The Cabin In February

I took my first overnight trip of the year to the cabin yesterday.

I loaded a small cooler with some pork ribs, a yellow zucchini, a potato, an onion, some carrots and a few Irish beers. Merle was happy to go, as always, and he was quite comfortable sharing the back seat with a guitar case. We left at 1:00 PM on a sunny, cold February day...just twenty-five minutes to my cabin in the woods.

Upon arriving, I had a pang of doubt that my little Geo Metro would crunch through the remaining snow on the little road to the cabin, but we made it. Not much to unload once we got there. Traveling light this time. I fired up the gas furnace and put on my insulated coveralls, and then gathered up some paper and struck out into the woods to the fire ring. Before long I had a blaze going. I thought of the first time Riley and I sat on the humble benches there in the mid winter, all bundled up in our coveralls in a light, gorgeous snowfall coming down as the fire cracked and we smoked cigars and sipped whiskey and visited the day away. I made a promise that today would be for him.

Merle was in dog heaven. He's pretty new to these woods, this place that Dirty Dog loved so much. But, he's got some catching up to do. At the moment, he was all about trying to get me to play chase me. Oh, I obliged a little, but mostly I just wanted to look into that fire, steep in the wood smoke and think about my blessings. Eventually, I went and got a cold Smithwick's and one of the Fuente cigars that Cole had given me for Christmas. I kept on feeding the fire, and passed three or four hours away. Finally, I realized I had better get up to the cabin and get the grill started. I was hungry enough to start supper.

Old friend Tom Martin-Erickson kept me entertained as I cooked. Simply Folk was on Wisconsin Public Radio and I thought back to when I went on their 10th Anniversary tour with them...so many years back. Tom and I traveled the state together in his car...following WPR the convoy from venue to venue. Wow...was I ever young then.

As the ribs were gently smoking away in the Weber, I let Merle out to do his business, and stood at the edge of the deck while he sniffed around below me at ground level. Suddenly, a cottontail rabbit bolted up the hill and away from him with a thunderous explosion...and I thought Merle would jump out of his skin! He jumped about six feet. So much for prey drive. I laughed out loud.

I sat down for dinner with some steaming hot ribs, grilled zucchini, and mixed vegetables cooked in tin foil, hobo dinner style. It was dark outside by then. There's nothing like the taste of your own grilled dinner in your own cabin in the woods. Something special about it, really. It's like the cabin is a magic culinary ingredient that makes everything taste better. Although, I know that if Riley had been there he would have been disappointed that I didn't do up a batch of my cabin potatoes. Next time, Riley.

After dinner, I relaxed on the couch with a small glass of single malt scotch. Eyes getting drowsy now. The radio was droning gently in the background and I marveled at the interior of my cabin in the low light of a few candles and one humble fifteen watt lamp, remembering when we had built this refuge from the dirt up. Just look at it now. Stuff hanging all over the place, memories. Still smells of the red cedar we covered the walls of the great room with. Vicki's brother Ron harvested the trees from the farm she grew up on and sawed the boards for us with his mill. Nine years ago and it still smells good.

I don't let Merle on furniture at home, but this isn't home. I invited him up on the couch and we curled up together, him leaning into me for a good scratching as I stared at the stealthy ceiling fan going round and round and round in circles.

I woke up about twenty minutes later. Better get up now or go to bed. Too early for bed. I relocated to the table and put a little Martin 00-15 in my lap and tuned it to DADGAD tuning. I felt like singing Oh Susannah...been a favorite song of mine since I was a little kid. Been a fan of Stephen Foster since I was a young man. I am reminded that in my song "Where Have All My Heroes Gone?", the line "say a prayer for good Stephen" is a reference to him. Not sure if anyone ever knew that.

I sang a few songs, picked a few more. This is part of what the cabin is about. Alas, no inspiration to write a new one this night. Another hour or two passed, and I got to feeling tired. Looked at the clock. It's 10:30 PM. Holy crap. If I were home I wouldn't be going to bed for two, maybe three more hours. Well, that's the cabin. No TV to stare at like a zombie. There is, however, a very comfortable bed.

I turned in then, setting a timer on my Grundig radio to shut off after 60 minutes, and began listening to a 1957 episode of X Minus One on Old Time Radio Night. C'mon up Merle. It's OK. Good boy...come lay down up here. I put my arm around his neck and shut my eyes. I am long gone before the radio shuts off.

The morning was crisp. There was such a light trace of snow falling that, when you looked toward the east and into the sun, it looked like pixie dust was fluttering down from the heavens. It was such a light flake that nothing was gathering on the ground. I put some water to the burner to make some chamomile tea. Merle bowed down with a good morning stretch, with his front paws outstretched and his butt high in the air.

I picked up the guitar and cleared my throat and started my day with Susannah.

Cabin Seeds

In the second year we owned our property, after a good deal of landscaping (sweat equity) and camping...and just loving our private place in the universe, I was talking with my father one day about how I wished I could afford to build a cabin.

"What's stopping you?" he asked.
"The money"
"What's the difference, you're already making payments."
"OK, but I don't think I can afford to add on another sixty grand."
"Oh hell, what makes you think it would run that much?"
"I don't know. Don't know nothin' about building materials and labor and dozing and all that."
"Well if we did it ourselves, that's two thirds of the expense off the cost right there, and I tell you, I won't be around forever, so you'd better get your ass in gear."

My dad is best known these days for his painting, which is to say, he is a western artist, an oil painter of considerable note. However, he did spend many years in construction as a bricklayer and stone mason, and he is a damn fine one at that. My step brother, Rob, followed him in this career.

Dad has always been a builder, an artisan, a whittler and wood carver, furniture maker, a true to life renaissance man. When I was a kid, he was always building things, shelving the house, creating out buildings, carving decoys, building muzzle loaders and gun smithing, whatever. Safe to say, he knows how to make a building from the ground up...from footers to drywall.

He started me out by asking me to figure out a good spot to build my cabin, settle on a size, and draw up a simple floor plan. Then, we could make a materials list and figure out who to call for dozing a building site and digging footers. I was really wary of the cost of materials so when I told him we should build a cabin, say, 14' x 18', he said,

"Oh son,...you really want to go that small? That's pretty tiny."
"I'm a little worried about cost."
"Well it doesn't cost anything to price an estimate, you know. Worry about the budget after you've got proof it's too much. I'll tell you this, if you build it that small you'll be wanting to add onto it in another year or two. But, let me ask you something. If we build this cabin, like, 20' x 28' and put an eight foot covered porch on the front, do you think you'll ever be sitting in there saying, Gee, I'm sure sorry we built this cabin so big"?









That made sense. It wouldn't cost a thing to make a materials list and start getting some prices, so we just figured our first numbers based on the 20' x 28' scenario, and my own floor plan. I did a pretty good job for a non-architect with some graph paper, figuring in a half loft for sleeping, a staircase to it, ten foot sidewalls so there was room to stand in the loft via a two foot knee wall, a kitchen area, a great room, and a west and south entrance. The basic layout also featured lots of windows.

I didn't really want a log cabin. Popular design these days, around here anyway, are these Amish-built sqaure log cabins, but they are lazy designs. Fast and rustic. Instead of being properly dove-tailed and then chinked, they are just constructed by laying rough sawn square logs on top of one another, making for buildings that can't keep mice out and are prone to premature rot since moisture can, and is, wicked in between logs where the contact each other. They look good from a distance, but I think they are crap. I wanted a stick-built, stud construction building, so I could insulate the hell out of it. Log siding would do fine. It doesn't look like real logs, but it's attractive enough for me.

And, dad talked me out of a fireplace, even though he could have built me a gorgeous one. It made sense when he said, "You gotta cut the wood or buy the wood. Then you gotta stack the wood somewhere. Then, you're hauling it into the cabin and it's dirty and messy and the bugs are crawling out of it when they warm up. Then you gotta worry about keeping the chimney clean. And worse, most of the heat goes right up the chimney. I love a fireplace. Everyone loves a fireplace. It's very romantic. But, I tell you, if it were me, I'd go with gas. Clean, cheap and easy."

It was hard to argue with.


One might think that building the cabin down at the river would be the perfect place, but not so. The law won't allow building in the flood plain, and that's good. A cabin wouldn't last the first real flood. I decided where I wanted to build the cabin...in the woods. Dad wanted to see the proposed site, so I walked him west of the property entrance and, as it were, into the woods along the hillside. South exposure, pretty thick woods. Once we reached about 900 feet from the gate, about half way across the width of the property, in a spot that was about 60 or so feet off the valley floor, I stopped and turned and said, " I want to put it right here."

There was a pause.

"Are you friggin' insane?" he barked.
"Nope. Wanna build it right here, away from the road, in the woods."
"You got any idea how hard it is to work on this kind of an incline?"
"Won't be a problem. Larry will doze a level building site."
"Well, that's true. You're absolutely sure this is where you want it, this far in?"
"Absolutely, dad."
"OK then. We'll build her here."

To my delight and surprise, after we got prices for dozing, road building, gravel, pouring footers, and virtually all the materials for the cabin, it was a mere, miraculous $15,000. We were able to add the amount to the initial $60,000 we borrowed without a problem.

In the spring of year two then, Fortun Dozing and Excavation arrived and dozed a road to my future cabin and then a nice little building site. I had him make the road do a teardrop around the cabin site. Drive in, stay right and go right around the building and back out the way you came in. He left a beautiful oak tree right next to where the cabin would be and pushed, at my request, two gigantic rocks he had turned out of the ground right up next to the tree. He leveled a spot at the outside edge of the teardrop for an outhouse. In August, we started construction.

We had decided, no water, no electricity...which meant no frozen pipes and no monthly bill for being on the grid. I have a well on the property near the front gate, so we just haul fresh water up in big water dispensers. We also decided we would completely wire the cabin, in case we ever decided to go electric. But to start, we powered it with 12 volt DC marine batteries which we could take home and recharge. (We could also go solar one day if we chose.) The cost of the DC ceiling fan was even included in our budget, as was a gas generator to power the tools we needed to build the cabin.










I can't remember who we had in with the backhoe to dig the footers and the outhouse hole, or the company that poured the cement footers themselves. But after those two steps and the dozing, I only hired two other jobs done, a professionl roofer to come in for one morning and coach me and a team of volunteers to shingle the cabin, mostly to get us off on the right foot, and my neighbor and his brother to come in at the end and spray a texture on the drywall ceiling. Other than that, we did everything...Dad, Rob, me...and a handful of friends who would come when they could for a little help and support.

We laid the block foundation on the footers, proceeded to floor joists, laid a floor and painted it to seal it off, formed stud walls, framed out the building, installed windows and doors, covered the studs completely with a layer of plywood (not press board), sunk massive posts and built the 28' deck, covered the exterior with log siding, formed the rafters, roofed it, shingled it, constructed the loft and insulated the entire building...all by later November. It was toasty warm with a gas furnace by deer season. I shot my deer right off the deck that year. There was a good deal of interior work to finish in the spring, but we had taken the bull by the horns, thanks to my dad, and done the unthinkable. I suddenly had my own cabin in the woods.

We even had enough leftover materials to build an 8' x 12' combination two hole outhouse and tool shed. Life was good. No more squatting in the woods.

Although many finishing touches would come later, I will never forget the visual of my dad, sitting in a chair by candle light, his eyes wandering all over the interior construction of our project, praising the good job we had done.


"I'm so happy I was able to do this for you" he said. "Glad you didn't wait too long."
"Me too, dad. Me too."

Insulated, secure and ready for deer season.