I dreamed of getting out of the city, a long ways out of the city, to a most basic yet fully-sufficient way of life, living in a single-story frame dwelling, with clapboard walls, the kind of windows you would actually open to let in the breeze, and no television, phone, or computer (pretty primitive, I'd say!). This structure stood in a large, sort-of-hilly, sort-of-grassy area, and I don't recall a single neighbor (at least that you could hear). Indoors, the accomodations seemed spartan, yet everything was organized and in its place. It looked clean, like someone had been preparing it for my arrival the way the housekeeping staff makes up a hotel room for a new guest.
It's hard to compare this Cabin with any one specific place. Maybe it was a bit like the caretaker's cottage next to the great, locked estate house in that famous winter sequence from "Doctor Zhivago," which I happened to see on TV in the motel room when I went to Orlando, Florida with my family in February. From what I read, a lot of Russian dwellings are still like that today. Or maybe, really, it was like our rustic, pine-paneled cabin rooms from the Skyline trip into the Blue Ridge on 19-20 July 1997, which I helped coordinate for the Y.A.C.H.T. Club at Good Shepherd Parish. I took the featured photo of Fell Cabin at Skyland Lodge (above), with my truck parked there, on that trip. Another good comparison might be the shelter at my cousin's friend's deer hunting camp, which I visited a few years ago when I flew to the edge of the great Wisconsin dairylands in Upper Peninsula Michigan. Since there isn't as much high-paying work in northern Michigan as there is in the Metro Washington, DC area, you can easily buy a large tract of land for the kind of prices you pay for single homesites in Fairfax County, VA. The camp, from my fading recollection, was cobbled together out of plywood, spare shingles, and pieces of old "manufactured homes" (trailers), and featured a wood-burning stove in its main room. I could tell that the owner, who was an outdoorsman like so many in the UP, must have found considerable solace there.
Well, that's what the dream was about...a place of rest. Maybe it's this life that people like us in the city lead. I would wonder how to build a piece of such a Cabin right at my home in the city, after thinking of this. It's the kind of thing you'd hear Sarah Ban Breathnach go on about in the decor and interior design sections of "Simple Abundance"--the "sacred space". Sometimes, I shut the computer off and get a start on such silence in the house, on my days off. But the TV and the phone, too...no, I'd miss something then.
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