The Wellspring of Inspiration

Where does inspiration come from?

Is it a sudden desire, a leap of faith? The first time I saw my husband on his land I knew this was an integral part of who he was. Brokenhearted over the loss of the cabin a few years earlier in the Hayman fire, his first visit back was the first time he'd seen the land without the cabin in over four decades, and it was a tough homecoming. By morning I knew he needed this place in his life again. Surveying the surroundings from the rocky outcrop above the old cabin site, I was ready to help make that happen, for him, for us.

Is inspiration an outgrowth of experience? When we decided to make the considerable investment (and I use that term loosely as the cabin will never be sold -- just enjoyed, shared, and handed on) to rebuild the family cabin it was after four years of experiencing weeks living the simple life -- no phone (cell or otherwise), no Internet, no television, no mail, no stores without a serious trek. Just us, our five acres, and seemingly endless wilderness, enough to get lost in (and I have), and we loved it, more every year. We couldn't get enough of it, even without running water or indoor plumbing. We were certain we wanted all of the rest of the summers of our lives on this hillside in the Rocky Mountains.

Is inspiration something that percolates up from your subconscious? How was it that within an hour of making what felt like a seemingly sudden decision I was able to sit down and sketch out a cabin that was quite similar to the drawings and specifications we've just put out to bid after a month of working on them? Were we processing the possibility all those years in the trailer, all the time saying "no way, this is fine"?

Is inspiration a pull from the past, a desire to recapture a time or a dream from your personal history, bring it to fruition for yourself and to share with those you love? I had a brief summer, my 21st, at a cabin in the mountains outside of San Diego. Fully indoctrinated in an appreciation for beautiful landscapes by my father who made Sunday roadtrips a family tradition, I've found love of place a determining factor my whole life. Here I am at that cabin (sitting in the plaid shirt) with my parents, my best beloved grandmother, and my sis.


In order to come up with the floor plan for the cabin, I had to visualize us in it. As it's small, by desire and by necessity, we had to think about what mattered most and how we were going to live in it and share it. I thought about other small places I'd enjoyed in my life and how they worked.

I was swept back to my grandmother's apartment, upstairs in the family home in Dearborn. Her biggest room was the kitchen/dining room. The treadle Singer sewing machine that she spent so much time at making me clothes shared the space. There was a corner hutch in the dining room, and always, on the table big enough to seat all five of us, there was a cheerful cloth with borders of fruit or flowers. I couldn't get the idea of those tablecloths out of my mind and went in search of vintage linens online. And they're out there. Well, not so many as before as I now have a nice little collection of them. The heavy smooth cotton, comforting spring colors, and patterns of abundance reminded me of a time when a carefully pressed and optimistic tablecloth was a sufficient decoration in a working kitchen -- no granite countertops or high end appliances required. Since the cabin will be primarily a summer retreat, I'm finding myself drawn to simple materials and playful colors, as carefree as we hope to be when we're there.

Is inspriation an effort to restore a family tradition for my husband and his children and other family, and to create a new tradition for us? Continuity is a powerful thing. There'd been a vacuum in my husband's life since the cabin burned. The trailer provided a means to an end, maintaining a relationship with the land, which is even more important than the abode that sits on that land. My husband's father was an excellent steward of the land, as well as the community of which the land is a part. Since returning to the land post-Hayman Fire, my husband has cleared burned trees and planted nearly 200 seedlings and young trees, more to replace those lost to beetles than to fire (blessedly few). He tends his land well and is a good neighbor and is following in his father's stewardship footsteps.


Inspiration grows out of all that we've been, experienced, and dreamed. It can be an outgrowth of the shared aspirations and desires of someone you love. My husband wants this huge part of life back, for himself, for me, for his family, and to honor a promise he made to his parents to never let the family retreat go. I'm going to do all I can to make certain that he gets it, and gets it with our own inspired spin.

The Heart of the Matter

After four years of summer vacations in a 33 foot long trailer, and loving almost every minute of them, during our recent 18 day stay we looked at each other and almost simultaneously realized we wanted to rebuild the cabin. Frankly, I often found the trailer quite romantic with its train car proportions, boat’s galley kitchen, and the encapsulated queen-sized bed in the aft. When we were alone there, adept at the waltz required of two people living in what was essentially a long hallway, our life was simple and intimate. Add even one person to the mix and suddenly the dance became a clumsy shuffle and everyone felt a slight tightening sensation of shrinking personal space. Add six to the mix with multiple dogs whining at the door and we became a sharp edged Chinese puzzle. The out of doors was our escape valve, but the usually welcome afternoon storms seemed to know when we had company and forced their way onto the guest list. We love our friends and family and want to experience our mountain retreat with them. But that is far from the only reason we’ve decided to rebuild the cabin.

A great deal of it is purely selfish. I grew up in San Diego, and almost every Sunday from about the time I hit a double digit age until my mid teens we had a family tradition of packing a picnic and hitting the road. It might be a short drive to the beach, or Silver Strand State Park on the bay side, a slightly longer drive into the rolling hills of Otay dotted with cattle and the occasional ranch house. Or we might go farther afield – Palomar Mountain with a visit to the observatory, Borrego Springs with a hike to the clustered palm oasis, or my favorite, Rancho Cuyamaca State Park. The narrow two lane road curved and twisted through oak pine forests, the roadside crowded by manzanita only to open suddenly to meadows and running creeks. There was a smell that I found nowhere else, sort of a dry dusty smell with the roundness of roasted nuts and the sharp clean notes of pine. That is the smell at the trailer on a warm rainless summer afternoon, and it evokes some of the best memories of my life.

I always wanted a cabin in the mountains. The closest I got was the summer I turned 21 and lived for a few months in a wonderful old house in Descanso, scant miles from Cuyamaca. I baked heavenly high-altitude oatmeal bread, watched the jays try to dominate both the feeder at the back of the house and the one at the front at the same time, and wandered around with my black lab. In the end the commute to San Diego, more the 5,000 foot ascent on the homeward leg than the hour each way travel time, rendered that adventure impractical with old cars. My lab, fond of following people on horseback down the dirt roads, didn’t come home one day (or ever), and I took it as a sign.

I never saw the A-frame. It was just a month after my husband and I got together that it burned. We had talked about a trip there soon – some simple provisions, hiking shoes, and a bag of books. The cabin looms large in family lore, from the summer in 1963 that the family camped on the land and built it, to my husband’s father’s first heart attack trying to clear the driveway of snow one winter, to his mother’s attempt at disciplining the hummingbirds warring at the feeder and her legendary trout fishing prowess. My husband, a teen at the time the cabin was built, remembers later weekends on his own there, stoking the fireplace and reading to his heart’s content. His children never knew life without the cabin until it was lost. His daughter recently said that there were three key elements for her at the cabin: the deck with its built in seating and its view of the valley and the mountains beyond, the fireplace which roared during the cooler months, and the kitchen table where they gathered for family meals and cutthroat board and card games.

In the end the wellspring of inspiration for the cabin will come from many places. From my grandmother’s vintage tablecloths in an upstairs apartment in Dearborn to a lifestyle ingrained in my husband’s family history. We’ll do our best to honor the family memories, re-creating a place where the family can resume its traditions, and creating new traditions for my daughter and our friends who, like me, never saw the original cabin. There will be a big table, a deck with built in seating, and a wood burning stove to gather around. It will be built to accommodate, without fuss, grandkids and dogs. We’ll have a retreat from the Tucson summers that keep us inside far too much of the time, and a simplified life where the nearest place to get a gallon of milk is at the end of 16 miles of dirt road, which does tend to focus the mind during provisioning trips. But the time between provides one with the space to settle on what matters most, where whole long days, waking and retiring with the sun, can seem an endless meditation, and the most arduous decision you make is what to cook for dinner. Time for the heart of the matter – reflecting on the natural world and being with the ones you love.

Beginnings, endings, and beginning again...

The first person I met when I moved, in a leap of faith, to Tucson at the end of 2001 was my next door casita neighbor. Five months later we were a couple. A month after that he lost his 40 year old family cabin, high in the Colorado Rockies, to the Hayman fire. It had been a cherished constant in his family's life, a gathering place and retreat for all of them, and was a devastating loss. A loss of much more than a well-used A-frame cabin.



Around the time we were married, he took me on a road trip through Colorado. I'm a landscape junkie, and though I find our mountainous Sonoran desert environment in Tucson spectacular, Colorado was a whole different category. Green. Surface water. Soaring rocky mountains. We camped with our heads a few feet from the Dolores River, wandered Telluride, marveled at the cravasse that is Black Canyon of the Gunnison, soaked in a vast pool fed by the hot springs in Glenwood Springs, and wept at the beauty of Rocky Mountain National Park. Our last night in Colorado was spent sleeping on the old cabin site.

The site is in a collection of five acre plots of land. The neighbors across the lake from us had invited us for dinner in what I can only describe as an enchanted cottage. Hand built, from the ground up, they'd created a Bavarian wonderland. I felt I'd walked into a fairy tale -- one with a happy ending. The evening was warm and welcoming in every possible way. When we returned to the old cabin site, our tent pitched, camp chairs out, we built a fire under a full moon. The cabin had been nestled against a softly eroded granite wall which reflected the fire's light. Hy husband's daughter had given him an unopened bottle of Chivas Regal that had belonged to his long deceased father, the father who he'd helped build the cabin over 40 years before. We decided to open that bottle and drank a toast to his dad, thanking him for all the cherished times and memories.



When we woke up the next morning, snug in our sleeping bags, I knew that my husband needed to reclaim his connection to this place in a concrete way. The land still belonged to the family. The outhouse still stood! In less than two months we were back for Thanksgiving, staying in the 33 foot Airstream Argosy that he'd bought and had parked on the old cabin site. It was a wonderful visit, but one in which we realized that this was not a cold weather abode, but one that would allow visits from mid spring to early fall.



For the past four years we have spent as much time as we could eek out from working lives at our breadbox (as it is affectionately called) in the Rockies, usually a little over two weeks in the summer and another week around the autumnal equinox to see the aspens turn.

Now, as my husband is considering retirement, we've decided to rebuild a cabin on the old site. We love Tucson and will keep it as our primary residence [see my Sonoran Desert blog Writing Down the Desert], but loving Tucson for the long haul means leaving it in the cruelest summer months - June, July, and August at minimum. We're outdoor people and like to hike most days of the week and residing at almost 8,700 feet in Colorado summers will allow that. It will also allow the rest of the family, those who knew the cabin and feel the loss, and the grandchildren who have gotten to know the place and already love it, to reclaim that part of their lives.

Join us as we share this experience of rebuilding and recreating -- more than just a structure -- a home, a way of life, and a family legacy.