Log cabin getaway is proof: It’s still possible to carve out a simpler life

I write about hiking, travel and all kinds of adventures, but nothing seems to capture imaginations as much as my log cabin. It’s everyone’s fairy tale getaway, a cabin in the Oregon Coast Range with no road, no internet, no cell phones and no worries. It’s where I do my best writing ― on a typewriter.

Janell and I built the cabin by hand for $400. That’s right, you can still build a house for $400 if you cut the logs and split the roof shakes yourself.

While we were building the cabin we found out why my parents had gotten the land so cheap. It wasn’t just the lack of a road. The previous homesteader had almost certainly been murdered there, leaving a ghost story.

Janell and I decided to interview the neighbors to try to figure out who killed him. As it turned out, there are only six families that live in this valley in the Coast Range. Every one of them had a motive to kill the old guy, and they all blamed each other. After 20 years we a missing witness turned up, and we realized who it was.

So, yes, we sort of solved a real murder mystery. At least we laid to rest the ghost that had troubled our woods. And now we live there most of the summer, and still have to hike in a mile and a half, carrying our two cats.

Let me explain how it all started.

My father was the editor of the Salem newspaper, the Oregon Statesman. In the 1960s he had to write headlines about the Vietnam War, nuclear bombs and race riots that were burning cities. In case civilization crashed, he bought an abandoned homestead on a remote coastal river as a survivalist retreat.

But J. Wesley Sullivan was a man who wore suits and polished shoes. He was not really going to go back to nature when the world went south.

Then came the 1970s. I was a young freelancer, writing articles for The Mother Earth News. I suggested that Janell and I build a log cabin on my parents’ derelict property. I remember my mother saying, “How much harm can they do?”

We had no money. All we knew about log cabins was what we had read in books. But we had the necessary tools.

My grandfather had just died at the age of 84. He had been a millwright in the 1930s, when Portland was a timber town. A stingy, tough old cuss, he was a sawmill machinist who had become the powerful leader of a labor union. The family assumed he had squirreled away a fortune. They sent me, the youngest grandson, to scramble up into the attic of his house in southeast Portland to find his hidden treasure.

There was no pot of gold in the attic. Instead all I found were a crosscut saw, an ax and an adze. Why had Grandpa treasured such things so highly?

I decided that these tools had been the insurance policy of a self-reliant man. He had lived through the Depression, when society really did collapse. If things went south again, a millwright could use these three tools to build a home in the woods.

I wondered: Could I?

Janell and I had never actually cut down a tree, but we were young and thought it couldn’t be that hard. My parent’s remote 53-acre property had a half mile of riverfront and 30 acres of young hemlock trees that needed thinning.

We didn’t have a car, so we borrowed a pickup, bought a rickety wooden rowboat for $35, and took a load of camping supplies to the dairy farm across the river from the property.

The cabin we built in the first two summers was only 9-by-12 feet. We cut each tree with the crosscut saw, peeled off the bark, and dragged it down to the cabin site. I flattened the sides of the logs with Grandpa’s adze and chopped notches with his ax.

For the roof we needed cedar shakes — but we had no money. Cedar trees were hard to find, having been hunted almost to extinction in Oregon by shake mills.

The dairy farmer across the river knew a trick about cedar. Although the big trees were gone, old cedar logs would float loose in high water. He didn’t know how to swim, but he ventured out onto the flooding river in his little boat to lasso cedar logs as they drifted by. One of the logs ended up on our side of the river. He agreed to trade it to me if I would buck hay bales for a summer.

These days the cedar shakes you can buy at lumber stores are tapered because they are sawn in half lengthwise to save money. The shakes I cut were not tapered. With a mallet and a froe I rived a thousand of them in the traditional way. When they split loose with a twang the scent of cedar is strong.

Nailed onto the purlins — the lengthwise logs that held up the roof — the shakes ping and twang in the rain like a marimba.

And then Janell was pregnant. With kids on the way the cabin had to be bigger. I added a front room with a porch, a spiral staircase, and an upstairs master bedroom. The original cabin became the kitchen. That called for a new and better woodstove, with an oven that could bake bread, and lots of chrome. Hauling that beast in along the 1½-mile trail took several days.

Since then, there have been many changes, but the cabin remains as it was, lost in time. The dairy farmer stopped swimming his cattle across the river to use our pasture. After that we tore out the fences to see what the wild would bring. A herd of elk took over, and have since increased to 75 head.

Blackberries attempted to take over the pasture. I kept digging them out, and then decided to farm them. I keep the vines confined, but now harvest the fruit and make blackberry wine. It’s great.

Our kids grew up spending summers at the cabin. They had no computers, no phones and no soda pop. Instead they climbed trees, caught frogs and read books. Surprise! They turned out fine.

Now when our grandchildren visit the log cabin each summer they delight in exploring the forest, playing games and having time to read books.

Maybe that’s why my stories about the log cabin strike such a chord with my readers. Our backwoods cabin is more than just a nostalgic getaway. It’s a reminder that there is a simpler life, and it’s not just a dream.