Chapter 3 - The Little Red Cabin

The water rocked me gently. I lay alone in the bunk of a houseboat in Ketchikan inside my sleeping bag listening to waves galunk against the hull. I felt safe, maybe for the first time in my life. I felt safe that no one else in the world knew where I was in that moment. There was no one there to feel I had to please, no one there I had to get to like me, no one to give me a grade.

For a month the waves had rocked away the confusion of my Boxtown life. The three-piece suit masquerade, the constant attention to clock-time, to keep myself, “billable.” Away from the force field of a family that felt like strangers. Away from the noise of cars, the passing of jets, the ringing of phones.

I was still accounting, but at least for Alaskan Natives and not boxtowners. I had taken a job as a controller for Cape Fox Corporation, A Tlingit Indian company a few miles south in a little town called Saxman.

The sun had poked its wintry head above Deer Mountain. I pulled on a pair of pants that were as cold as frozen pasta. I crunched over frost sunbacklit on the dock, like shimmering fur, blue, silver and red in the dawn. I fired up the little Volkswagen Rabbit the company had leant me and scraped ice off the windshield with a piece of broken PVC pipe I found next to the dock.

A woman from Saxman had told me about a cabin out north she thought had been abandoned. It sounded intriguing. I drove passed the Mecca tavern and to a dirt road about thirteen miles out of town that dipped and curved down toward the unseen ocean. Around one corner, a dog popped its head out of the bushes. It was a Norwegian elkhound and it appraised me malevolently as I drove by. In a few short months he would be known as the “Devil Dog” and would become Woody’s arch-enemy.

I found the little clearing in the trees the woman told me about and pulled in. I stood a moment listening to the stillness of the waking day. A two-foot wide wooden ramp led steeply down into the dark woods. There were no railings and it was a four to five foot drop on either side. A few remnants of green sandpaper skid pads held in tatters by nails remained on the boards. The ramp was wet, as was everything perpetually in this forest where it rained thirteen feet a year.

I picked my way carefully down. At the bottom of the ramp, I turned and bounced over a series of boards suspended over the mucky ground that ran a narrow path between dark hemlocks.  Each board was tilted a different direction, one to the left, the next to the right, each lower or higher than the next succeeding board.

This maze of boards etching a funky path through these woods would become for five years an obstacle course I learned to walk and even run over sometimes in the pitch dark, by way of something I came to call "foot seeing." This involved a meditative awareness and trust to go forward, keeping my eyes not down, but up and to the trees looking for the subtle gradations of the darkness between the treetops and the sky to steer my feet by.

I walked slowly through the forest and heard the ocean washing through the trees. It stopped me in my tracks. The waves seemed to reach inside to my own internal tidal flow, some mysterious ebbing and flowing that did not know about clocks or spreadsheets. I swayed to the music of it and took perhaps the first deep breath in my life.

I watched the slight breeze jostle the delicate hemlock branches. I allowed my sight to unfocus slightly and see the pattern of many tree limbs bending, bowing, dancing, silent together, endless. Without knowing it at the time I had stumbled upon a practice that would heal me for many years. It had something to do with the dance of every present moment in the wilderness. It was a place without thought, simply a watching of movement, the breathing sounds of the wave’s undulations over the reef.  I was suspended in time.

Some unrest pulled me out of this beauty trance. Around one more bend of trail I could see the sun spilled sparkle of water flash between dark limbs swaying.  I breathed the breeze flowing gently upwards from the sea. Then I saw the cabin, a faded wine red. The roof hung down over the forest like a hat brim pulled down above the outline of a door, like a shadowy eye.

I walked inside and found myself in a rough little kitchen with an oil stove at one side. A rusted out iron-frying pan sat in the sink. I tried the faucet. Nothing. The kitchen was open to the main room, a rectangle about twelve by twenty feet. It was littered with detritus from some beer-canned transient who had been using the place. There was a moldy torn cotton sleeping bag, an old red vinyl recliner chair, and a Leave It to Beaver style 50’s couch gone bad with some raunchy porn magazines strewn about.

It felt slightly dangerous to be there. And yet it was clearly abandoned. The air smelled of slightly rotted wood that had been dried to sweetness by the window sun.  The source of light for the cabin was a lovely picture window like looking through a Nikon viewfinder. Outside the window stood a rickety old porch flecked with faded paint. Rimming the porch were sweet green hemlock, cedar, and spruce limbs. I kept expecting to hear footsteps, to wake up from this dream. 

The cabin sat up twenty feet above the beach, to where a set of crotchety stairs descended. An old unstable picnic table rested in the middle of the porch.  Below, and beyond the trees, waves were peeling across a black rock reef. The sea spread out onto the horizon held down by pale blue distant mountains. In the center of all this water—an intermittent spark, a crack of white lightning.

This was the light that would frame my consciousness, my thoughts, for five years. The lighthouse beam that would take on the proportions of my heart, would settle me with its presence, would frighten me at times as it silently filled the pitch dark of the cabin blazing everything with a Hitchcockian light before sinking me once again into a sea of total blackness.

The little red cabin had found me. Now it was time to get a dog.