Cabin in the Woods: A Coming of Age Tale

Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman is one man’s encounter with a shack in the woods. When I saw the book advertised, it spoke to me. As an adult, cabin building was never my thing, but as a kid, I spent hours building trails and camps in what is Southwest County Park in Edmonds. 

My friends and I never built a cabin there, but years later someone else built a stunning treehouse. At a spot farthest from the road, 60 feet up, it appeared impossibly large to be held in the upper stems of a bigleaf maple. Climbing up to it was harrowing.

The treehouse enclosed a space about the dimensions of a queen-size bed. The kids who had built it had hoisted up a homemade sofa and a small woodstove. The treehouse had a fabulous view. As the maple gently swayed, leaves rustling, lumber creaking, you looked out over a rolling plain of treetops to distant gunmetal water and Whidbey Island. Not a house was in sight.  

I thought, “I should have built a place like this.” My friends and I would have slept out in it, cooked hot dogs in it, smoked cigarettes in it. We would have loved it. It was too late for that. I wanted to be a writer, and I was figuring out how to do it. I was not going to be building treehouses.

The author of Cabin, Patrick Hutchison, also wanted to be a writer. His degrees from the UW, like mine, were useless for the work he really wanted. Years earlier, I had solved my problem by going to journalism school. Hutchison had enough of school, so he took a job writing sales copy. 

By his account, he was good at it. It paid enough to live on. His job was “not that bad” — but not that satisfying, either. He dreamed of doing something else, but he writes, “I had no appreciable skills in any other field, unless you counted sandwich delivery boy.”

Recalling his youth “in the woods building tree forts,” he imagined building a cabin. He thought about it a long time. In 2013, in his late 20s, he decided to act. He borrowed cash from his mom and bought a cabin listed on Craigslist for $7,500. 

You can imagine what sort of cabin that was. Think of the Unabomber’s Montana hideout — a wooden box so cramped that the government men carried it off with a helicopter. Hutchison’s 10-by-12 cabin was Ted Kaczynski-sized. That gave it one advantage: It was too small to be on the radar of Snohomish County Planning and Development Department. It was too remote for the Snohomish County Public Utility District. It was subject to property taxes, but they amounted, he writes, to “less than a few tanks of gas.”

Hutchison was on his own. Unregulated.

His neighborhood, called Mount Index Riversites, had been subdivided in the 1960s by a developer who, I’m guessing, did not exactly hit the jackpot on it. The ground soaked up 100 inches of water a year. The hillsides were unstable, and in Hutchison’s first year there a landslide cut off civilization for months. Gravel roads, not maintained by the county, connected lots covered by cedars, fir, maples, alders, salmonberries, and sword ferns. The cabins ranged from the rustic to what appeared to Hutchison to be “junk-strewn drug dens.” Some had been abandoned. Only about 80 persons lived there year-round. 

Hutchison’s tiny cabin was on a dirt track named Wit’s End. His place had no piped water, no toilet, no woodstove — none of the bourgeois amenities that keep cabin folk warm, dry and clean. The place had been built of scrap lumber. Its creator, Hutchison writes, “had approached carpentry more like a bird building a nest… Nothing was level or square or consistent.” The building “overlooked a swamp of a driveway.” 

In short, Hutchison writes, “It was perfect.” 

He wanted a challenge, to “plant a flag of responsibility… to prove to myself I was doing more with my life than sitting at a desk and churning out marketing emails.” The cabin, he writes, was a way “of resisting being bored, of being stuck.” It was progress.

Cabin is his story of Hutchison’s journey from floundering to solid ground. Like Thoreau’s Walden, the story is less about a building — its leaky roof, its rotted understructure, the spiders and mouse droppings in the attic — and more about the author. He begins his hammering and sawing with the ignorance of a bookworm. After two years of watching endless videos on YouTube, of listening to contractors, of bending nails and spraying screws, of measuring cuts and getting them wrong, he begins to get them right. The pieces he cuts begin to fit. He buys a 90-year-old woodstove and struggles to fit a chimney. He builds an outhouse. He builds a rude kitchen, its sink with a bucket underneath. He builds a stairway. He jacks up the house to replace a rotten floor joist. He builds a new roof.

Now Hutchison is a rural carpenter and builder — and also a nationally published author. Reading Cabin, I thought of the treehouse I saw decades ago, and the urge I had to build something like it. A cabin was his thing, not mine. But at a deeper level, Cabin is not about cabins. It’s about taking on a challenge that’s hard — of doing work that you choose, not that’s chosen by others. 

It’s a remarkable account. I recommend his book.