For years my friend Mark has been telling me about a cabin he built on a plot of family woodland in northern Wisconsin. Call it a lack of faith, but I had pictured it a pile of plywood and sticks--building a cabin from scratch seemed too ambitious to do well in one’s free time. A couple weeks ago while he and I spoke over the phone, he answered my plans of doing a winter camp in the Apostle Islands by suggesting that instead of sleeping in a snow cave and shivering in a double bag for 12 hours a night, I visit his nearby cabin.
Last week I spent 3 nights in that 8 by 10 hut, a short walk from the road and sitting under a forest of birch, pine and maple. Inside is a small woodstove, the log walls behind it are protected by a layer of glazed, smooth stones. The floor is pieced from caramel boards and a bunk runs the room’s length.
I spent an afternoon on the Apostle lakeshore where there is a stretch of craggy shore pocketed with ice covered caves. The lake was frozen and I skied to the caves. The next day I drove along the Bois Brule River and walked among the ice mounds at its mouth, then strapped on skis and watched the sunset from Brule Point.
The last full day flakes began to fall and I didn’t leave the cabin. I cut logs, watched the snow pile up and wrote and read in front of a glowing stove. I woke at three to add wood; the wind howled icy from the north and eked through chinks that weren’t filled with moss or shims. I filled the stove high and went back to bed. But the wood didn’t catch and by first light my hard boiled eggs had exploded and my bananas were brown and hard as hammers. No matter, a new fire finally lit to warm those final hours.
