The Cabin
(entry for 6/26/2024)
There are of course many cabins in the world, but from before I was born until I was about 15 or so, when anyone in the family, or even the extended family, said the words, “The Cabin,” there was only one possible meaning. They meant a cabin in the mountains above Denver, above Turkey Creek Canyon, just below a mountain which we called Double-Header, but for which the official name is Double Head Mountain. The Cabin was owned by Emma, my maternal grandmother, and it was dear to all of our hearts.
(The photo shows Double-Header from the west. The cabin is at the foot of the mountain, just out of sight to the viewer’s right.)
There was no electricity, no running water, no bathroom, no good road to get to it, no modern conveniences of any kind. We loved it. We would go up from Denver for the weekend and ‘camp out’ for as long as we could afford to stay away. One glorious summer (1947) when my dad was between jobs, we stayed there for three entire and very happy months, without going to ‘civilization’ even once.
The only light at night was from kerosene lanterns. The only heat was from the cast-iron cookstove in the ‘kitchen,’ which was simply a covered and screened-in porch tacked onto the main one-room log structure, at the front end. (By front end I mean the west side, where the driveway was.) There was no fireplace. The cabin proper was perfectly square, about six hundred square feet, and the porch that contained the kitchen was an additional one hundred square feet or so. It faced west. Another, identically-sized screened-in porch, on the side of the cabin facing south, served as the ‘bedrooms,’ though there were no dividers between the four beds, all but one twin size, and that one a mere ‘double.’ (Queen-sized and King-sized beds hadn’t been invented yet, and wouldn’t have fitted in the tight space even if they had existed.)
(This photo is of me at age four on my beloved blue-and-yellow hand-made tricycle— the subject of another later blog post. It and I are just outside the ‘bedrooms’ porch, which faces south. You can see the east wall of the cabin proper on your right, complete with its massive ponderosa logs.)
There were two entrances, one in the middle of the kitchen porch, and one in the middle of the ‘bedrooms’ area. There was one huge window in the main cabin, facing north toward Double-Header. There were two much smaller windows in the east wall, facing the forest and the closest neighbors, whose cabin was invisible in the trees on that side, though it wasn’t all that far away. There were no other openings in the walls, other than the passageways into the two porches.
Except for the porches, which were made by ordinary carpentry, the cabin was constructed entirely of enormous peeled Ponderosa Pine logs, though where those came from I have no idea, since that species did not grow nearby. Between the logs was plaster ‘chinking,’ which constantly fell out and had to be replaced, lest wind come through the cracks.
There was a two-seat outhouse, rather like the front seat of a car, but with holes instead of cushions, and with only one door, straight ahead rather than to either side. I don’t believe that both seats were ever used simultaneously, and I’m not sure why there were two, anyway. (I find it a wee bit difficult to imagine any people I have ever known going to the bathroom side by side and presumably having a chat at the same time.) The pit underneath the large bench that the seats were cut in was enormous, and if I had ever fallen in, no one would have ever seen me again. (I had nightmares about that.) The outhouse was about a hundred feet away from the cabin, at the same level, just before you started the climb up Double-Header. In other words, it was far enough away that no one could ever smell it, though it wasn’t particularly odoriferous in any event, which was one result of the pit being so deep.
My Grandma had bought the property and contents in 1938, two years before I was born. She had previously owned another, larger one, near Shadow Lake, several miles north of this one, but she liked this one a lot better. For one thing it came furnished, including a player-piano with about fifty paper rolls to play on it, mostly old 19th century songs, but also some from the early 20th. There was a wind-up 78rpm phonograph. There was a huge sofa, and an even larger China-cabinet, complete with a carved lion’s head about six inches tall in the middle of the lower portion. (I couldn’t walk through the main cabin at night, after the lanterns were extinguished, because of that lion’s head. I was perfectly well aware that it was made out of wood and that it couldn’t hurt me. But I was afraid of it anyway. At least in the dark.)
The China cabinet was filled with three different complete sets of Depression Glass, one clear, one pink, and one pale green. There were also a few additional pieces in yellow, but not a complete set. (Today those three sets of dishes would be worth considerably more than the cabin, but when she bought it, nobody knew it would come to that, and when she sold it, shortly before her death, she passed them on to the new owners. I don’t know if they ever realized the treasure they were getting. And I don’t just mean the dishes.)
The grounds, several acres in size, were covered with Lodgepole Pine trees, and inhabited (my dad said infested) with hundreds of what we called Chipmunks, though they were actually Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrels, which are considerably larger, but which have stripes only on the body, not also on the head like true Chipmunks. They ate peanuts out of our hands and never offered to bite anyone, though they could certainly scold if the food was slow in appearing.
There were two other cabins in the immediate area, east of us, and close by on the same side of the dirt road that served the whole installation, though they couldn’t be seen from the cabin windows. Too many trees. The group of three constituted the whole extent of private property for several miles in any direction. The balance was US National Forest, though today the whole mountainside is private land, with hundreds of cabins where before there were only three.
On one occasion, when I was about five or six, the entire Children’s Youth Group of about twenty kids, from the Denver Central SDA Church (long gone), was invited up for a Sabbath outing. I remember a little girl cutting her finger on the needle of the wind-up phonograph. Other than that the only excitement occurred when my dad and I, along with about five other families, climbed Double-Header and were attacked by a Bald Eagle who was trying to guard a nest near the summit. (He or she finally gave up and flew away, as there were too many of us to take on all at once.)
There are many stories connected with Grandma’s Cabin, but they will have to wait for another day, as there are too many of them, and all too long, to fit into this blog post.
I will end by saying simply that I miss that cabin more than any other feature of my childhood. It’s still there, and I’ve been back twice, once with my son and daughter when they were in their teen and twenties years, and once much later with my (now-deceased) sister.
Sometimes I wish I was still there.
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