In a place where Lake Superior meets the sky, far north where the days are long even as the trees start catching fall, there’s a cabin built by my family’s hands. Not my blood family, but my betrothed family. My fiancé’s grandparents and uncle turned a miner’s one-room log cabin, bought for a pittance in the 80s, into what their neighbor jokingly calls “the estate” — a joke more telling of the rustic conditions down that stretch of sandy road in Gay, Michigan, and this artistic neighbor’s proclivities, than anything else. Though it must have struck me, because there is something undeniably stately about the tree trunks holding up the screened porch, crossing to make triangular windows that emblazon the morning onto the dining table.
If this were a cathedral in the woods, we take our service three times a day, with coffee, then beer, then wine, with salt and pepper and paper plates, and there is always more than anyone, even grandsons, can finish. Our altar is the fireplace, a big hearth of smooth river stones placed exactly where they fit — along with a piece of the Berlin Wall — and tended by my fiancé, who builds fires five logs high, flames so big the tips disappear into the chimney, because he can. If the conversation dies down as we sit close, in rocking chairs made of the same stuff as the porch and the fire and everything else, there is always the fire to talk about, or stare into. I suppose in this way it’s sort of like a television. For communion, I’d take a fire any night.
There’s a small television in the living room. Grandma turns it on every day at 7, while Grandpa hovers at the door to the porch, to keep his distance from the news. We hear about a defector in the White House, about hurricanes, and about a mother and son trampled by a giraffe. A presidential candidate was stabbed! We watch through the commercials to find out it was a candidate in Brazil.
Outside these woods new facts and feelings are ever-accumulating, and don’t we owe it to everyone, and ourselves, to be aware? But after only a few minutes, I feel the world is too much with us. It seems more vital to watch the perfect reflection of trees and clouds in the lake, or a snowshoe hare emerging from under the porch to nibble on the grass in the yard, hardly afraid of any of us. There are things to be done today — food to be cooked, books to be read, fish to be fished, games to be played.
Life at the cabin feels realer than real. We eat when we’re hungry, sleep when we’re tired, and our only conversations are with family and neighbors, who come by unannounced in their robes, like the cabins are distant rooms connected by wooded hallways. Here beauty and light consecrate our chores, our choices are few and good and productive: a finished puzzle, clean dishes, fresh pasta on the table. We bathe in the sauna, where we make a fire to heat coals to heat a vat of water, which we mix in tubs with cold from a hose. I lift a big bucket and turn it, heavy, over my head, covering me in a shock of silk. There’s no feeling as clean as stepping out from the sauna into the brisk evening air.
When I want to stay there forever, when I feel so happy stacking firewood or digging sand out of the pond, I know I’m being a romantic. I haven’t lived in the cabin for any extended period of time, or done the onerous work: dumping the trash, cleaning the septic, filling the water tank. I wouldn’t want to live there in winter — no one even could, the way the cabin is set up to run on solar. I don’t know what it would feel like without grandparents, to drive alone through woods steeped in night. The businesses in Calumet, a nearby town, are shuttering. I know it’s complicated. But deep down I can’t shake the feeling that it’s actually simple. What is that — faith or delusion? Love, like light, can be two things at once.
“Back to the real world!” our taxi driver announces too cheerily, and we laugh in bitter agreement, but we can hardly look at each other for fear of crying. I have hundreds of notifications and none of them matter. We fall asleep to familiar freeway sounds and the glow of the streetlight outside, and a few days later we climb the hill by our house and stare out at the city. The city feels a little pointless.
Then it starts to feel a little wonderful. We joke about the one and only supermarket by the cabin, which sold cases of Sunny D and something called bologna sausage. We romanticize, for a while, the Bay, the bridges, and the heedless hillside Victorians. And then, with the full and heavy hearts of realists, we take up anew this labor of love.
