Getaway to a cabin in the woods

Earlier this month, we couldn't decide how to celebrate our upcoming 12th wedding anniversary: we could get a room at our favorite hotel in Duluth, or head up the North Shore to stay somewhere on Lake Superior, or go to the Cities, or find a cheap, short getaway some other place entirely.

After weighing the options, it turned out that what we really wanted to do was get away to a little cabin in the woods somewhere, and just spend a simple day playing cribbage and reading, with no internet. We happen to have a little cabin about 500 feet south of our house, at the "South Guest Cabin," as we call it. We decided to go there for our anniversary, and we both were more excited about that than we thought we would be.

On a sunny, bitterly cold Friday afternoon, we packed up a sled with all the provisions we'd need for an overnight in our guest cabin. We packed up the fondue pot and the waffle iron, the cribbage board, some books for Gary and painting supplies and seed catalogs for me and, as you can see, quite a few other items we thought we'd need. We don't pack this much when we go on a two-week trip!

Leaving our laptops and cats behind, we walked to the south cabin with our provisions.

The temperature that night was forecast in the double-digits below zero, the coldest night of the year. Gary had spent most of the day stoking the wood stove, so it was starting to get warm when we arrived, but the floor and walls of the cabin were still cold. It brought back memories of the times we'd arrive on a Friday night from the Cities, and not be warm until the next morning.








We didn't waste any time getting unpacked and situated, with a couple of rocking chairs in front of the fire and a mess of books, afghans, and games. Cozy!












It's been a decade since we last stayed in this little cabin. It used to be our main house before we moved to our home on the north end of the island, and we spent many long weekends here, with no indoor plumbing and very basic electricity, only enough for some lights and a radio. We pumped our water (14 gallons every two days covered cooking, bathing, drinking, and cleaning), and heated only with wood. We have good memories of those times, and nostalgia for them, and we were eager to re-live them, even if only for an overnight stay.

Gary built the south guest cabin in 1984, after having spent a terrifying night in a tent in a wind storm, shortly after he bought Raspberry Island in 1983. He knew he and his wife, Elaine, needed some shelter, and this was the first cabin to be built on the island since the fur trade era. (We surmise that there was a cabin on the island back then, anyway; we've found evidence of a building -- metal spikes and handmade nails -- within a small area on the northeast side of the island.)

Gary and his father, Mick, built the main part of the cabin of white oak, which is extremely rot-resistant and needs no finish to protect it from the elements. Gary built the addition from purchased pine logs, which came from the state forest off of Highway 40, just east of here. He made the six-sided sauna from cedar poles that he bought from McGillis Pole Company, no longer in existence.

The additions on the back of the main cabin: living room, shower room,
and sauna on the right (cut off a bit in this photo)

The original cabin is now the kitchen, with a sleeping loft above, for two. The addition room is the living room, which also sleeps two. A narrow room (wide enough for a single bed) leads back to the sauna. In recent years, Gary added a shower room off the east side, for rudimentary showers: you have to pump and heat the water yourself, but it's private and, I think, luxurious. We used to just hang a shower back on the outside wall of the sauna, and shower there. When the wind was coming from the east in the fall, those showers were cold!



We arrived at the cabin just before happy hour, so we spent some time getting dinner ready before settling down in front of the fire for the evening. The menu: cheese fondue with bread, olives, and asparagus spears.

Without television or Internet or the usual household tasks to distract us, we were forced to talk and play games all evening. We pulled out a game from our cabin stash that we'd never played: Probe. According to the box cover from the 1950s, showing two men in suits having what looks like an entertaining game, it promised to be mentally stimulating and interesting. Here's a picture of the Probe game in action (sadly, it turned out to be an over-engineered version of Hangman).


We headed to bed around nine, and had a reasonable night's sleep, with Gary having to get up a few times to feed the Lopi stove. I opted not to run out to the outhouse at 2 a.m., and used the chamber pot instead. That, too, brought back memories.

In the morning, before making coffee, I bundled up for a visit to the outhouse. It reminded me of what our life was like before we got our septic system: having an outhouse forces you to take a walk outside first thing in the morning, and once you're bundled up and out the door, it's actually a really pleasant thing to do. It gets you out in the open air, and brings you face to face with the sunrise, without glass between it and you. Nice.














For breakfast, we made waffles in our cast iron stovetop waffle maker, and they turned out great . . .






















. . . and once the breakfast dishes were done -- which required heating water and disposing of the waste water off the end of the porch, like in the old days -- we went for a walk, played a few rounds of cribbage, and fired up the sauna. Then it was time for a nap (for Gary), and a bit of drawing (for me), a session with the seed catalogs I've been saving for this occasion, and another round of cribbage, before packing up and heading home with the sled.

Our new house feels so luxurious in comparison: running water, appliances, propane and electric supplemental heat, indoor toilet, internet, television, room to roam. But it was fun to re-live the days when we were a bit hardier, and when we depended more on our brains and muscle to get through a day.