Cabin in the City

I haven't left the house in days, except to shovel the driveway, refill the bird feeder, and deposit the container of vegetable peelings onto the compost pile out back.

During these snowy stretches, when the evening commute becomes treacherous and  outstate travel positively reckless, I count my blessings in a) not having a commute at all, and b) feeling no great need to leave town. The other afternoon I was sitting on the couch with a pile of books beside me, watching the sun go down while the fire from a single log roared in the Jøtul stove. We were listening to a brand-new CD of piano music by Sibelius—I might describe it superficially as a cross between Grieg and Saint-Saens. Hilary had brought home some fresh walleye from the supermarket. And potatoes. When the recital was over we cued it up again.

   

Yes, there are advantages to having a cabin in the city—that is to say, of having a home in the city that has a woodsy feel. Among other virtues, inhabiting such a dwelling obviates the long drive from the city to a lakeside retreat. It also eliminates the toil and expense of maintaining two domiciles. Of course, the signal purpose of owning a cabin or a "summer place," for many, is to make it possible to exchange, at will, the noise and clutter of city life for the simplicity and quiet of the woods. It follows, therefore, that an urban home must, before all else, be woodsy and quiet to deserve consideration as a "cabin."

I couldn't say when I started using the term "cabin in the city" with reference to our house but I suspect it was during one of those informal tours people give to guests visiting for the first time. Passing through the conventional living room and the modest kitchen, we would reach the more unusual dining room, a later addition set at a 45-degree angle to the rest of the house with a twelve-foot ceiling and tall windows looking out toward the backyard. Visitors would look out through the windows to the broad deck, the narrow sward of grass below, and the woods beyond.

first snowfall

From that point I would direct their attention to the left, where a new room has just come into view doubling back toward the front of the house. A previous owner—back in the 1950s, I'd guess—converted the breezeway between the house and the garage into a relatively spacious room paneled in knotty pine, with that small Swedish stove I mentioned jutting out into the middle of it. A pair of antique Ojibwe snowshoes now leans against the brick wall behind the stove, and some faded mallard decoys sit on the ledge up top.

"We call this our cabin in the city," I might have said facetiously on the occasion of that now-long-forgotten tour.

I was joking, of course.

But over time the underlying truth of the remark began to sing in. There isn't a lake anywhere nearby, and the woods out back is only twenty feet thick at best; we could probably name the individual trees. But the room has the feel of a cabin. And the house itself, though surrounded on every side by other smallish, one-story, post-war ramblers of similar construction, is only one strip of housing away from an extensive wood running down a steep hill to a marsh, a creek, and a far larger chunk of undeveloped land that continues south for several miles through Theodore Wirth Park and the Minneapolis Chain of Lakes to Minnehaha Creek. 

That might explain why deer often pass through the yard and sometimes spend the night, why we hear owls hoots every winter and sometimes find them perched in the yard, why a beautiful fox passes through on odd occasions ... and so on.

This is common suburban stuff, I know, but it keeps us looking out the windows in every season, taking walks around the block, biking down Wirth Parkway to Cedar Lake and beyond, feeding the backyard birds, listening for the high-pitched keen of the local Cooper's hawk.

Light flows into the house at every hour of the day. We often sit in the living room and watch the sun come up, and cook dinner with the pink spread of sunset above the backyard woods just outside the dining room windows.  

The first house we owned, in South Minneapolis, didn't have much light. In 1980, the year my mother died, we bought a one-and-a-half story "shotgun" house on Grand Avenue built in 1907. It had crumbling limestone foundations, an octopus furnace, and a coal bin in the basement. (I imagined, way back then, that the coal bin would make a good wine cellar; trouble was, I didn't have any wine.)

The house next door effectively blocked out all light from the south. To the north the view of the neighbor's house—no great thrill—was largely obscured by a massive oak staircase leading up to the second floor. To the east the front porch, with its aluminum screens, allowed little in the way of natural illumination to enter. Our view to the west was entirely obliterated by the dark oak buffet of the type that had been so popular in 1907, and also during the 1970s, when suburban kids like Hilary and me had returned to the city in search of authenticity and tradition. Let me confess here that I have never stripped an inch of oak in my life, though many of my friends lost precious brain cells liberating their woodwork from the tyranny of paint. All the same, I liked the "mission" look, and still do, up to a point.

The only room in the house that had a view of any kind was a small second-floor room facing west that had a sash window. But the room wasn't big enough to be used for anything except an office, a sewing room, or a nursery. Neither of us spent much time up there.

In contrast, our cabin in the city is filled with light. Looking out, we don't image or dream that we're somewhere else. We're looking at the shapes of the trees, trying to identify the little birds moving through the forest or scraping up the underbrush.

How we happened to arrive here is a story in itself. After spending seven years on Grand Avenue—a major bus route with houses built unusually close to the street—we decided the time had come to start looking for someplace new to live. I say "we" but it was Hilary who initiated the search. She hired a realtor named Pat who showed us quite a number of dwellings in our price range in several parts of South Minneapolis—we were still committed city-dwellers—but none of them were much better than what we already had. In exasperation Pat asked if there were any other neighborhoods we'd like to investigate.

At that moment something came to mind. A few years earlier we'd been invited to the birthday party of a friend of a friend, a woman we didn't know well. It was a joint party, however, and it was being held at the other birthday girl's house, way out in Golden Valley. As we zigged and zagged the final few blocks to that event I remember saying to myself, "Why would anyone live way out here?"

But the house was nice. There were some woods in the back. I even got the impression there was a stream off in the distance, though I couldn't see it. Hilary loved the place.

So when, years later, Pat asked about "other" neighborhoods, I said, on the basis of that single evening, "Why not line up a few houses in Golden Valley?"

A week later, on a hot summer night, Pat took us around to a succession of smallish ramblers, trim but uniformly undistinguished, all within a few blocks of one other. The last one on the list looked much like the others. But when I walked in the door, I noticed that the house extended much farther back than you might have guessed while standing in front of it on the street. As we walked toward the back we entered a room bent at an angle, with tall windows looking out onto a deck. When I saw the two short steps down from the dining room to the den, I had one of those deja vu experiences that's both pleasant and creepy. It wasn't just that this house was as nice as the one we'd visited years earlier. It was the same house. Of course we had to buy it.

It might be worth mentioning that the man we bought the house from held an executive position in the Nature Conservancy. He'd recently been promoted to a post in Washington D.C. and he and his wife were eager to move, but they were having trouble selling the house. The asking price seemed too high for what looked like a conventional rambler. "Not a drive-by," the ad in the paper read. But it was considerably lower than what the house was worth.

When he gave us a house tour, he spent less time discussing the virtues of the plumbing than identifying the various trees he'd planted in the yard. There was an American chestnut and a Haralson apple tree in the front and a row of tall red cedar forming a privacy screen in the back. Along the edge of the deck he and his wife, an environmental lobbyist, had planted a mountain ash, a Russian olive, and a row of gray dogwoods. They also maintained a handsome vegetable garden in back, with a pin oak nearby and a buckeye flourishing just beyond at the edge of the woods. They'd planted the terraced garden spaces under the bedroom window with windflowers—wild geraniums, wild honeysuckle, and golden alexander come to mind—and they'd put down trillium, hepatica, and dutchman's breeches in the shadows of the little woods.

Most of those plants are gone; the yard is a lot shadier now than it was thirty years ago. But we've replaced them with other things, and we've also nurtured more than a few of the volunteers that have arrived. But the place had been well nurtured before we arrived.

One obvious drawback to owning a cabin in the city is that you have nowhere to escape to when the rat-race starts getting you down. But is this really the case? For much less expense than maintaining a vacation home Hilary and I can go practically anywhere we want to go for a few days, then pack up and leave. After returning to the same resort—even the same cabin—year after year, a familiarity and hominess begins to settle in.

I admit, this coziness will never approach the feel of a family cabin with a layered, multigenerational history, but it will also be free of such chores as retrieving the dock that floats away with the ice every spring, removing the pine needles from the shingles on the roof, and keeping the problematic and perhaps dangerous gas line to the antique propane refrigerator in good repair.

Well, you know what they say: "You can't have everything."