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QuickTake:
Each October we board up the windows and abandon the place for six dark months, returning in May with anticipation.
With summer around the corner, it’s time to start dreaming about your favorite Oregon getaway — perhaps a campsite in the mountains or a cabin near the beach. But you also worry about the changes you might find there.
This is particularly true for the remote log cabin Janell and I built on a coastal river 48 years ago. Our cabin has no road, so we have to hike in a mile and a half. In winter, floods can close that trail. Cold rains make it inhospitable. Each October we board up the windows and abandon the place for six dark months.
We return in May with excited anticipation — and a flutter of nervousness. Even if all goes well, opening the cabin for summer is a big job. I suppose we could do it in a day if we tried, but usually it takes a week — cleaning up trails, restocking shelves and seeing what’s new.
We park our car behind a locked gate, just out of sight of the paved county road. From there we backpack in supplies for the season. I intentionally leave the trail hidden and a little rough.
The path starts by crossing a waterfall. Then there’s half a mile of mud before the trail enters the woods — giant, old-growth spruce trees along the river.
Finally we reach a first view of the guest cabin, a wood-frame structure from 1987. Ten years after Janell and I began arduously hewing our log cabin out of the woods, my brother built this plywood cabin in three weeks. He said he was demonstrating how normal people do things — which is to say, fast.
Beyond the guest cabin, there’s still another quarter mile of trail before you reach the log cabin itself.
One of the first jobs of summer at the cabin is mowing the lawn. Because the grass is usually 5 feet tall by May, I do this the old-fashioned way, with a scythe. Usually 10 cartloads of grass have to be hauled to the compost pile.
Once the lawn is mowed, it’s time to check the water line and set up the solar hot tub. The creek near our cabin doesn’t have enough elevation to pipe water into the house itself, so the only plumbing is a faucet in the front yard. From there we carry buckets into the cabin’s kitchen. But there is enough water pressure to fill a hot tub in the lower part of the yard.
The tub consists of a heavy-duty plastic cattle trough that we bought years ago at Coastal Farm Supply for $128. Two black garden hoses extend to a pair of recycled solar panels in a sunny part of the yard. When the sun shines, a small solar-powered pump moves hot water from the panels to the tub.
On our second day at the cabin, Janell and I hike back to the car to haul in a final load of supplies.
By our third day it’s time for me to oil up the typewriter in the writing cabin and start work on my next book. I built this little 7-by-10-foot hut as a place to escape the hectic life at the log cabin itself. That sounds like a joke, but in fact I find it’s easiest to write if I’m completely alone with no distractions. Each summer I generate a sheaf of typewritten pages. When I get back to Eugene, I retype everything into a computer.
Also on our third day, Janell traditionally makes the log cabin cozy by cooking a gigantic “monsterone” soup on the wood stove.
By the fourth day we’re curious to get word from the outside world. Because we have no cell phone or Internet reception at the log cabin, checking emails requires a half-hour hike up to the “Internet Log.” In a barren pass, the Log overlooks vast expanses of clear-cuts, our patch of wildness along the river and a distant slice of the Pacific Ocean.
Our fifth day often starts with breakfast on the picnic table in our cabin’s front yard. I built the table from a tree that fell across our access trail. That project required just eight lag bolts and 80 cents of chainsaw gas. The finished table weighs 1,200 pounds.
By the sixth day it’s time to clear the overgrown River Trail. This path traverses the forest around the edge of an old pasture, passing two “walk-through” spruce trees that grew over stumps. Now that the stumps have rotted away, the trunks have caves at the bottom.
Further along the river path is a rusty old mower, a piece of horse-drawn machinery left by the original homesteader here before his death in 1964.
The largest trees on our property are a pair of Sitka spruces 7 feet in diameter and 150 feet tall. Before World War I, when the U.S. Army logged this valley to provide spruce for biplanes, all the trees were probably this big. These two were left for fear they would fall across the river and span it.
Janell likes to sit by those spruces, watching the river in the late afternoons. To provide a shortcut across the pasture, I hack a path through the tall grass from the cabin. If this sounds easy, consider that I’ve measured grass in this field 11 feet tall. Even after cutting a path, we mark the route with flagging to find the way.
And on the seventh day of summer we rest. I put my feet up and swing in the hammock. The two housecats we carry in each year sprawl on the front porch, their paws in the sun.
We celebrate our first week by opening a bottle of last fall’s blackberry wine. The May sun heats the hot tub to scalding temperatures in the afternoon, but then the water begins to cool. When the stars come out, the tub’s temperature is perfect for a soak. We relax sore muscles after a week’s work. And then, up the spiral staircase with a candle to bed.
I imagine everyone wants their favorite summer getaway to be a Brigadoon — a dream that materializes unchanged, year after year, immune from the troubles of the outside world. But life isn’t quite that way. Families grow up. Kids move on. New life emerges. I’m sure it’s for the best.
Still, I find myself wishing, as we drive to the trailhead at the start of summer, that our hideaway will be the same as always — exactly as it remains in our dreams.
