Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman

by Patrick Hutchison

At one point, there was a plan to become a doctor. Instead, I double majored in anthropology and history. It’s hard to imagine an educational shift more perfectly suited to destroying a person’s job prospects.

Anticipation is an underrated feeling. It is that moment when all the possibilities of what could be pile up, and you can’t help but wonder if there’s a chance that what’s to come might just be the best thing that’s ever happened.

But this was not a half-million-dollar house in the city. This was a $7,500 shack in the woods without so much as a light switch. Employing the normal professionals for this transaction would have been like putting a helmet on to empty the dishwasher. Instead, there was just Tony and me and the hope for trust between strangers.

Most of the smoke had dissipated—though, in hindsight, I realized that fear of a smoke alarm would have required our smoke alarms to have fresh batteries in them or at least, and possibly more importantly, to exist in the first place.

“Dude, McLendon’s doesn’t even carry Bosch,” I replied, sighing with the undeserved confidence of someone who had learned less than twelve hours ago that A) Bosch was a company, B) they made power tools, C) they were considered good, D) McLendon’s didn’t carry them, and E) McLendon’s was a hardware store.

I had been up to the cabin twice since buying it nearly a month before. Once to show my brother, who eyed it with the sort of suspicion only a loving family member can, a complex mix of feigned enthusiasm, general concern, and sincere fear as he stood balancing on the skeletal frame of what I promised him would one day be a charming little deck.

On the inside, wide cedar boards covered portions of the wall with the alignment normally reserved for glued letters on a ransom note. The plan was to take it all down and replace it with the cheapest plywood I could find.

Growing up, most of us didn’t have the benefit of a father who taught us the sorts of things you see fathers teach their kids in movies. And if we did, we didn’t have the sense to listen to them. We didn’t know how to build houses or fix cars. We didn’t know the difference between a jigsaw and a scroll saw or why you might want an orbital sander versus a palm sander. We faked our way through engine trouble when girls were around, and we tried our best to offer firm handshakes whenever we could, even if the strongest thing we normally gripped was a Nintendo controller or a guitar neck. As adults, our fears of lost security deposits kept us from the sorts of trial-and-error projects that might have offered a few lessons in home renovation, but that certainly didn’t mean we didn’t want to. The cabin was practice. Most importantly, it was practice in a place far from the prying eyes of people who might see what we were doing and offer some criticism. It was a safe space.

“Don’t do it!” I yelled as I drove past. They waved and smiled the way serial killers might if you let them babysit your kids.

All too often, an average evening at home would consist of little more than sitting on the couch, phone in hand, letting my attention lazily ping-pong between Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and whatever happened to be on TV. Hours were spent like this. Days were spent like this. Weekends were lost to this behavior.

Whatever it was, it was just too damn easy to live like that. Worse was seeing so many others living the exact same way, making it almost impossible to justify the feeling that something about it was wrong.

So much of that time was spent feeling like I had come too far to turn back, to choose another direction. Each year older, each year deeper into a field meant more experience but less flexibility. It was like digging a hole and then stopping to wonder if it was too deep to get out of, then going right back to digging. The problem with that kind of reasoning and being the sort of person who buys into it is that the trap it creates only becomes stronger with each passing year.

had always been a camper. From as early on as I could remember, our family spent summer weekends up at Lake Crescent on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.

Lake Crescent rocks

The work involved in achieving warm and dry and clean and fed made the comfort that derived from it all the sweeter.

Eventually, in a blind rage, I’d rip the whole nozzle and cap assembly free, destroying its plastic components in the process, and then feverishly dump gas wherever I damn well pleased. Free of all constraints, it would gurgle with intoxicating fervor and tremendous inaccuracy, ensuring that everything within a two-foot radius was baptized in petrol and the can was empty; me, chest heaving, eyes wide with lunacy. That is the kind of safety we have now. Luckily, I’ve always sorta liked the smell of gas.

Sometimes, the character of the message would allude to the community’s shadier side and give the page a bit of illicit excitement. One woman complained that “a few” of her “outside refrigerators” had been stolen. Instead of commonsense follow-ups inquiring about the necessity of exterior refrigerators—or several of them, for that matter—most comments merely offered their condolences and expressed concern about their own out-of-doors appliances.

Toward the end of its life, the biggest problem was that the car would not reliably turn off. I’d roll into my high school parking lot, find a space, turn the ignition off, remove the key, step out of the car, shut the door, and stand there watching as it continued to sputter and shake with life.

What I was worried about was being defined as someone who didn’t have the courage or gumption or intelligence or whatever was necessary to get out of spending half his waking hours on a task and at a place that he didn’t enjoy or find fulfilling. I didn’t care if I was or wasn’t a writer. I was worried I was someone who let life just sort of happen to them.

found myself heavily involved in an affair of purpose, finding more confidence and self-esteem at the end of a measuring tape than I did buried in an overloaded inbox.

Ten minutes after she set foot on the ladder, we were racing down the highway, her right hand held aloft with a comically large amalgamation of blood-soaked paper towels and duct tape. It took eight stitches to close up her index finger.

What’s not rare is the quiet, persistent voice that nags us into wondering what else might be possible, what change might be a bit better for us in the long run. This story is about what happens when we give that voice room to grow. It reminds me of the water thing.