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January 22, 2007 ~ Longing
Monday.
My WordGoddess prompt for the month comes from Heather: "If only I were..."
Hiking along Suicide Ridge with Grove in the sling one day last spring, I noticed a faint track leading off down the back of the ridge--a faint depression with slightly less vegetation and sticks broken by footfalls. Always eager for new ground to explore, I followed it down into the thick-leaved rhododendrons and wiry mountain laurels.
When I stepped out into a small clearing, I was surprised to find a thin, curly-haired girl standing next to a cabin the size of a large car. Reading the surprise on my face, she said, "Oh, don't worry, you're not intruding. Want to look at my cabin?" She explained that she'd originally created it for an art class, but that she now spent a lot of time living in it instead of her dorm room.
I stepped down paving stones carefully cut into the mountainside around to the front of her cabin. Glass marbles, shells, and ceramic shards were worked in with the paving stones forming beautiful designs. She opened the hinged wooden door, and we ducked inside.
I was extremely impressed with all of the work that she put into the place. Unlike other huts I had found in the woods on campus, here I could stand up straight without brushing the roof. The timber frame was air tight, packed with red clay. Here and there bottles and colored glass had been laid into the walls, and a full window stretched across one side of the cabin. Shells and beautiful trinkets were worked in to the clay of the walls. Little shelves protruded with candles. A sleeping platform took up one end of the room with a hand-woven grass mat and handmade wool blankets. A stone-and-mortar fireplace with a functioning chimney was next to the door, and she had even included an oven compartment separate from where the wood fire was laid. The hard-packed dirt floor had been swept until it shone. A deer-hide rug covered the middle of the floor, and when I looked closer I realized that she was wearing hand-sewn clothes made from hide as well.
She enthusiastically explained everything that she'd done to create the cabin and its surroundings. She said she'd used tulip poplar bark for the roof shingles, but that it could only be collected a certain time of year or it would not come loose from the trunk. She looked ashamed when she said she hadn't actually killed the deer, but that her friend had given the fresh hides to her and she had tanned them herself, at least.
She said that she had been working on the place for years, and she got a little teary when she mentioned she'd be graduating in a few months and would have to leave behind her cabin. "But I made it all myself, at least, and I know that I can do it again, somewhere else." We talked for a while longer, and eventually Grove and I left.
I thought a lot about that little cabin in the weeks that followed. I imagined living a few weeks in a place like that--just fifty square feet with everything I needed, alone in the middle of rhododendrons on a lonely ridge. Sleeping huddled in a cocoon of wool and deer hide, a fire burning low on the hearth. Waking and walking out into the cold to squat under a laurel. Working to patch the mud of a wall as golden light streamed through the window and glowed red in the tiny room. Cooking my dinner over a fire, adding plants I'd gathered in the woods.
I'd done it a few times before, hiking to remote areas with everything I needed on my back, making camp, gathering food, sleeping under the stars or, once, lashing a makeshift shelter together against two trees when the snow turned to rain and threatened to soak me. I don't suppose many Americans today have even such limited experience of self-reliance in the outdoors as that. But primitive camping is still very different from the permanence of that little cabin, living there, day to day, in a place made by very hard work and ingenuity.
The issue that kept returning to my mind though, was that in my life right now, I couldn't just take off for a few weeks and live in a little cabin like that one. My responsibilities to Grove and the dogs and to Morgan made such a flight of fancy improbable at best, but more likely impossible. When we were college students, we hadn't realized just how free we were, despite work and class schedules. I could (and did) take off for a night or two to sleep under the stars, without worrying about dogs who needed to be fed, bills that needed to be paid, and a baby who needed to be kept warm and nursed a few times in the night. This girl with her little cabin in the woods talked about maybe starting over somewhere else, but more likely she'd be caught up like the rest of us in holding a job, paying her bills, perhaps tying herself down for love of family.
This feeling was not regret, exactly, but more a sort of nostalgia for something I never actually experienced. I am happy with my choices and my life. Were I back in those unfettered years, however, perhaps I would be sitting on a dirt floor in the warm afternoon light dabbing red clay into cracks in my cabin wall, thankful for the natural beauty around me, taking pride in the hard work of merely living.
Perhaps someday I will once again have that chance, but it will be different. Instead of solitude, perhaps I'll have a young boy along with me, eager to learn, excited to experience what few of his peers will ever know. Maybe we'll build our little cabin together, and he'll think he's the one learning and growing, but he won't be alone.
out the front window
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