Cabins

A cabin is not the same as a house.  “It is not a shelter” but often a place of “delicious peril” and “a jumping off place” for a child.  A cabin on a lake is a place to be alone with oneself and from that will come strength to deal with “the more serious winter perils later on.”   Diane Johnson makes these observations in her new book “Flyover Lives: A Memoir”.  Diane Johnson has numerous books published as well as having written the screenplay for Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”  She grew up near Moline, Illinois; part of the vast in between of the United States called flyover country.  It’s not far from where I grew up and I share some of her memories of going to a cabin for the summer time.  For as she reminded me, the Illinois summers are mercilessly hot and humid and escaping north was an old tradition.  But there are as many dissimilarities too.

Her family has been in America for more than two hundred years and her stories of them are not of timber barons or inventors.  They are quite ordinary lives of farmers, teachers, country doctors and a lot of housewives, but she writes with such detail and feeling that their lives are as intriguing as any biographies of presidents or generals. And they bring back memories. And sometimes that is a good thing.

One of her relatives, a great uncle, built a cabin on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan near the Mackinaw Straits    She spent summers there in  the 1930s and 1940s.  And she writes of the difference between a cabin and a house.

I felt for this house the special love that almost everyone, I’ve since discovered, feels for a summer house—a love quite different from the feelings you have for the house you grow up in.  Perhaps a summer house is where,  forced into your own company, you discover that you are yourself, and maybe that’s something that can’t happen in an ordinary life, when you belong to your parents and school. The organized city child is deprived of these hours of messing around alone, though they must be the crucial ones in which we discover things, develop a point of view, learn to rely on ourselves as reliable observers, establish in our own minds that we are we.

Not sure of this theory of city and country differences, but the idea of a regulated life versus a free one is something I understand.  And Johnson is not talking about the summer homes in the Hamptons or Newport Beach or the “cottages” of the auto barons from Detroit and the meat packing barons from Chicago who summered in Harbor Springs, Michigan just a little south of where her cabin was.  No this was a simple place they built themselves and for years it had no indoor plumbing.  Johnson’s father was a school principal and so could spend the summers in the family cabin that they shared with uncles, aunts, and cousins.  Its furniture was not “real furniture” like the mahogany table at home.  It was made of “birch logs and bark.”   An aunt made a chandelier out of coffee cans that she painted bronze.  It was all to make this summer place very different from the “real” house in town “scene of schoolwork, regulation, orderly life.”

But for many people, there is no mahogany table at home.  We didn’t even have one.  And how delicious to even choose to live the simple life rather than it be one of necessity.  But this is not an essay on inequality.  It’s about growing up and what’s great about a time when you didn’t have many rules and your time was your own.

She describes stepping on June Bugs in the dark of night on the way to the outhouse.  I can remember that crunching sound myself at the various cottages my school administrator father rented with his brothers and sisters up in Minnesota.   He could never spend more than a week or two away from the school, so our time in cabins was short compared to Johnson who got to spend several months away from the “real” house”.  Later when I was in college and had a summer job in Michigan, my father decided to rent a cabin on a lake for a whole month so that I could be close to my family.  But I knew many schoolmates whose families picked up and moved to “the lake” (Lake Michigan) for the summer with the father commuting back and forth from work 40 minutes away and the kids running loose among the sand dunes and pine woods.  Some friends had grand homes, but most had plain and simple places where one could drag in all manner of critters and deposit heaps of sand every where you plopped down.  While the kids would play the mothers would have coffee together and not have to clean the way they did at their “real houses”.  Eventually my father would buy a cabin in Holland and he, my mother, and youngest sister would have a taste of this very good life of kicking back for the summer.

But when I was young the money was short and my father’s time away from work was short ;  so my time in cabins was limited to a couple weeks.  But oh how wonderful they were.  Even coming out of the lake covered in leeches was better than being at home.  My Uncle Jim would laugh a hearty laugh and get out his lighter and burn them off us.  Later when my Uncle Tom’s computer company took off, he would buy a yellow boat and teach us to ski.  But before that, the men would spend the day fishing while the women just sat around and yakked.  Like Johnson, my cousins and I would roam the woods looking for bugs to scare each other with or frogs to capture and then let go.

And yes, like Johnson, it was a time to read and read and read.  You would find a comfy spot away from the mosquitos and the babies.  There you would read the Hardy Boys, Treasure Island, Little Women, or the House at Pooh Corner, a particular favorite of mine.  We would play the card game “Authors” and I read many of their books.  I can still picture the Louisa May Alcott card with her in a dress with the white-collar (the only woman, I think), Mark Twain with his mane of white, and Robert Louis Stevenson in his dark coat and cravat and his long long mustache looking quite sexy although I don’t think I knew to call it that at the time.    There was “Old Maid” and “Animal Rummy” and the board games “Parcheesi” and “Candy Land”.  Because we were church going Dutch Calvinists there were also Bible card games.

Grandma would take us on a hike each day.  She would lead us single file and as we marched she sang out with her Dutch accent, “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It’s off to veerk ve go…” and we would all chime in “Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Hi Ho!”  I think Grandma made up some lines like “We will work some and then have fun, Hi Ho, Hi Ho,” or something like that.   Yes, off  to collect and identify leaves of various trees.  Lots of maple leaves, white oak, tamarack, birch, and white pine.  We collected and identified rocks too-(My cousin Jenny says they were agates).  We learned how to make a hobo stove out of a coffee can.  French toast on a hobo stove is still the best kind.

And yes, even church was better in the summer.  We would go the lake services at some camp that looked nothing like the churches back at home with their polished pews and stained glass windows.  These lake chapels were usually in a tent or in a large empty building where we would set up folding chairs before the service.  If there was an organ it would be a simple Wurlitzer.  But sometimes a piano would all we would have to sing songs like  “Bringing in the Sheaves.”

Sowing in the morning, sowing seeds of kindness,

Sowing in the noontide and the dewy eve;

Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.