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Cabin Fever

By Ken Wright

"The public lands represent, in a sense, the breathing space of the nation."

- Richard M. Nixon

I was truly blessed this holiday season: I passed it in a cabin in the woods.

A solid and simple cabin in the lovely Northwoods of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The cabin sits on a lake shore ringed with bone-white birch and droopy hemlock and winter-bare sugar maple. In the summer, loons hatch and raise their young along the far shore, visible from the cabin's deck. I've heard wolves while sitting in a canoe at dusk in the middle of lake. In the winter - like on this most recent visit - we can ski tour the silent and solemn snow-blanketed woods, and pull lake trout for dinner out of ice-fishingholes in front of the cabin.

The cabin itself is respectful of the place that holds it, built with a delicate touch on the land. It is humble but comfortable, well-built and functional, spare but able to hold the big extended family that goes there to enjoy its space. It is a place where quiet rules and the only entertainment is what you make for yourself, or find not in the cabin but in the space the cabin inhabits.

This, I recognize and am acutely aware and appreciative of, is a blessing in my life, to have this cabin to return to once or twice a year. It is a place where I can regenerate and re-enervate. It is where I can both step away from one world and step into another. It is where I can pause the unrelenting flow of daily life and reconnect instead with its active flowing. Which, after all, is the point. I can remember that there. It is no exaggeration to say that I always leave there different from when I arrived. It would be an exaggeration to say I don't need that once or twice a year.

That this cabin is there for me to visit is not an accident. Not that I, myself, bought, built, or was in any way behind the creation of the cabin. I merely married into it. The cabin, instead, is the product of the forethought, planning, and long-range visioning of my wife's parents and family. They did not invest in this, though, with an eye toward some snappy financial return; but, rather, with a sense of long-term rewards for the family and friends who would gather there, to reconnect with each other, and with the land that holds the cabin.

Still, even if I didn't do the work that created this space, I have claimed it as my own. Along with, of course, the rest of the big extended family with a stake in the place. We all share in both its pleasures and its maintenance and oversight. But it is mine just as much, for I embrace its gifts, and engage in the care it needs and deserves if it is to continue as I place I can go when I need, when I want. And so, too, we teach our kids - who've grown up with this blessing in their lives by birthright - to take care of the place, so they, too, will also have the cabin when they want it, when they need it.

And then, when the holidays are over, we come home. Back to our daily lives. Which are also blessing-rich, I know I'm fortunate to be able to say. But, still, it's the nature of the steady flow of the busyness of our daily business that it entrenches and erodes and wears our spirits down - we again get swept away in the flow and forget to savor the flowing. And once again we - I know I do, and I see it in my family as well - need those places where we can regenerate and re-enervate.

But I don't own a cabin. And, to tell the truth, I don't want to own a cabin. Which is probably a good thing, since I can't afford a cabin.

Still, the best blessing of all is, I don't need a cabin. Because I live in the American West. And in the West, the public lands are our cabin. Our public lands are everyone's cabin. The are the places we all own, where we can all go to find space and places to regenerate and re-enervate our spirits and our bodies. Not just recreate, but re-create our connections, with the land, with our family and friends, with ourselves. With the flowing of our living aside from the endless flow of our lives.

Here in the West, our cabins are our lakes, woods, mountains, rivers, canyons, chapparal . . .. Like the cabin, all blessings I, and we, inherited from those before us who had vision. But it is ours none the less, to both enjoy and maintain. And these public lands - a full 85 percent of southwestern Colorado is public land! - take the the same vision and forbearance and respect and investment and guarding as any cabin in the woods, to make sure our kids will have those blessings, too.

If we are all willing to claim them as our own. And to do the work needed to keep them that way.