Editor's Note - September 2007 |
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Cabin Power From the September 2007 issue of Log Home Design |
Cabin Power
Cabin. The word conjures up many ideas and evokes a variety of emotions. For me, it calls to mind “Camp Goldie,” the clapboard fishing retreat my dad’s family built with their own hands and named after my great-great-great-grandfather, William Goldie, who, as family lore has it, was a key inventor behind the success of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Our cabin sat along the Allegheny River near the hamlet of Emlenton, Pennsylvania. The house was tiny. The kitchen and living room shared one open space—a very modern idea Camp Goldie’s founding fathers came up with five decades ago. There were two bedrooms, each bursting at the studs with enough bunks to sleep 10. There was a bathroom, but no shower or tub—bathing was left to a bar of Lifebuoy and the river.
Even more than how it looked, I remember certain things about spending youth’s sweet summers there. During our annual family reunions, my Uncle Bill pounded out gospel hymns on a hunter-orange upright piano stationed at the far end of the living room. I can remember, with surprising clarity, the clicking sound his dog Jiminy’s paws made as he scampered across the linoleum floor, which always had a fine layer of river silt on it no matter how many times we swept.
Smells play a key role in my memories, too, like the scent of must when we opened the cabin for the season; the faint odor of oil from the refinery down river; and the aroma of percolating coffee at 5 a.m., as the early-bird fishermen readied themselves for a day on the water. To most people, these smells (except for the coffee) would be objectionable, but to me, they signaled the start of something great.
We no longer own this cabin, and I haven’t laid eyes on it for more than 20 years, but to this day when I hear the sound of paws scurrying on the floor or get a whiff of refined oil on the breeze, my heart lifts, and I’m whisked back to a time when my thoughts revolved around life’s small pleasures—fishing with my dad, riding my bike down our camp’s dusty trail and watching deer graze on a crisp, foggy morning. It’s so much more than the house you construct, it’s the memories you build. That’s the legacy of the cabin.
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