My sister, Merilee, and me at The Roost, trying on Grandpa’s fishing waders and boots
Oma tupa, oma lupa.
(One’s cabin, one’s freedom.)
— Finnish proverb
In some families red hair and freckles are inherited; in others it’s the talent to play baseball well or a predisposition toward skin cancer. In my family the urge to own a cabin runs deep in the DNA.
My grandparents had a cabin built for them near Brainerd, Minnesota, in the 1940s. They nicknamed it “The Roost” — and in doing so sentenced themselves to a never-ending torrent of birthday presents and thank-you gifts plastered with images of roosters. Their dinnerware had roosters on it. There were cock clocks, rooster-shaped spoon rests, and pictures of roosters combing their combs. The doormat had two roosters holding a welcome sign. My grandmother’s embroidered apron sported a rooster running with a platter of food; on the platter was what looked like a roasted turkey, but that may have been rooster, too. Chickens, turkeys, or other barnyard fowl were not an acceptable part of the decor. It was strictly roosters.
Thirty years later my parents bought a small, run-down cabin on Lake Waverly, a one-hour drive from Minneapolis. My father wanted the cabin to be a family affair, so he set a rule: for every five hours a person worked, he or she would earn one number to the combination padlock that guarded the door. Fifteen hours of painting, raking milfoil weed, or untangling fifty years’ worth of fishing line in the boathouse earned you cabin rights. He bought the cabin, proclaimed the padlock rule, bolted two old theater seats on the end of the dock for contemplating life, and then died with a tennis racket in his hand a few months later.
There were two morals to the story. The first moral: name your cabin carefully. When Kat and I built our cabin, we took the rooster lesson to heart and named it Oma Tupa, Oma Lupa. Translated from its Finnish roots, it means “One’s cabin, one’s freedom.” Unlike for roosters, there is very little oma tupa, oma lupa memorabilia available in gift shops. The second moral: we learned that life is short, so live and love while you can.
Many books are simply good, long allegories. In Secrets of a Very Good Marriage: Lessons from the Sea, Sherry Cohen uses fishing experiences as a way of examining her relationship with her husband. She offers such parables as “See the beauty in what he loves, even if it looks, for a minute, like ground-up fish bait.” And “Spend time together: hearing about catching the shark isn’t the same as feeling the shark’s breath.” A 1960s book called Centering by Mary Caroline Richards was, at face value, a book on throwing clay on a potter’s wheel, but just below the glaze was a treatise on centering the soul as well. In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway is wrestling with something larger than the marlin on the end of his line.
Likewise, we found building our cabin was more than just whacking 2×4s together. Designing a 600-square-foot cabin — a dwelling the size of a double garage — forced us to consider which things and activities were most important. Watching Kat, my wife, and Sarah, our oldest daughter, install deck boards at what to me as a seasoned carpenter seemed a glacial pace held a lesson in determining which was more important — a quickly built deck or the pride they felt in their newly honed skills. A thousand questions arose. Should we have blue or brown siding? Internet? Sleeping places for all five kids? A washing machine? Sex after insulating? A big or small kitchen sink? These were all questions we grappled with. Our cabin is the art of compromise memorialized in wood.
When some couples reach midlife, he buys a red Miata sports coupe and she gets a facelift and a walnut-size cocktail ring. Not us. We decided to buy a nearly inaccessible cliff of eroding clay on Lake Superior and build a cabin together — along with five kids, a handful of friends, and a half-blind, gimpy Pekingese. We decided from the start that the process of building would be just as important as the final cabin. And in the end we wound up with a cabin perched above three quadrillion gallons of water and a bucket of memories. Welcome inside.