Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman

by Patrick Hutchison

At times, I wished for some sort of test for contentment. I wanted to walk into a clinic and give my blood or swab my cheek and run my numbers to determine if my happiness levels were average or not. If they were low, I’d feel justified in making some big change. If things were fairly typical, I’d find ways to cope. My biggest fear would have been finding out that I was above average, that I was better off than most, that the aimlessness I felt all the time was actually as good as it could get. There’s a hopelessness that comes with reaching the peak of anything because once you’re at the top, there’s nowhere else to go.

There is a magic sweetness that comes from unlikely comforts. As any camper will tell you, food tastes better around a fire. Sleeping bags are somehow improvements on thick memory-foam beds. Brisk dips in a lake create memories that no shower could ever contend with. For the non-outdoors types, imagine the tingle you get when the seat next to you on an airplane is unoccupied. No one would choose a pair of economy plane seats for their living room, but if that’s what you end up with on a flight, you’ll feel as though you’ve been transported to a golden cloud. When people ask about your flight, the extra seat will become the highlight of your entire trip. People will ooh and aah at the thought, even when they are actively sitting on a reclining leather sofa in their own living room.

In fact, we made a bit of a tradition out of the moment when we’d pull off the highway and switch our phones to airplane mode. It was an intentional act to leave the world behind for a bit. Among the endless tasks of sourcing firewood and cooking and cleaning and shooting the BB gun at empty cans, one of our favorite activities wasn’t more complicated than simply sitting there and looking around. Doing so had made me hyperaware of the impact of a few lumens of light or an arrangement of blankets. It sounds a bit obsessive, but there was joy to the act.

The anxiety was like a trick to force me into a habit of cabin visits that were clearly benefiting my mental health in all kinds of ways. After a week or two or three under the fluorescent lights of my office, getting back to the cabin felt almost medically necessary, so much so that I often thought back to a time when doctors would prescribe “clear country air” to address the ailments of folks living in industrialized cities. I wondered how many people would still benefit from a prescription for cabin time instead of a bottle of pills.

Building things slowed down time, translated efforts into results that reverberated for decades. At a desk, I’d compose an email that was sent to thousands. At most, the pinnacle of engagement would be thirty seconds of someone’s time. More often, it was just a thing to delete. But there was a chance when I screwed a tread onto a set of stairs that it was just the first act of a lifetime that could span entire generations of friends and families who might step there, on their way up to sleep in the loft, on their way down after changing from a rainy romp in the woods.