Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison (St. Martin’s Press, 294 pages)
In 2013 Patrick Hutchison was despondent in Seattle, his dreams of becoming a writer going no further than composing marketing emails and doing other copywriting gigs. His twenty-something friends “were going off and doing ridiculous things like getting careers and advanced degrees, husbands, wives, kids, dogs, and other accoutrements of the heavy-responsibility genre.”
In contrast, Hutchison’s long-term plans “ended at knowing when the leftover Chinese food would go bad.”
One day the answer to his dilemma showed up on Craigslist: a listing for a decrepit 10×12 cabin in scenic Snohomish County, about an hour and a half drive away. The price: $7,500.
Despite not having $7,500 — or, for that matter, any handyman skills — Hutchison drove up to see the place and made an offer almost immediately. His memoir, Cabin, recounts the experience of making it habitable and in the process reinventing his life. It’s no Walden, the Henry David Thoreau classic, but it doesn’t aspire to be. It’s more a story of millennial angst in the internet age and the longing for competency, connection and meaningful work.
And, of course, nature. It wasn’t so much the cabin itself that seduced Hutchison as it was the land it was on, and the views.
“I knew people that had larger places to store their lawnmowers. Architecturally, it took inspiration from drawings of houses made by preschoolers. Box on bottom. Triangle on top,” Hutchison writes.
But it was nestled in an area that was thickly conifered, with mature trees and plentiful ferns, near the Skykomish River and an enormous waterfall that Hutchison says looked like something out of the Old Testament.
Not that the neighborhood was ideal. The street was ominously called “Wit’s End Place.” Other tiny cabins nearby were “charming in a dystopian sort of way,” and many were clearly abandoned. The driveway was basically a swamp. There was no electricity, cell service or plumbing. The closest wi-fi was at a McDonald’s 15 miles away. And there were spiders — so many spiders.
Nonetheless, Hutchison only saw its potential, both as a retreat and as an answer to incessant questions about what he was doing with his life. Fixing up a cabin in the woods seemed a pretty good answer to that. “At times, it felt like the cabin and I were partners in a sort of joint self-improvement project. When the cabin was all fixed up, maybe I would be too,” he writes.
Hutchison had friends who bought into his vision and were willing to make the trek and invest their own elbow grease to build a deck and an outhouse, among other projects. As such, this is no story of a self-made man improving his lot (literally and figuratively) in the woods.
While it’s true that Hutchison emerges as a different man at the end of the story, his cabin is not the do-it-yourself project that Thoreau’s was. Even the truck Hutchison used to haul stuff to the site was borrowed from his mother. It took a village and then some. But, to be fair, even Thoreau left Walden Pond every couple of days to eat a meal at his parents’ house and drop off his laundry, and the lot belonged to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Hutchison is genuinely funny and brings a light touch to his story of back-breaking work, particularly when it comes to his newfound infatuation with power tools. (In one scene he tells a cashier at a hardware store that he’ll also be buying a chainsaw and says he is “half expecting balloons to fall from the ceiling in celebration of such a rad purchase.”) At the same time, he is learning of the pleasures of old ways and old things, at one point bringing to the cabin a typewriter that had belonged to his late uncle, and realizing he had no idea how a typewriter worked.
There are, of course, challenges and dangers along the way, to include mudslides and falling trees. And Hutchinson, daydreaming of the cabin while he’s at his day job, doesn’t devote his whole life to the project — he is in and out of the woods while pursuing other adventures, including travel with a girlfriend who shares his distaste for the sort of life where you moor yourself to a job and a place.
He worries as the project progresses that the tiny cabin might be getting too comfortable, even in its simplicity. And 16 pages of color photos, which show the work and the results, do in fact make the place look like what has been called “cabin porn” — daydreams of a simpler existence off the grid with a wood stove glowing and light snow falling outside well-insulated windows.
These days you can buy a brand-new tiny house on Amazon for under $10K without all the work that Hutchison undertook. But his journey wasn’t about finding a place to live so much as it was about finding a reason to live, and in this his quest was like that of Thoreau, who famously wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life….”
Like Thoreau’s cabin, Hutchinson’s cabin will not be a permanent part of his life but serves as a stationary vehicle that transports him to a different way of being. Don’t look to Cabin for advice on how to restore a dilapidated tiny house or downsize your life, but as inspiration for going down the road less traveled, a well-oiled chainsaw in hand. B+ —Jennifer Graham
Featured Image: Cabin, by Patrick Hutchison
