IF I EVER HAVE TO LEAVE, I WANT NEVER TO COME BACK

This is the cabin that David built.

It measured 900’ square feet, sat on 205 acres overlooking a meadow where it surveyed the waters of the Keweenaw Waterway. It had electricity that was brought in through the 1/2 mile of buried cable from Bootjack Road, a 360’ deep well, an Ashley wood stove, and an outhouse with an inviting morning sun painted on its door.

David bought the land and built the cabin while a student at Michigan Tech.. 

backstory…

He told me about his land and his cabin on a rainy Ketchikan day while we sat in his little house drinking tea. He told me I should come by during my upcoming summer break. And so I did.

After an accident on a solo hike on a 14’000’ peak in Colorado weeks before that left me injured but still able to drive, I hobbled into my Landcruiser with my Norwegian Elkhound Sheena and a US Road Atlas tucked under my arm and took off. 

When I (after 5 days and a detour through ND to visit my sister) drove up that 1/2 mile 2-track road, it was mid-July and every wild flower on the planet was in full bloom. A burst of gloriousness. The forests of northern hardwood, fields of wild fruit trees and berry bushes, a lake they called Superior, pasties of which I knew nothing about and a guy I hardly knew but was certain I wanted to know more of, set a hook. 

After a week’s stay, I loaded back up into my Landcruiser and drove away from this cabin and this place. I said out loud, “If I ever have to leave, I want never to come back.”

fast forward…

This humble, hand built, 2 room cabin became our home for 5 years. We heated with the wood we harvested from our land, skied the 1/2 mile uphill during the winter towing sleds filled will necessities, slogged through deep mud during spring breakup, fought off every kind of flying insect in the summer months (without success). We grew a large garden, raised chickens and goats and had two babies. We lived on-the-grid but were isolated from the rest of the world by 15 to mile drive on an old corduroy road to the nearest town where David had a small woodworking shop, and 35 miles to the biggest town in the Copper Country where I had a teaching job. Atop it all, our main occupation was survival. We worked hard at everything, but especially at that; we'd made this lifestyle choice,  It was tough living this adventurous, back-to-the-woods hippie lifestyle and rather it getting a bit easier every year, it got tougher, more complicated and challenging in every way as the years came and went..

So, on a day in January, we made the gut-wrenching decision and sold this irreplaceable piece of what we knew as home and moved to an equally small Finnish farm house on a road called Lake Annie.

When I drove away from the place we loved for the last time, I wondered why. Why was I brought back if it was to leave again? 

I was to find out…