Fencerows: “The Cabin”
By John Luthens
I was being kicked into submission by steel-toed work boots. The higher powers deemed it an important beating for the bottom line, and they were still kicking when the quitting whistle signaled the end of the round. I stumbled from the ring and pulled out of the parking lot. There was a cabin waiting for me.
I don’t know why I let it get to me. This country was built on generations of shovels and plows and sacrifice. It was built on the far shores of other countries by braver people who paid the ultimate sacrifice. My work for them is not pertinent like that, barely a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of things. It was the cabin that really weighed on my mind as the sun broke the horizon.
It was a six-hour drive into northern Wisconsin. I’d been too long gone from home and I was low on sleep. I was low on intelligence too, barreling straight through on nothing more than my own thoughts and heavy applications of gas-station coffee.
Goldenrod shot across the ditches and into the early-autumn dew of the passing hayfields. It was a fine morning. Monarch butterflies winged along the roadside. They crept into my truck and danced brightly in front my eyes along the windshield. That was weird—I pulled into a station and slammed more coffee. My work for them is nothing.
It was near noon when I turned into the twisted gravel drive that meant so much. Birch and aspen swayed over in a white tunnel, and at the end of the tunnel an opening surrounded by leaning red pines. I could smell the pine pitch before I saw it. At the end of the tunnel was the cabin.
My mother still lives in the northern cabin year round, as did my father before he waded on to his final fishing hole. There are still signs of him. The mailbox has a wooden trout hanging next to it. Every cabin corner shelf is beset with little-fish knickknacks. The gun cabinet is polished oak, and still holds a fine collection of shotguns. But the drawers of the gun cabinet itself overflow with ancient and yellowed fishing maps. Old waders still hang in the wood shed and they look and smell like swamp mud.
My dad knew what it meant to go to work, but he also knew what it meant to get away. He knew what it meant to come home again. He would have been sitting in the rocking chair on the porch waiting, stringing up a rod. The woodshed waders and the fishing maps were his, but the trout knickknacks were hung by mom’s gentle touch. Dad always smiled, humoring my mom, but he could have cared less about the niceties. He was obsessed with the real thing.
My sudden arrival caught my mom unawares, meaning she was out and about on such a fine day and the cabin door was locked. There used to be a key hidden in one of my dad’s worn-out hunting boots on the porch. He worked in those boots too, so they were always double-barreled worn. Now, the boots and the key were gone. Maybe he took them with when he left. The key only unlocked the cabin, not the Pearly Gates, but my father was a tireless worker. If he took his hunting and work boots with him, St. Peter would be forced to let him in on general principle.
Wandering around the yard like a stray dog, I finally left my pack on the porch steps and took my sleeping bag to the screen house in the back and went to sleep. The last thing I remember before passing out exhausted was the tinkling of a wind chime sounding in the breeze. It was hidden deep in the pines and I couldn’t see it.
I came awake to the late-afternoon sun coming through the screen house and the roar of a lawnmower. The smell of a cooking ham came from the kitchen and a pot of potatoes, spoils of a big summer garden, simmered in a pot. Not only is my mom adept at hanging fish ornaments, she’s also a hell of a tireless worker in her own right.
“You look like you haven’t slept in weeks. I hated to wake you with the mower but it’s going to rain tomorrow and I needed to finish it. I made up the spare bed in the basement—much better than sleeping on the porch.”
I offered to finish the lawn, but was duly snubbed. “Grab those smelly waders out of the shed and put ‘em to use, the mice keep wanting to build a nest in the boot legs. I’ll keep a plate of ham warmed on the back burner. I imagine you’ll be out till dark. And for heaven’s sake, eat some garden vegetables before you go.” She was married to my dad for many years and she knew certain things went without saying. She knew the apple fell pretty darn close to the tree.
I stepped into a river that roped quietly through the valley, and I was still thinking about the wind chime and the pines and the cabin. My dad might have hated fish knickknacks, but he always had a thing for my mother and for gardening, and for wind chimes and trout fishing.
I made my first cast of the evening. As I rounded the first bend of the river, I realized that the bottom line deemed so important by some, is nothing but a frantic cast at shadows beneath the current. There are far more important things in the river. I still had the river valley, and at the end of that, the cabin and a plate of ham. They say you can’t go home again, but they’re wrong.