The Cabin

            by Megan Stimpson

 

            Our van turns off the highway and I know we’re only twenty-five minutes away from Angora Lake, where our cabin is nestled in with the trees and rocks. As we get farther from the busy freeway, the road grows increasingly bumpy and twisty. We snake through the trees, slowing at the curves, in the hope that another car isn’t racing in the opposite direction on the one lane road. I roll down my window. Watching the aspen leaves shimmer in the wind, I crinkle my nose as I breathe in the familiar smell of pine trees. 

            Through the trees the parking lot finally appears. Although the drive up to the cabin is relatively short compared to the other road trips my family often takes, I’m always thrilled to see those signs that mark the lot. Three hours in close proximity with my five year old brother Brad and my fifteen year old sister Kerry can make anyone a little crazy.

            Jim and his white pick up truck are already there waiting for us. We load all our gear into the car and climb in. Kerry and I hop in the back with my dad, while my mom and Brad squeeze in the front, next to Jim.  Jim has known my family for years but he still can’t tell Kerry and me apart.  This is partly understandable – Kerry and I both have the same long, straight brown hair and we’re both about the same height (actually she’s one inch taller than me, not that anyone’s counting). Ever since we were kids, people have constantly asked us if we are twins, much to my mortification. Despite this one sore subject, for the most part we get along. I’ve always thought that sisters are great because you get a built in best friend.

            Once we’re all in his car, Jim speeds up the winding hill to our lake, watching out for people on the trail. Hikers stop and wave amiably as they watch us drive off into the distance, but I know they are jealous of our ride. After the dust settles, they pick up their packs and continue their trek.

It was pure luck that we bought the cabin. I was seven at the time, and my family had been hiking up this very trail when a lively man unexpectedly burst out of the bushes next to us. He had his hiking boots and a huge green backpack on. I figured he was one of those intense hiker types. When he came closer, I realized that his pack was full because there were several bottles of champagne shoved into it. He introduced himself as Kirk from cabin #6. Kirk turned out to be very sociable and informed us that one of the owners of cabin #2 was selling their half. My dad got the number of the broker, visited the cabin the next day, and made an offer. By the end of the month, we were sharing cabin #2 with a sixty year old Czechoslovakian man named Boris.

            The truck reaches the tree-covered opening of the path to the lake and stops. We all crawl out and begin unloading our duffel bags and the food supply for the whole week. Each of us grabs all we can, and walks through the trees and over the creek to our cabin.

            As we round the bend, the lake comes into view; the clear water glitters as a light breeze skims the surface. Across the lake is Echo Peak. It’s snowy all year round, but this year there seems to be more snow than usual. I groan inwardly just thinking about the mandatory hikes up this mountain that are to come.  Finally, I see our tiny cabin. Like many of the other cabins, it’s shingled on the outside and has a splintery wooden deck with a rickety railing in the front. My eyes scan the bright orange-red window frames and the peeling forest green roof. Our little blue rowboat is parked in the lake, fifteen feet from the deck, held in its spot by a few rocks.

            At four hundred square feet, ours is by far the smallest of all the cabins on the lake. There are only two rooms. One room is a bathroom with a thundering shower, a tiny sink, and a cabinet filled with Boris’ tanning oil collection. The outhouse is up a hill in the back and is about the same size, if not smaller, than a Port-a-Potty (I can’t complain though – cabin #3 has an outdoor shower). Inside it is the Incinolet. Incinolets are essentially metal toilets that burn waste into ash. Over the years, Kerry and I have had many run-ins with the Incinolet. However, I like it better than its predecessor, the Destroylet, which required propane gas. Nevertheless, the Incinolet constantly malfunctions, resulting in challenging situations. This past summer, I was outside collecting firewood when one such disaster struck.

 “Megan, the flushing lever won’t work,” I heard Kerry’s muffled voice call out from behind the wooden outhouse door.

“Here, use this.” I carried over a long, pokey stick and squeezed into the outhouse with her. I made sure not to touch the walls, which are covered with cobwebs, ants, and Boris’ bizarre scribbled poems.

She took the stick and forced open the metal panels that had refused to flush. Flames shot up from the toilet, dancing dangerously close to our hands. Startled, Kerry jerked back the stick, which was now on fire, and waved it around as she screamed. I darted back and forth, trying not to get burned in the tight space.

At that moment, Brad’s game of pirates and ninjas had led him to where we were struggling with the fire. Hearing our shouts, he wedged himself into the outhouse, claiming he’d help. “Ooh, fire!” he cried, delighted.

“Brad!” we both yelled. Kerry jerked the blazing stick away from him. In doing so, she smashed into the wall and knocked off a lamp that was perched on a wobbly shelf. The lamp flickered and plummeted to the ground. Kerry screamed, although this event was not new to her. Somehow, she manages to break the outhouse lamp at least once every summer.

“AAAAHH! PIRATE ATTACK!” Brad screeched in a pitch that only five year olds can achieve, wielding his sword and slingshot to “protect” us.

“BRAD!” we both yelled again. The flame was creeping up the stick, closer and closer to Kerry’s hand. I grabbed the burning stick and dashed out of the outhouse, with Brad the Screaming Ninja close behind. My parents, oblivious to the perils their children were facing (or maybe just accustomed to our spazzy behavior), barely looked up as I ran past them. I dunked the stick into the cold lake water, breathing a sigh of relief. Brad soon approached at a run and threw a cup of water at me. Satisfied that he had saved his two big sisters from merciless pirates, he ran off to rescue more damsels in distress.

*   *   *

The other room in the cabin serves as everything else – a narrow kitchen, a futon and fireplace area, a sleeping loft, and an eating area. One night, my dad, Kerry, Brad, and I all gathered around the table in the eating area for dinner. Suddenly, the door flew open with a loud squeak and crash as it slammed into the wall. The whole house shook and one of Boris’ Russian poetry books fell off the shelf. Alex, a quirky teenager who was staying with his friend in cabin #6, strode purposefully into the room. He had arrived by bus the day before and already felt quite at home in all the cabins. Although we had just met him, Kerry and I had already begun to regard Alex as our weird, but well meaning, cousin. He had short blond hair and his face was sprinkled with freckles. The day before he had confessed to us his dream in life – to enlist in the military and die before he was thirty.

Alex looked at all of us sitting at the table. When no one said anything to him, he threw off his baseball cap, sat down at one of the place settings, and began eating. My mom walked over, carrying her plate of food. She paused.

            “Alex. You’re in her seat,” Kerry said.

            With bread hanging out of his mouth, Alex responded, “Oh, sorry. Pull up a chair, Deb.”

            A minor uproar from Kerry and me followed. Alex answered, “Okay, okay there’s room for one more.” He graciously moved over to the side.

            “So Alex…” my dad began slowly as Kerry and I tried not to laugh. “What’s up?”

            “Oh, you know, not too much,” Alex answered, pouring some milk into my cup and gulping it down.

            Silence.

            “Well…would you like some food?”

            Alex denied his hunger three times.  Finally, my mom rolled her eyes and went back to the kitchen for another plate. As she handed it to him, he said politely, “Oh. Well yeah thanks, that’s so nice of you to offer. But I wouldn’t want to impose on your dinner or anything.”  

*   *   *

            This past summer, Kerry and I decided that instead of the usual family hike up Echo Peak, we were going to hike Echo Peak sans parents. Our dad altered the plan slightly. He allowed us to hike by ourselves but said that he and our mom would follow a ways behind us with Brad. Kerry and I employed our friend Becca from cabin #1, who had hiked Echo Peak even more times than we had, to be our guide. In our eagerness to hike ahead of the grownups, the three of us set off, forgetting to bring water and snacks.

            Almost immediately, we regretted our choice of Becca as a leader. Kerry and I had often joked that she was as strong as an Amazon woman. As we walked to the trail head, she pulled back her curly brown hair in a no-nonsense ponytail and did some warm-up arm stretches. I didn’t even have to see her to know that she had on her game face, a look she had acquired from years of playing competitive club basketball. Kerry and I clambered after her as she jogged up the mountain, remembering why we never went on hikes with her.

            Twenty minutes into the hike, I pleaded with Becca to reduce the traveling pace down to at least a power walk. Tired of waiting for Kerry and me to catch up with her, she conceded. Unfortunately, this brought out the non-stop chatting.

            “…And then I was like, well, why? You know what I mean?” she asked us effortlessly.

            “Gasp…uh…yeah…gasp,” I breathed, mustering up all my energy to get those two words out.

            Kerry forced Becca to give us what would have been water breaks, had there been any water. Every five and half minutes the two of us stood in the welcome shade of the trees, panting and wiping the sweat from our foreheads, while Becca side-shuffled around us, eyes glued to her watch. At one of the breaks near the top of the mountain, we spotted a family of four. “Want some lemonade?” the father called out to us.

            “For the love of God, YES!” Kerry shrieked.

            Kerry and I found unknown strength as we scrambled up the rocks and snow to where this godsend of a family had stopped. My mouth began to water as I imagined the icy lemonade drink that awaited me. When we reached the family, the mother held out half a lemon.

            An awkward silence passed as we all stared at it.

            The daughter rolled her eyes. “Um, you use the snow?” I watched as she grabbed a handful of snow she had just been standing on and squeezed lemon juice over it. She took a bite of the brown clump of ice. “See? Lemonade!”

            “Is this some kind of cruel joke?” Kerry muttered under her breath.

            We sat there in the snow, munching on our “lemonade,” until my parents found us. We finished off the hike with them, scared to follow Becca further.

*   *   *

            Besides hiking, another regular cabin activity is hammocking. Kerry and I position the worn rope hammock between two dead trees in the back.  Our other next door neighbor, Eric, often joins us. Eric is one of the older kids on the lake and most of the time does not feel compelled to lower himself to our childish games. He liked the hammock though.

            Once, Kerry and I were outside when Eric strolled over. He told us he’d been working on a great hammock ride and he thought maybe we’d like to test it out. Kerry and I jumped on, excited. The hammock rocked higher and higher; we shouted with joy as the wind blew through our hair and the mountains around us began to blur. But before long our happy shrieks turned to screams of fear and demands to “STOP!” Eric kept pushing. All of a sudden, the hammock flipped and we both flew out onto the rocks and the bushes. As we shakily brushed the dirt off our shirts and wiped at the blood on our knees, Eric laughed. That was the last time we allowed Eric to grace us with his presence.

            When the gentlemanly Eric is not at the lake, his equally gentlemanly relatives usually are. Most of them are in their mid-twenties. One summer night, a few of them were out on their front porch. It was close to midnight and they were singing songs and having passionate debates. Inside our cabin was stuffy and outside there was a nice breeze, so my dad and I were on the deck in our sleeping bags. We counted shooting stars and the number of chipmunks that crawled over our feet as we tried to fall asleep. When you’re miles away from any sort of civilization, even the slightest noise echoes off the lake, so their music and noise was tremendously upsetting. After a particularly rowdy song, my dad sat up and asked politely if they could possibly be quieter. None of them answered, and a heavenly silence descended upon the lake. A few minutes later, one of them muttered seriously, “I’ll kill you all,” and his friends laughed nastily. I didn’t sleep well that night.

            That and the hammock incident sealed the deal – residents of cabin #3 were not welcome in our group.

*   *   *

             Whenever we come up to the cabin, champagne-filled-backpack Kirk always throws one of his cocktail “hour” parties. For Kirk, cocktail hour starts at 11:00 am and stops only when he brings out the electrical saw, which, as it turns out, is not an unusual occurrence. I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t remodeling some part of his cabin – whether it was adding in another kitchen or fancying up the shower.

            My family and I all traipsed over to his place. As we approached, Kirk walked out onto his sprawling deck, wine glass and hammer in hand. He greeted Kerry and me with the usual, “Girls, will you marry me?”

            I noticed that he was wearing a headlamp and that the light was on, even though it was still the middle of the afternoon. “Last night I didn’t even have a flashlight. So I have to keep this around,” he offered as an explanations, as he employed Kerry and me, then aged twelve and fourteen, in the kitchen as cocktail waitresses.

            “Kirk. There’s four different kinds of alcohol in that one,” I pointed out as he began to pour drinks together splashily. 

            “Yeah, see that’s the trick,” he said. “Hey, wanna learn something else? If they’re watching, you give them half a shot. If not…” He poured three shots into the glass. “Now go bring this to your dad.”

            I did as I was told. Kerry and I had learned long ago that following Kirk’s directions, although sometimes unusual, usually ended profitably for us. Once he told us to follow around his son and report back to him with what had happened. We both felt privileged to be working as spies for Kirk and took our jobs very seriously. After an hour of tromping through bushes and climbing in trees with binoculars, we came back to him with a detailed report. Kirk grunted a “Good work” and reached for his wallet. He shoved some twenties in our hands, and waved us out of the room.

*   *   *

            Every summer, the Forest Service stocks our lake with tiny trout fingerling fish. Because the lake is surrounded on all sides by mountains, the planes have to fly down low to ensure that the fish actually land in the lake.

            One morning, Kerry, Becca, and I all went on one of our routine frog catching trips. The three of us had trudged over to the marshes of the Lagoon, the mini-lake right next to ours, and searched the muddy grass for the penny-sized tree frogs that hopped everywhere. Frog catching is an acquired skill but by that summer we were basically professionals. We made Becca the Amazon Woman carry them around in buckets.

            Back on her deck, we made the frogs a new (temporary) home in one of Boris’s massive cooking pots and named each one. After we had fed them a heart healthy meal of leaves and pinecones, we watched a roofer who was re-shingling cabin #4. As it is impossible to drive up to the cabins, the man was making countless trips across the lake, bringing shingles back and forth in a motorboat. Becca’s younger brother Jacob tried, to no avail, to make friends with the roofer by occasionally shouting words of encouragement.

On one of the trips, the roofer was surprised by the loud whirring of a plane dive bombing his boat, or so he thought. Suddenly, hundreds of tiny silver objects plummeted from the plane. Panicking, the roofer yelped, stood up, and jumped around in the boat, yelling frantically. He finally leapt into the lake, thinking perhaps that the water would provide him cover from the attacking plane. He swam to shore. We watched the roofer’s rowboat motor around the lake in small circles, collecting the fish as they fell from the sky.

“Your boat! Your boat!” Jacob shouted, flailing his arms wildly as his short legs ran and jumped in his own boat. The rest of us babysat our frog friends, laughing as Jacob unhelpfully yelled suggestions to the roofer.

*   *   *

            When the end of our stay comes around, I feel as if I’ve only just driven up in the truck with Jim. We all take one last swim and say goodbye to the trout fingerling fish that nibble at our toes. Kerry and I drip dry as we run around stuffing long lost jeans and sunglasses in our bags. My dad empties out the Incinolet ashes in the woods; my mom turns off the water pump and locks up the rowboat. Brad reorganizes his trucks in rainbow order. When our bags have been packed, Kerry and I conduct a celebratory bonfire in the fire pit to conclude the trip. Being good Berkeley citizens, my family saves all of our glass and plastic recycling and lugs it down to the car at the end, but the paper we burn.

            After every corner has been swept and every inch of the wood floor has been mopped, we hide all of our valuables from Boris and lay out his strange fur rug that we had moved into the closet at the beginning of our stay. Our dad ducks as he walks out the door and locks the padlock behind him. I grab my bag and heave one of the overflowing garbage bags over my shoulder, Santa Clause style. On the way down to the parking lot, as Kerry and I cut in and out of the shortcuts, I’m already planning what I’ll do when we come back in a few weeks.