The Cabin

I've had all these things to show you, gathering dust since late November, when we took a West Coast vacation through Mendocino County and up to Portland, Oregon to be with friends for the Thanksgiving holiday. There are so may moments worth recounting that I expect this will come in several parts. It all started when Miriam invited us to come stay for a weekend in her family cabin in Comptche, a tiny tiny town just 20 miles or so from Fort Bragg in Northern California.



We headed up on a Saturday afternoon. After leaving California Hwy. 101, we drove mostly along a winding road through a sleepy hollow sort of landscape, light green and lush and rocky beautiful the whole way. We lost the light thirty minutes shy of our arrival, so that by the time we pulled into the cabin's gravel drive, our eyes were tired from squinting at road signs. We were in a forest, we figured, dark as it was by 6:30, but that was all we could tell.

My grandparents have a cabin in northern Wisconsin, perched on a hill, looking over a lake. Jungle Lake, as we fondly call it, is painted in a blue wash and decorated with vaguely Scandinavian knick-nacks, built by my dad's family in the 60's. Not knowing what to expect, as always with my California, I imagined to find the same sort of thing at Miriam's in Comptche. I woke up our first morning, to find something else entirely.








In truth, they aren't so different. The redwood forest that surrounds Comptche, at the scale of the majestic, is more impressive probably than the familiar woods at Jungle Lake. But where the cabin itself was punctuated with their families' history there--a museum of treasures collected on hikes adorning an exterior wall, lamps and drinking glasses handmade by Miriam's dad and the cabin garden tended by Miriam's mom--I was constantly reminded of the parallel traditions we kept at Jungle Lake. We have a birch cribbage table that my grandfather made from a felled log and an announcemnent still hangs in the hall closet for a pounce tournament "tomorrow morning" that we made when we were kids. Each time Miriam would explain a ritual of Comptche, I would remember one of my own. In a bit of a flood of memory, I realized how much I'd forgotten of the Jungle Lake traditions since I moved away.

They're a lot like time capsules, cabins. They envelope you in that familial slowness, where things assure you they will remain the same forever and you can just laze about in that promise. In the comfort of someone else's cabin capsule, I was able to enjoy that very home feeling. It was a perfect way to begin our Thanksgiving.

House Guests

Living in a Destination City, for me, has been a new experience. Philadelphia, for some reason, fails to attract vacationers' attention like the Bay Area and though some people came to visit us while we lived there, they were more interested in quality time with us than in the Liberty Bell.

Since moving here last fall, on the other hand, we've hosted six friends on our couch and seen several others while they were in town. Even after all this traffic, I still don't feel like I know how to entertain them, aside from going to the Berkeley Bowl to buy produce with abandon and drinking beers in the middle of the day and driving to the beach. Most of my friends by now are happy with this simple plan, but I hope that at some point I can add some other tricks to the repertoire. If you're looking for a vacation that revolves around meals and lying around, we will be sure to show you a helluva time. If you're hoping for a tour guide, I'm not sure what to tell you.

This last go around, we had two favorites in town: Kathleen of Astoria, and Mary Wegmann, soon to be of Portland. They are easy going sorts of friends.


Mostly we employed the usual tactics: a hike to the albany bulb, a drive to the coast, Burmese food to die for and a picnic apiece. Mary Wegmann brought some fresh beer from Wynkoop in Colorado, a peppery brew which we enjoyed thoroughly.



With Kathleen, John arranged for a particularly eventful event: a headless dead bird fell out of our tree, while the two were sitting in the chairs in our backyard. After exclaiming thoroughly at the insanity of it, they gave the poor guy a proper burial, not before documenting the unlikely, unsightly thing. I'm not sure this sort of thing will ever become a regular on the Mary-and-John-Oakland-celebrity-tour, but for Kathleen, a bird enthusiast, it was certainly a notable occurrence. And one you will not find in any guidebook. Here is a snapshot, but beware it is a bit graphic.


I think we'll stick to the easy going sort of hosting duties, feeding and sheltering and the like. That way, the unexpected headless birds have room to fall from the sky and you'll quite possibly have a perfectly unbelievable story to tell the folks back home. What more could you want in vacation?