Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman

by Patrick Hutchison

I stood there for a moment, savoring the anticipation of weekends spent with friends, crisp fall days burning leaves, long summer nights by the river, cozy winters huddled up inside, big snow, deer, bears, drinks, smoke, fire, wood, axes, sweat, tears, laughter. The structure was already a lifetime of memories and I hadn’t even taken a step toward it.

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.

On Mondays, you’d ask everyone about their weekend. Tuesdays were harder since weekend adventures had already been discussed, so we’d discuss the weather. If you were lucky, someone had been fired or hired, or some other office gossip had emerged. The boldest and most bored among us would begin discussing upcoming weekend plans on Wednesday. The rest of us would try to wait until at least Thursday. On Friday, all talk was of recognizing how glad we all were that it was Friday. These conversations were repeated ad nauseam every week.

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.

Knowing I had the perfect escape made the desire to escape more manageable, as if seeing light at the end of the tunnel made being in the tunnel a bit more tolerable.

We joked about the cliché office dramas, about people not washing their dishes, about the one guy that didn’t think twice about microwaving fish for lunch and subjecting an entire floor of a thirty-story office building to the smell of day-old cod, about the pointless meetings where you spend an hour hearing people using mountains of acronyms you don’t understand to explain the solution to problems you don’t care about.

I tried working harder, taking on extra projects, hoping the extra effort would unlock some feeling of ownership or sense of shared accountability, but it never did. Inevitably, I’d slip back into just sort of plodding through the day, doing about the minimum required, because working harder didn’t seem to help me and didn’t seem to matter to anyone else.

I wasn’t doing much besides going to work, coming home, and going to sleep. Sure, there were dinners with friends and weekend trips here and there, but the majority of time was spent in the monotony of a routine I could not find engaging. There’s a truth to the saying that your work doesn’t define who you are, but damn if it isn’t hard to believe otherwise when you’re in it.