Cabin in the Woods
The first time I ever stayed in a cabin in the woods for a night without adult accompaniment, I was 10 or 11. The cabin that I’m remembering was built by my older siblings and cousins and I feel lucky to have had that childhood experience thanks to their ingenuity and resourcefulness. I don’t remember what they built it out of, but I remember it had a roof and walls and a door and built-in bunks. Nancy, my neighbourhood friend, and I had to clean out a bit of squirrel and chipmunk scatterings before we could sleep in it, but that seemed natural. I think my younger sister and younger cousin were with us that first time, and Nancy, who was a whole year older than the rest of us, was in charge. The cabin was in a small woodlot on my aunt and uncle’s farm next to our farm. From the edge of the woods you could see our barn and house probably about one kilometer in the distance. This helped me a lot because at that age I tended to get a bit homesick sometimes. When it started to get dark, knowing I could stroll to the the forest edge and see the barnyard light over the fields eased my fears about being out in the woods on our own for the night. During the day it had all seemed like one great big adventure. We loaded up the ponies with our sleeping bags and some food and walked with them back to the cabin. The ponies were then set free in a small corral that my older siblings and cousins had thoughtfully included in their master plan (along with dirt-bike trails but that’s a story for another time). After we unloaded and swept the cabin and settled in, we let Nancy take the lead. She knew pretty much everything about camping out because she had been to overnight camp. Around the campfire, she taught us camp-songs and then showed us how to make cheerios and marshmallow squares with about a half a pound of butter in a fry-pan over the fire. We ate that sweet hot smoky buttery crunchy mess in big globs with our hands. And no one told us we couldn’t have more. I know that Henry David Thoreau built a cabin in the woods beside Walden Pond on his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property and spent most of a couple of years there writing a 300-page tome about his philosophy of life, politics and nature, but if he didn’t have smoky buttery cheerios with marshmallows, then I’d say his experience was incomplete. At Rise Above Guest House, remote cabins in nature are a significant part of our infrastructure, from the first one built in 2008, to the Juniper Cabin that we completed this summer. Aside from the first one we built, (Shekinah – which now sits next to the big house), each new cabin has its own private forested enclosure where you can spend time writing your own philosophy of life and nature, or concocting your own favourite campfire feast. Whatever you choose, the Land here will embrace you.