where I felt part of a larger group.

At my home in Boulder, I live in a subdivision with big lots and wide streets, which is wonderful for cars but not so good for neighbors talking to other neighbors. I see very few people around; many come and go through their garages, and once the garage door is closed, so is any chance for a neighborly chat about the weather.

Yet in Meeker Park, I know neighbors up and down the road and onto the next one. I think this camaraderie is due partly to the fact that everyone walks—with their dog, as exercise, with friends and to their mailbox, which is at the entrance to our road. With homes scattered throughout the woods, it has the feel of an old village.

One day this summer particularly stands out. The man who plowed my driveway in winter and was putting in my septic system, Dan Crane, came by to update me and stayed to talk. We had been in communication for the past two years, discussing soil type, pumps and the ever popular topic of the county’s unreasonable requirements—conversations that often extended into discussions of the weather, vacations and retirement.

When I went for a walk later, I ran into a neighbor down the road, and we discussed our mutual septic systems: when he had his built, how far from the house, and how deep. As we were talking, two other Meeker Park residents joined us, two of the older women who anchor this settlement, and the four of us got on the topic of the 2013 floods and how it had affected his house. When I escorted one woman home, helping her across my weed patch yard and avoiding the two big test holes for the septic system, my next-door neighbor came out, and the three of us discussed the new addition to his cabin.

That kind of accidental, small gatherings would be rare in my Boulder subdivision. But in this mountain neighborhood I think we’re more bound to each other because of its remoteness and isolation. During the floods and in big snowstorms, we make sure to check on each other. But we’re also connected by our love of this place, our willingness to put up with inconveniences—dusty roads, no easy access to Internet, no cell phone coverage, no gas stations or restaurants nearby.

Maybe that’s why it was such a huge shock when Dan was killed in a motorcycle accident a few weeks ago. He was well known in the larger Allenspark community, someone who always stepped in when help was needed. During the 2013 floods, Dan had done some heroic acts—rescuing people stranded on Coyote Hill above me when the creek took out the road (grateful residents renamed the road in his honor, adding a yellow ribbon after he died, above), and building a raft to extricate logs that had dammed a pond by Saint Malo, so the road could be opened.

In this small village, hundreds attended his funeral. For many people, myself included, it felt like a huge piece of this interwoven fabric of community had been torn out, leaving a giant hole. At the same time, I’m grateful to be part of a community where one person’s absence sends shock waves through this mountain enclave of cabins, forests and fields. It seems a rare thing.

Ireland Old and New

Travel, almost more than anything else, forces me to confront my illusions.

When I went to Ireland I wanted to see an ancient way of life, something authentic: monasteries where monks chanted hundreds of years ago, romantic castles and stone walls that still enclose green fields full of baa-ing sheep—sheep that historically have produced Ireland’s famous woolen sweaters. I wanted to sit in an Irish pub, drink a glass of Guinness and listen to a fiddler while the locals danced and convinced me to join them.

Everything that wasn’t part of my vision I tried to edit out—at least from my photos: the surfer in lovely St. Finan’s Bay, the cars that jammed the picturesque village of Kinsale (right), or the modern lime green tractor and bales of hay wrapped in black plastic in front of an old gray stubbled stone barn, The photo above is for me the quintessential Ireland: the omnipresent sheep, a farmer’s cottage and the green pastures rolling down to the steely blue sea. But what you don’t see is the huge tour buses roaming the countryside, all the modern homes or the tropical palm trees and agave plants that shouldn’t be growing in such a northerly climate.

For the first few days, I tried to ignore all the modern stuff that didn’t belong in my vision of Ireland and sought out the  ancient places like the Gallarus Oratory, an 8th century place of worship so perfectly constructed of stones that, more than 10 centuries later, not a drop of rain penetrates; the remains of a 6th century monastery; castles dating back to the 12th century; and stone forts (left) used for protection and shelter dating from the 9th or 10th century. But 80 percent of the buildings on Dingle Peninsula are vacation homes, the Irish version of a U.S. ranch house—squat, plain houses, many of which are rented out to tourists.

At some point, I was forced to see the reality underneath the beautiful Irish landscape. The hillsides are covered in yellow gorse, and in my imagination these were similar to the heather in the moors of Scotland and England, long celebrated in song and verse by poets. However, the gorse—just like the scarlet fuschia that borders the lanes, and the palm trees (right) and agave plants—is a non-native species, introduced relatively recently.

I loved the small towns with their brightly colored buildings, but when I asked our tour guide if this was an ancient Irish tradition, I was disappointed to hear that towns painted their buildings in a competition for “Tidy Town”— some ploy apparently by the country’s tourism board to dress up the otherwise drab buildings for tourists.

We stopped at a churchyard on Ventry Harbor where gravestones were marked with the old Celtic crosses. My first thought was that this would be a perfect photo op, until I saw the men wearing fluorescent orange vests and heard the weed whackers. I was able to edit out the invasive signs of modernity but when I look at the picture, it doesn’t mean anything. It isn’t totally true.

In every town, the pubs advertise “Irish music,” and some version of traditional Irish music is played for tourists who want the Irish experience, but most of the time you’re aware that you’re being dished up something that’s not totally authentic. I never found a pub where I inadvertently stumbled in on the locals dancing and fiddling, never got the chance to kick up my heels.

As for the sheep, they’re not much used for woolens anymore; it doesn’t pay, so instead they become someone’s meal.

So Ireland is not the authentic place I wanted. Instead it’s a mixture of new and old,  abiding side by side. It’s messy, just like life. But it's all beautiful.

 

 

 

Living on the Edge

Gone two weeks from the cabin, and the natural world turned upside down. Two weeks previously, I walked around the shores of Lily Lake, the blue water ruffled by a light breeze, ducks floating on its surface, grasses fringing the lake. The next time I visited, the lake was frozen solid, a mass of solid black etched with white lines and spots of snow. The trail up the hillside was covered with snowdrifts that I had to punch my way through, and 70-mph wind gusts threatened to send me flying onto the lake’s hard black surface. By the time I get back to the car my hands and legs were frozen.

At the cabin, the chairs I left on the deck last time, in some silly expectation that the warm weather would continue forever, sat forlornly in the snow. With the sudden onset of winter, everything becomes more difficult, even carrying all my stuff from the car to the front door of the cabin through deep snow. Inside all the water containers are frozen, so I can’t wash anything until they melt. All day long I play “Move the Containers,” a continuous game to catch the warmth of the sun as it moves from one side of the cabin to the other.

When I sit at the table to work, the cold air from the empty space under the cabin seeps up around my legs. Through every crack in the thin walls, the wind pushes, and it feels like the separation between me and the outdoor world is very thin.

And yet I can’t complain. Unlike the first white residents of this valley, I don’t have to keep a fire going all day in order to survive. When I get tired of sawing the wood into small pieces and of having to constantly tend the fire, I can take advantage of the electric baseboard heat. Instead of getting out of bed in the morning in the cold and try to get a fire going, I can turn up the heat and crawl back into the warm cocoon of my heated mattress pad and electric blanket while the place heats up. Except for the few hours when I first arrive at the cabin and have to wait for the radiators to crank up, I don’t ever have to be cold.

I’m grateful for these comforts, but I’m also grateful that I have some insight into a different kind of life, where your comfort and survival depended on constant readiness, awareness and hard work, where life had a sharper edge to it. Hiking above Lily Lake in knife- like ­wind gusts and deep snow or sitting in front of the fire at the cabin, cold air enveloping me from all sides, I can briefly touch that edge, feel its sharpness. It’s the sharpness of life, of survival. It makes me feel grateful to be alive.

If a Tree Falls in the Forest

I read an article recently about GoPro, the video camera that can capture images from your point of view—ideally if you’re skiing off a rock face or jumping from an airplane. The article recounts one man’s adventure while biking in Idaho of being surrounded by a running herd of elk. But far from being a magical wildlife moment,  it was a disappointing experience, he told the reporter, because didn’t have his GoPro; if he couldn’t capture it and post the video for others to see, the experience didn’t mean anything.

I was appalled when I read that, and yet I realize I do the same thing—albeit on a much tamer level. Shortly after I read that article, I was hiking around Lily Lake, and the sight of golden grasses around the pond (bottom), reflected in the still pond, stopped me. But then I remembered that I had left my camera at the cabin, and started to move on until I realized what I was doing.

I wonder why it’s so difficult to enjoy the view without the urge to document it. These days, when we tell someone we just saw something amazing—a beautiful sunset, a squirrel hanging from your feeder—the first question is: “Did you get a picture?”

But a picture is never the same. Taking a photo of the Grand Canyon is different from being there. Standing on the edge of canyon, you feel the immensity and yourself as a small part of this vast landscape. You smell the pinyon pines, feel the air uplifting from the canyon, and hear the voices of other sightseers, the chatter of the chipmunks, the call of the raven soaring over the canyon. It’s a total experience, and you feel something that you’ll never get from a photo or even from a movie.

A few weeks ago, at the exhibit of Chihuly glass sculptures at the Denver Botanic Gardens (above), I saw people approach each sculpture, whip out their cameras or smart phones, snap a photo, and then move on. I was doing the same thing, until I forced myself to slow down and relax.  Maybe it takes too much work to concentrate on what’s in front of us; maybe we’re afraid to let ourselves feel things, and it’s easier to record the experience, maybe to be looked at later. Or is it just that all our minds are running as fast as possible? That we live in a world where speed counts—doing as much as possible in as short amount of time as possible? We don’t have time to ponder.

On my hike at Lily Lake, I climbed up above the lake and stopped to catch my breath. Across the valley snow was blowing off the ridges below Longs Peak, its jagged summit forming a V with Mount Meeker. Below me was the lake, a startling blue, the wind brushing its surface. The smaller ponds on the south side were azure eyes fringed by grasses caught in the sunlight. The longer I stood there, the more I saw, and I felt that this was the first time I was really seeing this landscape, even though I’ve hiked up here dozens of times. If I had my camera with me, I would likely have snapped the photo and then rushed on up the hill, eager to see more views.

If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one to hear it, does it make a sound? If we’re surrounded by a herd of elk and can’t record it, is it worth anything?

 

Looking for a Little Human Touch

In the process of setting up my new computer, I lost the ability to send emails, which puts a big crimp in my daily communication. Unfortunately, the companies that sold me the  software and Internet access on my computer don’t provide any human contacts for help. Instead, I got assistance in the form of community forums, where I posted my problem and then get 50 different replies from “community” members, each of who has their own solution. I spent more hours than I care to remember chasing down rabbit holes until I felt I had fallen into some alternate universe. It’s one where all the humans have disappeared, replaced by disembodied names: John42 and MX57.

The next day I talked to a friend who had no luck online trying to use a voucher for Frontier Airlines to make a plane reservation. When she finally tracked down a human voice at Frontier, the woman referred her back to the non-functioning web page.

On my way to the cabin this week, I ran into the grocery store to get a few things. At that early hour, none of the lines were open where human checkers greet you and take care of you. Instead I went through the self-checking aisles, where I had to figure out how much the cilantro and mushrooms cost, where the machine balked at my bag and issued unreasonable statements to “return my items to the cart” when I didn’t have a cart. What would have taken five minutes with a human checker took 10 minutes, which only seems like a lot of time in a time-driven world.

And even when you can find a human being on the phone, they don’t seem to have human emotions. A friend wanted to end the irritating daily messages on his phone: “Your time is limited to reduce your credit card fees.” When he called the number given and asked to be taken off the company’s list, the male voice on the other end repeated “That’s not my problem” and then hung up.

John lives in a cabin near mine, and when I told him about my difficulties in finding human assistance in a world increasingly dominated by machines, he was somewhat baffled. “I don’t have to deal with that,” he told me, and I envied him.

Retired from the work world, he doesn’t own a computer. He rarely travels outside of his small community of Meeker Park and Estes Park. A big trip is to Boulder, down in the “valley.” There’s the mountain world where he lives, where life hums along at a slow and steady pace, and the valley with its frenzied urban activity.

Most people would look at his circumscribed world and feel sorry for such a narrow existence. But his life is rich with human contact: the philosophy and religion group he belongs to, the community theater he is part of, the restaurants where he eats weekly and knows the owners, even the checker at the town grocery store who greets him by name every time he comes in. John has been visiting this part of the world since 1972, before he permanently moved here, and can tell you who lived in each cabin going back more than 40 years.  He can tell me which contractor to trust and which handyman to avoid.

John lives in a world that is fast disappearing. I envy him his ignorance of the new one.