My Cabin in the Woods

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to build a cabin. A nice, old-fashioned cabin, tucked into some picturesque site. My cabin would have a large hearth, Hudson’s Bay blankets on the rope-strung beds, maybe some kind of rustic rug on the floor, and would be cozily primitive. I picture getting up on a cold morning and making ranch-style coffee in an old chipped enamel coffee pot, heated on some left-over coals in the hearth.

I’m not sure where this comes from but I suspect it has to do with my parents. Their generation, at least in the Colorado Rockies where they went to college, met and fell in love, was into cabins. Somehow the quiet dreams of one generation pass down to the next in an invisible cascade, filling our ways and attitudes almost without our knowing it.

One of the ways my child brain was filled was through art and drawing. I have memories as a six-year old watching my Dad draw his cartoons and drawing fancy letters with his Speedball pens, going to watercolor classes later, and learning from my mother to draw and observe. We also had a cabin, and spent a lot of time there.

I don't draw much any more, and shoot a lot of photographs instead. Building skill as a photographer is a complex, demanding process, and once in awhile I'm pleased with the results. This is rewarding. But something's been missing.

In his wonderfully competent book, “The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa,” Michael Kimmelman talks about the emergence of amateur photography when George Eastman came out with his Brownie camera, and how it replaced the fine art of sketching.

“Before cameras, educated, well-to-do travelers learned to sketch so that they could draw what they saw on their trips, in the same way that, before phonograph recordings, bourgeois families listened to music by making it themselves at home, playing the piano and singing in the parlor. Cameras make the task of keeping a record of people and things simpler and more widely available, and in the process reduced the care and intensity with which people needed to look at the things they wanted to remember well.”

Echoing this way of seeing and of recording sight by drawing, my mother wrote to her mother often and later, to us children, and frequently included her own drawings of things she had seen. Perhaps her desire to draw rather than photograph stemmed from an earlier cultural prototype that came from pre-brownie times.

In Kimmelman's view, to draw is to see more acutely, and thus experience our surroundings with greater intensity and authenticity. My sister gave me his book for Christmas this year, which increasingly seems prophetic. My mother gave me her treasured copy of Sara Midda’s book, “South of France – A Sketchbook,” full of hundreds of little sketches and observations, and a blank sketchbook. Quite independently, my brother also gave me a beautiful leather-bound journal, ready to be filled with drawings, thoughts and collages.

Perhaps these vectors of thought and intention reflect a greater process of handing down ideas and attitudes about life, art and observation, from ancestors who drew and wrote to record their thoughts and experiences. Perhaps it's also a message, alerting me to the possibilities and imperatives of opening my own eyes to see, observe and experience in an more authentic way.

It is both frightening and exhilarating to contemplate making little sketches of my surroundings, instead of using the camera. Today’s brownie camera is an incredibly competent machine of optics, digital processing, software and image processing all contained in a small portable package about the same size as the old box camera — but with skilled industrial design in the form of hand grips and display graphics. It is so easy to use, and I find my thought process being that of instant comprehension and almost instant manifestation of the image I see in my head. Instant concept, instant results.

I wonder if all this speed and processing is but a complex smokescreen, that comes between me and the world. Perhaps that’s why sketching seems so frightening – I must come out of headspace and really look at things the way they are.

I’ve long thought that anyone can learn to draw competently, since drawing is about 95% observation and 5% manual skill. If you can write your own signature, you have enough manual skill to draw, I’ve often said. But that belies the hard work of observation.

That hard work lies behind the fear of drawing that I feel. Yet I’m drawn to it, and want to draw now. It seems simpler, more authentic, more difficult and probably in the end, more sustaining. I justify these thoughts by saying to myself that if I draw, I will learn to see better and that will inform my photography. But I know that there’s something more going on, something mysterious, ineffable and primal.

Similarly, this deep desire to build and spend time in a small, hand-built cabin somehow connects to a basic vein of desire to connect to texture, to be engaged in authentic process. I feel a deep need to shuck the plastic of civilization in order to get back to a kind of world-contact that is only dimly remembered, in large part through the passed-along memories of my ancestors.

Not surprisingly, one of my most treasured books is “Your Cabin in the Woods,” by Conrad Meinecke. First published in 1945 (the era of my parent’s youth), this book is a handbook of methods and plans for cabins from the extremely basic to the large lodge, but all made by hand, of native materials. It’s extensively illustrated in one of my favorite styles, the romantic pen and ink style of travel posters and stories of the West. Crooked pine trees in dark black provide background for quaint drawings of secure-looking cabins, each with a curl of lazy carefree smoke rising from the chimney. Just looking at these drawings gives me a feeling of safety and contentment.



The book was also given to me by my sister, in a Christmas past. It’s been on my bookshelf, close to hand, ever since. Now that I have some land and maybe enough trees to build a cabin, it may be possible to manifest the dream of building my cabin in the wooods. It will take much work. I wonder if I’ll have the fortitude to build it. Cutting trees and fitting logs, even with chainsaws is hard, slow work. So is building a fireplace and chimney of rock.

I’ve selected a little spot where the woods give out onto a meadow overlooking Shade Mountain. Perhaps by going very slowly, one bit at a time, I can confront the work and skills needed to build it. It would be wonderful to complete the cabin in 2009, which would be 30 years since my vision was given form through the book my sister gave me, back in 1979.

If a dream or vision lasts for 30 years, it must be real, and is thus worth respecting. In the process of trying to build it, maybe I’ll learn something about facing hard work and challenge, and why I love this land so much.