At the cabin, pleasure doesn't come from perfection

Posted by adn_jomalley

Posted: May 31, 2009 - 9:54 pm

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Me, age 10, with my brothers Joseph and Anthony on the dock at the cabin. Have your own cabin photos? Click here to upload to our reader-submitted Alaska cabin photo gallery. Click here to see photos that people have submitted.

I should have expected to find myself with my friend Adolf at Central Plumbing and Heating on a recent night, both of us squinting at a sales guy as he diagrammed the way to install a stove at my family’s cabin.

I also should have known that the project would unexpectedly require $90 worth of hoses, pipes, regulators and valves. Those were not mentioned when I purchased the stove last season at a large home improvement box store in town, but this was my fault. I bought into the reasoning of a pubescent salesman who told me installation of a propane stove at a cabin accessible only by canoe or trail would be “no problem!”

Anyway, anyone who has a cabin will confirm that cabin repairs are governed by a kind of modified, exponential version of Murphy’s Law that goes something like: “What gets planned will take forever.”

You will always: (1) schlep 10 times more stuff than you expect out there; (2) take 10 times longer to complete the project than you thought; (3) involve at least 10 people to assist you; (4) spend 10 times as much as you thought.

In this case, the stove had to be stored for months in my mother’s garage, driven across a frozen lake, dragged through the snow and lifted into place by my cousin and her husband. Then came installation advice from several big-box-store hardware people who sold me parts I later discovered would cause an explosion. Finally, I called my friend Adolf, who took me to Central Plumbing.

As cabin people know, all of this hassle is part of the deal. Such is the price you pay to get out of town, to escape to your own little hideaway in the spruces.

How many Anchorage people have a place out there they call “the cabin,” as if it were the only cabin on Earth? Maybe it’s in Hope or Homer or Talkeetna. Maybe it has Berber carpets and jet skis, flushing toilets and flat-screens. Or maybe it’s something like mine, a little homespun, a little rough-edged, a little Old World.

Perhaps there’s Tyvek on the outside, or clear plastic over the insulation on the inside. Maybe it needs a window or three. The way I see it, makeshift carpentry, renegade wiring, things undone under undulating blue tarps, it’s all part of Alaska cabin culture. Perpetual projects are as much a cabin custom as reading old paperbacks and drinking Swiss Miss.

You can’t get too hung up on the details at the cabin. You’re on vacation! There are only so many hours between coffee and beer. Anything that can’t be accomplished in that time has to be saved until next time. Anyway, what’s the rush?

About this time of year, I start to crave the cabin. I can’t wait to load up the car and put on my old jeans and drive out the highway with the dog in the back. I want to blow through Wasilla and take the Big Lake cutoff at the Gorilla Fireworks stand, to drive to where the pavement stops and then skitter down the gravel road until it turns to soft orange sand.

Sitting in my little half-cubicle at work, I get a picture in my head of the old trail from the dock, rutted with tree roots worn shiny by years of summertime pilgrims. I keep thinking about walking up that trail, fishing the key from its hiding spot and opening the old cabin door.

Many of the older places like ours on Horseshoe Lake burned in the 1996 Miller’s Reach fire. Insurance money built new ones with lawns and ringing phones and whirring motors. But by luck and smokejumpers, our cabin survived it and stays preserved, a canoe-in time warp to the ’60s .
There are paneled walls and a rusty wood stove. An old groaning pump in the kitchen draws water that tastes like metal and rain. The coffee’s done when it splashes into the glass bulb on top of a beat-up percolator. In the loft, there’s a stack of 40-year-old Look magazines with worn cover stories about JFK, and Martin Luther King, and the war in Vietnam.

Things aren’t perfect. The outhouse leans a little. Duct tape covers seams in the floors. My grandfather wired the place backward, so if you want to turn something on, you have to turn it off. And, until this summer, the original enamel oven was prone to belching balls of flame.

But what I like best at the cabin isn’t in the architecture. It’s the time just before I open my eyes in the morning, when the jet skis and power boats are quiet and the birch leaves lie still. Sometimes in that dreamy state, I forget how old I am, and it could be any summer of my childhood with loons crying and the cabin’s ancient smells: smoke and dog, kerosene and wet sand.

In that way the cabin is kind of a shrine to another time. Fixing it too much, making it too modern or finished would take away what makes it cool.

Luckily, I don’t see much danger of that.

By the time you read this, I hope to have finished last summer’s project. Next, maybe I’ll tackle the duct tape. Or the outhouse. Or maybe not.

We’ll need another project for next summer.

Have your own Alaska cabin stories? Send them to me and upload your cabin photos here (bonus for outhouse photos!).

Postscript: The cabin trip was a success, and stove is installed, but I'd like to make note of another event that made this trip especially memorable: my friend Rebecca Palsha, wife of my colleague reporter Kyle Hopkins, went into labor. Their healthy baby girl, Alice James Elizabeth Hopkins, was born Sunday, just after 7 p.m. Congratulations to them both!

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