The Great Escape

Buyers | Sellers

The Great Escape

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This article appeared in the May-June 2001 issue
of Cabin Life magazine and is reprinted with permission.

The Great Escape
By Spencer Foxworth
Ask anyone: The world looks different through your cabin's windows.

Late afternoon, yellow sunlight leaning through the porch windows. You can see wisps of steam lifting off our coffee cups like the haze over the lake outside. In the pause between conversations, Katie, one of the two dogs at our feet, sighs lightly and rolls onto her back.

The fwup-fwup-fwup noise of a Great Blue Heron winging from shore to shore filters through the screen, and sitting across the table, Judy Ostern smiles. I'd just asked whether she and her husband, Bob, ever take their Lake Superior cabin for granted. As with each question I've asked this afternoon, she takes her time to answer. A puff of a breeze falls against the water outside. The water ripples like goosebumps, then grows smooth again.

"You could almost take it for granted," she finally says, "until you see the moon come up. It reminds you every evening." Bob nods his head, saying nothing.

Cabins Get In Your Blood

Envision a map of America on a summertime night, clusters of light thick at the center of cities, thinning out the farther you get from each metro hub. Suburbs are gridlike latticeworks of light; highways, long time-exposure streams of headlights and taillights. Rural areas resemble sporadic oases, small and random amid deeper wells of dark. If you watch long and closely enough, letting your eyes adjust to the dark, now and then you'll see a single point - a car or truck - detach itself from the highway stream and venture out alone through lightless wilderness, heading toward a yet-unlit point like an iron filing to a magnet.

Let those dense clumps of brighter lights, metro and suburban, take care of themselves. There's something about the pockets where light hasn't crept, something about the dark that draws.

It gets in your blood. Ask anybody who's ever owned a cabin of their own, for whatever reason they own it, why they bother spending a healthy chunk of their yearly income on their second home - three-room vintage cabin to brand-new, million-dollar showcase; wilderness getaway or weekender party-pad. Any answers you get, disparate as they most certainly are, will be woven around a singular theme.

They do it because they're in love. It's as simple as that.

It's tough to put into words, that allure of owning a place away from the everyday - be it cabin, cottage or lakehome. But it's part of the definition of cabin, part of what makes a cabin feel like a cabin. If you're among the one in 10 Americans who own a second home - doesn't matter what kind - you know exactly what I'm talking about. This draw, this enchanting allure of living away from the humdrum for awhile, this chance to steer your car or truck through the dark some evening and come out on the other side to a place you love - and a place that loves you back.

Owning a Cabin is the New American Dream

But here's the kicker underneath it all: Unique as each cabin is, the decision to own one has become anything but. It's now the defining American dream, the measure of success hoped for by six out of every 10 U.S. adults. Used to be, your successes were measured by the digits in your yearly salary or the number of rungs beneath you on the corporate ladder. Now it's measured by the breakfast view off your cabin porch.

Dig a little deeper into this theme, and you'll uncover all sorts of rationale for this decision. Not everybody who owns a cabin does so because they're in the business of measuring their own success. To some, it's a closer connection with the wilderness that exists beyond highways and strip malls, a quiet getaway place in the woods, on the lake, in the mountains. To others, a closer connection with their family in the context of this wilderness. To yet others, a chance to kick back and play hard on a section of land where nobody can tell them they can't. Some grew up with a cabin in their family. Some are newcomers to the cabin life. There exists, beyond the demographics of cabin owners, a collection of stories and motivations as wide as a lakeside sunset and so far, there's space enough for everyone.

Space enough for everyone. You could encapsulate the promise and mystique of American life in those four words, and American cabin life is no different. So much of our culture is steeped in our relationship to America's physical space - our mountains, our plains; our lakes, rivers and forests- and cabin owners are a fortunate, privileged group who've been able to turn this social metaphor into a reality, staking out a parcel of the American landscape as their own. That's a tremendous, primal attractant. If you spend a third of your day at work, stereotypically in a square-ish room belonging to somebody else, and you spend another chunk of your day boxed up in your car, one more neatly defined situation in a string of neatly defined situations, following a schedule five out of seven days of the week - well, every so often, a person needs to color outside the lines of life.

A Place to be Stark Naked

Or as Jerry Samuelson puts it: "I wanted a place I could walk around stark naked." Ten years ago, Samuelson had had it up to his cufflinks with the mounting tension of constantly coloring inside the lines of his urban law practice. He got the cabin bug by accident on a motorcycle tour when he stumbled across a plot of available land, and suddenly the possibilities of cabin life leapt out at him. Wading through client crisis after client crisis, he couldn't rid himself of the notion that maybe, just maybe, there was something more to living. The first night in his remote little cabin, he began to discover just what that something was.

"It was late at night," he recounts. Vacant for 20 years, "the place was a mess. Dirty. Decayed. The roof was leaking. It was January and 30 below, and I didn't know how to use the stove. Since I'd left my watch at home, I lost my sense of time. I was frightened to be frightened, scared I'd be lonesome, worried that every regret and grief of my life would become monstrous.

So I went for this walk across the frozen lake. It was dark, just a sliver of moon, but the snow radiated starlight; the stars were endless. And as I walked, I heard this sound, and I looked up, and here's this bird, way, way up in the sky. I could hear everything.

He pauses, and his eyes flick off to a point in the distance. "I was welcome there," he says. "All the artificial battles I was fighting in the city to find meaning, friendship, love - they were artificial. This is reality."

Watch closely a person's eyes when they're sharing the details of their retreat. Ephemeral as these notions sound, experiencing it for yourself hits home straighter than any words. A billboard on the drive up to Samuelson's cabin puts it perfectly "Fire your therapist" it says, against a backdrop of woods and water.

That was 10 years ago, and Samuelson's been heading up as often as he can, balancing his urban life with his cabin life. He's since fixed his place up (the roof doesn't leak anymore, and he's figured out the wood-burning stove), met his old-timer neighbors and become an old-timer himself, hosted loud, rockin' parties and relished long, silent weekends of solitude, almost died in a devastating, 90-mph straight-line windstorm, and made it a near-discipline to tromp around stark naked as often as he can. Being up there, he says, "makes me feel small and large at the same time. I feel like I belong."

So far, no therapist.

Today's Cabins Are Built for Leisure and Play

While it's safe to say that Samuel-son's experiences with his cabin are probably unusual among most cabin owners, it's also safe to say that most cabin owners know precisely what he's talking about - even the ones with motivations completely dissimilar to his. After all, a cabin is a cabin regardless of its size or seating capacity, and there's no rule that says you have to drive eight hours through back roads to get to it.

Indeed, many of the cabins being sold in the bustling second-home market these days are mansions compared to the typical ones of even 30 years ago; the term "second home" is telling, after all. Dropping $128,000 will land you a cabin smack-dab in the center of the demographic continuum, settling you into a comfy, homelike structure on property as likely beside a lake as it is in the mountains or woods. It all depends on how you'll use it - most folks cite "recreational opportunity" as their main reason for owning their cabin - and who'll use it with you.

By way of example, Vonnie Hough's lakeside cabin - lakehome, that is - has dinnertime seating capacity for 18 people, so it is definitely built with family and recreation in mind. Hough's family plays hard with their personal watercraft, and all 18 family members visit year-round as often as they can - snowmobiles in the wintertime, personal watercraft in the summer. Hough's motivation for owning her cabin is about as markedly different from Samuelson's as you can get: "Before we moved in," she says, "the lake was pretty quiet. We're not noisy people, but we play hard. That's why we like our cabin."

That goes for thousands of other cabin lovers for whom summertime is synonymous with "lake cabin," and for whom "lake cabin" is synonymous with "pontoon boat." On summer weekends in certain lake-country regions, you can't sneeze without rocking somebody's pontoon boat. If you've never experienced this particular joy, suffice to say that it isn't about fishing (necessarily) or racing (certainly not) or competing with the Joneses. Pontooning is all about leisure and laziness. You invite your friends onboard, fire up your Smoky Joe, and relish a mosquito-free afternoon on the lake: sun, scenery, conversation, watching waterskiers tumble spectacularly into the water.

Rusty Griffin, who owns a lakehome on a chain of lakes, defines the edges of his summertime work week by his pontoon boat. For him, pontooning is a ritual of relaxation: "We get up in the morning on Sunday with a bunch of friends," he says. "Get on the pontoon boat at 10 a.m. with Sinatra playing and eye-openers in the cooler, and cruise the lake, seeing bald eagles, Great Blue Herons, turtles, ducks. It's a nice way to mentally download from a week of too much input. Nice thing is, you can go as slow as you can go and keep moving.

"During the week, sometimes I jump on the pontoon boat and go to the other lake, visit the mom-and-pop restaurants and pizza places, grab some supper, and be the only boat on the lake at night. That's just great for beating the work week." In short, it's about enjoying the sun and water of summertime, afloat on a gently rocking pontoon boat.

A Family Affair

Compare that, too, with Howard and Judith Munson's cabin experience. Since the early '70s, Howard's been heading up to Fraser Lodge, a huge timber-framed cabin jointly owned by his aunt, uncle and three other business partners in a cooperative timeshare arrangement. Each partner's family divides their time among the other partners' families, each family getting approximately three months' worth of cabin time. No group can spend more than two weeks there at one time, and holidays rotate on a four-year cycle.

Logistically, you'd think that's a recipe for disaster, but in practice, it's not. The timeshare arrangement has operated with only minor hitches for more than 30 years. Regular communication among partners is their number-one priority, as is keeping the place spotlessly clean and maintained. Howard laughs about the latter. The retro '70s decor of Fraser Lodge was hardly retro 30 years ago, but the times change even if partnerships don't. "In the '80s," he says, "it was like, 'Wow. We really gotta do something about this place.' " But what goes around comes around. They've managed the upkeep so well, all that retro furniture has finally come full circle back in style.

It's a beautiful lodge," Howard says. "None of the [original] partners' families were real wealthy, so they put their assets together to buy it.

He and Judith are up as often as they can be, which isn't as often as they'd like, but it's enough for them to forge their own latticework of memories and experiences. For Howard, heading up gives him a chance to watch his nieces and nephews and remember his childhood; Judith, for whom this whole cabin lifestyle is new, loves walking in her husband's memories while forming her own. So the minor sacrifice of sharing their special place with three other families throughout the year pales every Sunday evening spent on Fraser Lodge's front porch, watching their lake soak up the purples of the darkening sky.

Blisters Are Good for the Soul

Not that these rewards don't require work. That's a crucial part of most people's cabin lifestyle too - crossing a bridge of labor in order to make it to a place of relaxation. For some cabin owners, that means a long-distance drive; to others, it means months of hammering, refinishing, refurbishing, decorating, landscaping and general putzing around. To still others, it means both.

Ryan Smith travels 170 miles by car and eight miles by boat to get to his cabin. "It's kind of a hassle to get there," he admits, "and that's what keeps it special. It'd be different if we could drive right up there in two hours. When we go, we go to stay, and the remoteness keeps it special."

Like the Munsons, Ryan and Cindy Smith's cabin was part of their family (Ryan's great-uncle sold it to them). Like the Houghs, they play hard at their cabin (progressive dinners, winter golfing on the lake, day-long cocktail parties). Like Jerry Samuelson, they love the quietude it offers ("hard to explain unless you experience it," says Cindy). They also know precisely how much work went into their place… and that, paradoxically, makes the relaxation all the more relaxing.

Blisters, as the Smiths would tell you, are good for your soul.

Three years' worth of repair went into their cabin - three years' worth of plywood sheets, electric generators, pallets of shingles, bucketloads of nails, chairs, full-sized mattresses, picture windows, couches (try hauling those across a lake on a fishing boat), all moved to their cabin on the shore, over and over again in countless trips, long weekend after long weekend. Hard work, yes, but they'll tell you it was more than worth it: When they crack open one of their cabin photo albums, you can practically cut their gratitude with a knife.

Switching to Cabin-Living Full Time

As prevalent as owning a cabin has become, 90 percent of the American population doesn't. The Smiths are part of a lucky few, and they know it. "It's a quiet, simple existence up there," says Cindy. "It's awesome."

The cabin life really does get in your blood. It doesn't get out, and it changes you for good. The world looks different through the cabin's windows. You want to hold onto that perspective as long as you can.

Dr. Larry Anderson made this decision on the Fourth of July, 1999, when at his cabin he'd watched two people nearly come to blows over their personal watercraft. "I saw kids trying to canoe, and they couldn't because of the water traffic," he says. "I was watching the shoreline erode because of the wash of these things. Suddenly, I didn't have the quiet anymore."

He realized that the quiet was what he loved best about his cabin, so he decided to do what millions of Americans are deciding to do: adopt the cabin lifestyle for good, move in year-round and retire there. Barely a month later, he and his wife sold their cabin, found another on a quieter, more secluded chain of lakes, and are in the process of settling into their new life. It hasn't taken long.

It's a stage of relaxation that I had forgotten about for a long time," he says. "Being able to go outdoors at night... You can see the darkness.

Could be that the cabin allure is as simple a matter as this: You steer your car into one of those deep wildernesses of darkness lying between the pockets of artificial light, stake out a little section to call your own, and something universal moves you inside, the way people used to be moved when they could look upward and watch the Milky Way above their heads, in days before streetlights took that away. We seek out what they used to be reminded of every evening.

Words Can't Describe the Allure

And just like that, it's early evening again. Judy and Bob have spent their afternoon trying to explain why they own a cabin on the shore of Lake Superior: because they both grew up beside the lake and it's home, because (as Bob says) there's nothing anywhere like the rocky, expansive scent of Lake Superior, because they love walking along the beach, charting the changes of the water, watching out for evidence of foxes, deer, herons and wolves among them.

They cite reason after reason, but the whole is a greater sum than the parts, and words can only circumnavigate this underlying truth.

Our coffee cups are empty and the dogs are getting restless for a walk. We get up. I shake Bob's hand, sensing the quietude of their cabin in his mannerisms, and thank him.

Judy and the dogs walk with me to the door; I open it and we head up the path, separating when it vees off, one fork heading deeper into the woods, one heading up to the gravel road where I'm parked. Judy calls to her dogs, her voice echoing, and I turn to watch them. Where they're heading, the tips of the trees are stained bronze - the sun is setting overhead, and the sunlight is far-off now and bent. In a break between the trees, I can see the broad ultramarine blue of a long summer dusk. Everything is quiet.

Above our heads, there's a faint sliver of a moon rising. I keep it centered in my rearview mirror on the drive home.