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.