In the 1960s, while in college, I read “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau. He built a log cabin, lived by himself in the woods and wrote. I always wanted to do the same thing. My grandfather had a poem published each week in a newspaper, and wrote two books about growing up in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
In 1969, I was living in Everett with two brothers from Montana. One of the brothers was working at a grocery store that had its own beauty salon, and he wanted to date one of the beauticians. For New Year’s Eve we had a party, and he invited her and she brought three friends from beauty school. The first brother began dating the beautician, and they got married that summer. The other brother married one of the other girls that fall. That left me all alone.
One of my friends owned an old neighborhood grocery store with an old one-bedroom house behind it. I lived in that house for a year, went back to college, worked as a window washer, made log carvings and wrote poetry. I even had some of my work published.
In 1975, I married one of the girls from the party. I also got promoted to run a financial branch office in Eastern Washington.
Our neighbor bought 26 acres of timberland north of Colville, and I helped him build an A-frame cabin in the summer of 1978. We bought 20 acres next to him.
We went elk hunting that fall and, sitting around the campfire, I said I had always wanted to build a log cabin. My friend agreed to help and so did my father, who had retired.
I had no idea how to build a log cabin, so I went to a college bookstore and bought a how-to book. The author recommended that you cut the trees down before the sap is up in the spring. My neighbor and I snowshoed in on several feet of snow and cut down 26 Douglas fir trees on New Year’s Day 1979. A friend had a small bulldozer, and we leveled the site in the spring. My dad and I peeled the logs and put in the foundation logs and floor.
In July, I took a week’s vacation from my financial management job. My father and I put up the walls. Near the end of wall construction, my father broke his leg. How did he know it was broken? He said it just went “flippy floppy.” I took him to the regional hospital.
My neighbor friend showed up and we went back and put up the 34-foot purlins, without any tools. (Purlins are like rafters but they run the entire length of the building.) The next month, I picked up a truckload of cedar fencing from a company going out of business.
On Labor Day, my family wanted to see our progress, so we all went up and ended up putting most of the cedar roof layer on. My father wanted to help with the steel roof layer, so he and I attached the rolled steel roof — in the snow, during hunting season, while he still had a cast on his leg.
We installed the wood stove, the outhouse and a kitchen taken from a wrecked RV. The cabin was done.
For Christmas, my wife and our daughter went up to the cabin in the snow. But after two nights, our daughter wanted to go home because she didn’t think Santa could find her at the cabin.
Our company had a national company magazine, published quarterly. When the company found out about the cabin, we were asked to write an article with pictures. It went to 2,200 branch offices.
We snowshoed to the cabin many times until we moved to the coast and finally Clark County. The entire experience of reading about Thoreau’s adventures in the woods in “Walden” was an inspiration to do the same.
After more than 40 years, the cabin is still in very good shape. Many of our family and friends have gone with us to the cabin. We still go up there in the summer and hunt from it in the fall. It’s a good place to get away and reflect.
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