The
Wish to Live Deliberately: Building a Cabin and its Consequences
The last few
years I've been spending my summers and, as you read below, one
Christmas, in the forest in central New Brunswick. I bought a
large wooded acreage, built a cabin over a summer, and since then
I've returned every year, discarding the attraction of the phone
and the internet, and immersing myself in the forest.
I first lived
on the land in a shack I built in a handful of days, although
it was November and below freezing every night. By the following
summer, I built the main cabin, and I've added to it considerably
in the intervening years. I recorded those early days by candlelight;
even while I was sleeping in my car in the late fall I was scratching
a pencil across a diary of building, living in, and then insulating
a shack. I survived hurricanes blowing through the province, sub-zero
temperatures, and high water that stranded me on the wrong side
of the creek. Later, in slightly more commodious circumstances,
I brought fingers stiffened by construction to journaling how
I built the cabin that came to replace that temporary shack.
A number of
years later the cabin is nearly done. Although I can always find
a project to work on-such as adding to the functionality of my
ever-evolving solar electrical system-I've spent much of my time
writing, reveling in the chance to read, gardening, and appreciating
the animal life around me. I've stayed in the cabin in both summer
and winter, and because the experience changes with the seasons,
I've maintained a record of those times as well. As if it were
the child I detail in my examination of adoption films, this journal
collection covers two very different timelines and overall just
over nine months. In that way, it is a story about the conception
of an idea, the gestation of its building, and the squalling much-anticipated
delivery which is the final product of the cabin. Those two timelines
are bookends of both a life alone in the woods and a grand adventure
in living.
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