1

FOUND

I bought the cabin for $7,500 from a guy on Craigslist. He was a tugboat captain. His name was Tony.

Here’s why.*

I was in my midtwenties and experiencing what felt like a sort of quarter-life crisis. People all around me, people I thought were my friends, were going off and doing ridiculous things like getting careers and advanced degrees, husbands, wives, kids, dogs, and other accoutrements of the heavy-responsibility genre. They knew what Roths and IRAs and 401(k)s were, or at least they knew enough to know that wondering what those things were was something to be concerned about. And here I was, thinking that we had all agreed to get through college, or at least those years when one might go to college, and then just sort of hang out forever and eat pizza and watch The Simpsons. It had seemed like a good plan, but no one else was holding up their end of the bargain. I had no idea what I wanted.

I was living in Seattle, trying to be a writer. But it wasn’t working out. I’d gone to college. At one point, there was a plan to become a doctor. Instead, I double majored in anthropology and history. It’s hard to imagine an educational shift more perfectly suited to destroying a person’s job prospects. After graduating, I wandered. I spent six months in Patagonia, a month in Colombia. Rarely did I receive mail for more than a year at the same address. I worked at random jobs—a bartender, a sandwich delivery person, a sushi busboy. Out of those wanderings and a social science education, I’d landed on a dream of becoming a gonzo journalist travel writer–type person. Think Hunter S. Thompson meets Paul Theroux and Anthony Bourdain. I wanted to hunt down bizarre stories and wild characters, mostly because it seemed like a surefire way to fuel an endlessly intriguing day-to-day life. Apparently, however, those jobs are not easy to come by. Instead, I’d sit at my laptop and fire off story pitches to editors who couldn’t have cared less. Jobs were few and far between. The pay was terrible. The reality was a constant, stressful, demoralizing struggle.

I started selling off parts of the writing dream for things like being able to afford rent, health care, and foods that didn’t rhyme with Rop Tamen. I stopped chasing the underpaid cool magazine jobs and accepted the desk jockey marketing copy gigs. Years after leaving college with an intent to roam the earth telling the stories of beautiful lunatics, I was in an office creating email templates to sell advertising to plumbers and wondering how I’d ended up here.

It felt like a great secret that I was completely lost. The lack of direction and purpose were embarrassing, like a part of me was missing. When I looked around, it seemed that everyone else was getting on with things, stacking their cards, squirreling away, creating plans for five years, ten years, and beyond. My long-term plans ended at knowing when the leftover Chinese food would go bad.

At first, I really wanted to fix the problem. I wanted to find a new purpose and dive in with everything. But it wasn’t happening, or I wasn’t looking in the right place, or I was being too lazy about the whole thing. I had no idea. What I did know was that every passing week, month, and year that the aimlessness went on, I was more and more desperate.

Slowly, that desire to find a purpose festered into a simple desperation to at least appear like I had a purpose. If I couldn’t find a cure, maybe I could at least find something that worked on the symptoms. I needed a distraction of responsibility, a smoke and mirrors show that I could hold up to the rest of the world while I feverishly figured out what in the hell I was doing.

I knew that there were a few gold-standard, proof-of-responsibility milestones that I could turn to. Things like grad school, marriage, kids, enlisting in the military, maybe. But the idea of going back to school seemed ludicrous, which made the idea of a new career seem pretty unlikely. Getting married was a bit too dependent on the cooperation of others, and having a kid was that same problem multiplied. The military, as far as I knew, still involved a lot of running around, so that was out.

At the time, the girl I was dating announced that she was looking to buy a house. It was an idea that seemed absurd to me, considering the closest I had ever come to qualifying for a mortgage was getting approved to finance a DVD player from Best Buy. Her confidence in tackling the task made me question how unbelievably out of my league she was.

I’d never seen the house-buying process before. It was astounding. It reeked of responsibility with all its forms and appointments and phone calls and emails and bank … stuff. It dawned on me that a real estate purchase might be an ideal solution to my problem. For two solid weeks, I reveled in telling folks that I was “looking into buying a house” when they asked how things were going. It was marvelous, but the dream was short-lived. As it turned out, while I could afford a house, I could not afford any house within a zip code I was familiar with. It was 2012, and Seattle-area home prices were the lowest they had been in more than a decade. There could not have been a more affordable time to buy a house, but I was nowhere near being able to do so.

Outside of Seattle, there were options. I’d sit at my computer, zooming out farther and farther until I saw listings that matched my “financial profile.” They were far from the city. Far from traffic and streetlights. They were in farmlands and river valleys, and still farther yet, they were nestled in the foothills of Washington State’s Cascade Mountains. And often, they were not homes at all. They were cabins.

I’d grown up in the woods, on a few acres about an hour and a half south of Seattle. My childhood was spent tromping through dense forests of hemlock and Douglas fir, pushing through ferns and blackberry bushes with the family dog, a chocolate Lab named Mud, who had a taste for sticks and deer shit. When the long days of summer allowed, friends and I joined one another in the woods building tree forts with my dad’s rust-covered hand tools. When they were complete, we’d pack ourselves inside and spend hours practicing swear words, farting, spoiling our appetites with Cheez-Its and warm cans of Mountain Dew. Scrolling through pictures of cabins on real estate sites let loose a torrent of nostalgia from those tree fort days. Though adult life included summers with frequent camping trips, I still missed the woods. Certainly a vacation home was the sort of surefire totem of responsibility that I was hoping to find, but when I saw those cabins, my real estate pursuits became fueled by a desire to return to that magical feeling of being in the woods, cramped into a cozy space with good friends, maybe swinging a hammer around from time to time.

There was a problem, though. While I could afford a cabin, I could not simultaneously afford a place to live in the city. Escaping to a woodland retreat was what I wanted. Becoming a full-time hermit was not. Nonetheless, I kept looking, gawking at log structures in snowy mountains, drooling over humble cottages alongside lakes and rivers. It became the mindless thing I did on my laptop or phone in the morning when I woke up, on the toilet during work, and late at night when I couldn’t sleep. This went on for months.

Until late one night, in the early fall of 2013. I was on Craigslist looking for ads featuring any one of a number of items that had been stolen from our house during a recent burgling. Having no luck, I returned to the search bar and, on a whim, typed in “cabin” and hit Enter. The inquiry had the sophistication of an eleven-year-old typing “boobs” into Google. It was just as effective.

My eyes locked onto the top result: “Tiny Cabin in Index.”

I knew Index. The little outpost hemmed in by brutally beautiful mountains consisted of a shabby mini-mart, whose shelves of dust-covered beans and out-of-date camping equipment never seemed to change, a small coffee shop, whose OPEN sign was always illuminated even though the door was always locked, and an adventure rafting company that offered guided trips down the Skykomish River. Apart from that, Index maintained a volunteer-run fire station, a small collection of cabins, a school, and a decrepit inn that had been neglected for decades despite a constant stream of new owners with grand plans to renovate. My visits to the town were always quick stops on my way to hikes or camping spots. Index was a last chance to stock up on ice or a few cases of cheap beer before diving deeper into the mountains.

But it wasn’t the town’s name that drew my attention to the ad. It was the picture and the price. The simple, tiny cabin was set against a backdrop of moss-laden trees. Only ten by twelve feet, it looked more like a big chicken coop than anything else. I knew people that had larger places to store their lawn mowers. Architecturally, it took inspiration from drawings of houses made by preschoolers. Box on bottom. Triangle on top. All around it, the forest floor was covered in a sea of bright ferns. Here and there, the first leaves of fall added a pop of gold or crimson, donated by a few mature maples that towered overhead. Nestled into the forest, the cabin begged for someone to cozy up inside, light a fire, take a slug of whiskey, and let the world drift away, all for the price of a used Hyundai. They were asking $7,500.

I sent an email immediately, requesting more info and a visit as nonchalantly as possible, so as not to appear overeager. When I heard from the owner the next afternoon, the reply was quick and equally casual:

Yeah, that’s no problem. The key is above the door. It’s the fourth place on the left up on Wit’s End Pl.

The owner’s name was Tony. He seemed about as concerned about the place as a dog is about climate change. I told him I might go check it out, if I had time. I didn’t want him to think I was desperate, didn’t want him to know that within twenty minutes of receiving his message, I was speeding northeast, feverishly trying to cut out of the urban sprawl of Seattle before armies of tech workers swarmed the highways on their commutes home. By three o’clock, I had made it to U.S. 2, a two-lane, east-west corridor that roughly followed the Skykomish River as it wound down from the Cascades to Puget Sound.

In the winter, the highway was clogged with powder-hungry skiers headed to the resort at Stevens Pass. In the summer, it was equally clogged with a combination of hikers and campers looking to escape the bustle of Seattle for a weekend. And in all seasons, city folk streamed over the pass to reach Leavenworth, a stunning mountain town that had been transformed into a strange, pseudo-Bavarian theme park promising big pretzels and overpriced beer. It was, and continues to be, bafflingly popular.

It didn’t take long for the landscape to begin shifting as I made my way east. The chain restaurants and clogged intersections gave way to one-light towns and rolling farmland. An hour after I left, the road aligned with the wide banks of the Skykomish River, flecked by the occasional retiree in full waders casting a line. I passed through Sultan, Startup, and Gold Bar, a trio of tiny places that were all too easy to mistake for one another. Experiences on previous road trips had taught me to remember that Sultan was home to the bakery that made cinnamon rolls the size of spare tires and giant cups of coffee that never cost more than a dollar. Startup, of course, was home to the drive-in with the best milkshakes and saltiest fries, and Gold Bar had the Prospector, where a kids’ karaoke night turned the establishment into a makeshift day care on odd evenings.

I found myself daydreaming about a life where I would lean into the nooks and crannies of the town’s homespun businesses. I imagined stopping in the little lumber store to buy bags of nails by the pound like my dad and I had when I was a kid. I pictured ducking into the studio apartment–size post office in Startup to send out letters to friends and family over longer cabin stays. And when I passed by one of the many white water raft companies that shuttled tourists down the Class IV rapids farther upriver, I took special notice of the road sign calling for “New Seasonal Guides! Now Hiring! Training Provided!” picturing myself as a summer raft guide. I hadn’t even seen the cabin yet, and I already had a whole new life picked out to complement it.

After Gold Bar came Index, but not immediately. Index had something akin to intro music. In the few miles that separated the two towns, the road got tight. Gone were the farms and rural housing developments. There was no room here, no more flat. Groves of massive Douglas fir and cedar guarded the shoulder. At the edge of Gold Bar, a long bridge revealed the Skykomish River below. No longer wide and calm, it had transformed into a mesmerizing display of shifting blues, swirling from deep cobalt to turquoise to snow white as it churned and tumbled over granite boulders the size of minivans. Taking inspiration from the river, the road began to snake through the valley. Around each bend were teasing glimpses of Mount Index, whose nearly six-thousand-foot peak loomed over the forest below.

U.S. 2 was known for being dangerous. It was the only highway in Washington I knew of that had a permanent sign erected to keep track of how many days it had been since a fatal collision. In over a decade of visits to the area, it felt rare to see the number top twenty-five. The sign itself was just outside of Index, and I often wondered if the dangers came not from the icy conditions in winter or the high speed limit (sixty miles per hour on what were very windy mountain roads) but from the sheer beauty of the place. When you approached the town, it was instinctual to shift forward in your seat, pulling yourself over the steering wheel to see even just 5 percent more of the surrounding granite spires. It was as if the mountains themselves had the power to draw you straight through the fucking windshield.

It seemed too good to be true that I wasn’t driving through but diving deeper into those woods. I could only imagine what sort of picture-perfect cabins and cottages would be tucked along the river here, built by those who wanted to complement the surrounding environment rather than impose themselves on it. I figured I’d see folks chopping up firewood in preparation for the cold weather ahead. Maybe there’d be a father and son casting their lines into calm river pools for salmon, or someone out with their dog just enjoying an early-autumn walk.

The directions seemed fairly clear. When I took a right off the highway, I started getting excited. Crunching over a well-maintained gravel road, I slowly cruised along a winding drive that paralleled the river. Up and over a small hill, a homemade arch welcomed me to the Mount Index Riversites.

As the car found its way around a high bend, the road quickly dropped, and I hit the brakes. There was a monster below: a massive waterfall shooting out of a long, bottleneck canyon. It looked like something out of an Old Testament story. Later I would learn that Sunset Falls only drops 104 feet, but it does so over a span of rock about as long as a football field. With most waterfalls, there is an element of grace, a moment when the water is free to slip over the edge and drop without influence. Sunset Falls was not graceful. It was an aquatic mosh pit, a cocaine-fueled waterslide designed by Poseidon himself. I rolled down the window and slowly followed the road as it wound around the pool at the base of the cascade. Mist from the falls drifted through my open window and settled on the dash. It smelled like cedar.

Past the falls, the road turned sharply to cross an old wooden bridge above a straight section of railroad. I was supposedly getting close. According to Tony, Wit’s End was not far beyond the bridge, but nothing by that name showed up. Before long, I started second-guessing my directions and my desire to stick around.

Until that point, I had seen an odd structure here and there, a few cabins, nothing out of the ordinary. Here, though, deeper in the community, a different type of neighborhood began to emerge. There were piles of rusted car components being overtaken by thick clumps of blackberry vines and muddy driveways packed with vehicles that clearly hadn’t run in decades. Around one corner, I came across a large cleared lot with the charred remains of several RVs. Police tape still clung to some of the tree branches. It was hard to imagine any explanation other than a thriving meth business that had met an explosive end.

The only things that seemed bright and new were the ample orange-and-red NO TRESPASSING signs affixed to random trees, fence posts, and scattered bits of junk. I wasn’t sure what was more frightening: the dangers that lurked behind the signs or the type of people who would desire to find out.

I would later learn that the Mount Index Riversites consisted of a few hundred lots, most under half an acre. It may have once been a pristine settlement of vacation properties in a gorgeous mountain environment, but at some point, Uncle Methadone moved in and really kicked some shit around. Whatever it might have been in the past, there now seemed to be two kinds of places in the Riversites: junk-strewn drug dens and everybody else. From the looks of the quirky lawn ornaments, everybody else was mostly grandparents, retirees, and the odd ski bum. I drove to the end of the road, where it finished with a big loop that had me soon heading back out. I’d passed by several road signs, but none that were close to sounding like Wit’s End. I checked my phone, which hadn’t had service since pulling off the highway, and checked the directions again. There were no additional hints to help me out. Without reception and with no desire to knock on the door of one of the many nightmares that surrounded me, I decided to turn back and head home, asking Tony for better directions or simply abandoning the prospect altogether.

As I made my way out, the glint of a green road sign caught my eye where I hadn’t noticed one before. It wasn’t on a post but rather rammed into a large maple. It read ’S END PL. The rest of it was buried deep in the tree’s bark, grown over after being placed there, likely decades before. It wouldn’t be long before the apostrophe would be consumed and the tree would continue its gradual process of renaming the road. Hoping it was indeed Wit’s End Place and not Lunatic’s End Place, I unnecessarily flicked on my turn signal and hung a left, creeping up the gravel drive and looking for the fourth cabin on the left, not knowing whether to count the spray-painted school bus, overgrown with weeds, that sat at the corner.

Wit’s End rose up a steep hill. Although the streak of abandoned structures continued here, there was a subtle difference. These were tiny cabins. Most were simple, the sorts of things more likely cobbled together by weekend warriors rather than full-blown construction companies. They resembled the kind of sheds that you’d see falling apart in the parking lots of Home Depot or Costco. Granted, there was far more character to these simple getaways. Little chimneys poked up from cedar shake roofs, ornamental stained glass windows provided pockets of vibrant color, and well-worn decks offered views toward the river and mountains. Though the overgrown driveways and weed-filled gutters indicated they weren’t regularly occupied, they still felt tidy. They did not feel like the hideouts of a ne’er-do-well. They felt like forest refuges, clearly well loved at one time or another even if now they seemed forgotten.

My station wagon came over the top of a hill, and I counted the third cabin. Just beyond, over a steep drop to the left, the corrugated metal roof of a tiny structure sat cloaked in dried bits of moss and a red-brown blanket of fallen maple leaves. I parked in the middle of the road near the closest thing the cabin had to a driveway, a slightly cleared mud pit with a few patches of salmonberry bushes. Turning the car off, I hopped out and took in the scene.

Anticipation is an underrated feeling. It is that moment when all the possibilities of what could be pile up, and you can’t help but wonder if there’s a chance that what’s to come might just be the best thing that’s ever happened. Often, I felt like the anticipation before a grand adventure or a first date could feel as big or bigger than the experience itself. I stood there for a moment, savoring the anticipation of weekends spent with friends, crisp fall days burning leaves, long summer nights by the river, cozy winters huddled up inside, big snow, deer, bears, drinks, smoke, fire, wood, axes, sweat, tears, laughter. The structure was already a lifetime of memories and I hadn’t even taken a step toward it. I checked my phone and saw that it had put itself into emergency mode on account of the lack of reception. While the lower road felt like the sort of place one might have the need to call 911, I felt safe up here, so I tucked it into my jeans and crossed the few broken planks of wood strategically arranged for safe passage across the swampy ground that led from the road to the cabin.

In person, it felt bigger. The steeply pitched roof was rusty, but seemed solid. Neatly arranged cedar shakes covered some of the exterior. The rest was some kind of cheap exterior paneling, with little grooves cut out to mimic the aesthetic normally provided by actual boards. Though the windows looked almost brand-new, the remainder of the cabin appeared to be cobbled together from miscellaneous spare parts. In front, the skeleton of a deck waited to have its top filled in. A few pieces of rotten plywood served as a substitute in the meantime. On the small ledge above the cabin’s only door, my fingers pushed through a curtain of cobwebs to find a key. Curiously, there was no knob; two dead bolts held the heavy door in place. The key turned easily in each lock, and the door swung open, though not all the way.

About a third of the way into its swing path, the bottom of the door caught against the floor, indicating that either the door, or the floor, or both, were not level. The inside smelled like a good scotch, wet earth, and punky wood, which didn’t bode well for the hopefully dry interior of a house or cabin. Even with three windows, there was not much light inside. The floor was mostly dirty plywood. In the corner were scraps of even dirtier linoleum. Some of the walls were covered haphazardly with cedar boards that had at one point been painted a shade of pink whose name, if you were to come across the swatch at a hardware store, would likely be Pepto Bismol but Gray Somehow. Where the walls weren’t covered, exposed hunks of pink fiberglass insulation hung loosely from within the cabin’s framing.

Beneath two of the windows was a small cabinet that I didn’t dare open for fear of getting ambushed by a startled woodland creature. Opposite the cabinet, a crude ladder led me to a dark, cramped loft. The loft floor appeared to be made of more plywood, held on by a parade of rusty, half-driven nails. There was a window opposite the ladder, but I was too unsure of the date of my last tetanus shot to consider making the hands-and-knees journey to see if it was operable.

Back on the main level, I tried to picture where things might go, what work might have to get done. New flooring, new wall coverings, and fixing the door or the floor or both for starters. I’d need to cover the deck, figure out a place to poop, and fill in the swamp of a driveway. That was just off the top of my head. In reality, it was a dark, musty, disgusting hole. There were spiders everywhere, skittering around the floor like extras in a Godzilla movie. It was the sort of place where you wish your shoes had shoes. There was no electricity, no water, no plumbing, no wires, no bathroom, no lights, no Wi-Fi, no cell service. If you counted gravity and rain, the total number of utilities would have been two. It was a wooden box with a roof and a door. It was perfect.

Like a new parent with a hideous baby, my eyes glazed over the flaws. At that moment, I only saw what I wanted. Weeks later, I would see the holes in the floor. I would see that not a single support beam was level or straight. I would see the gaps in the siding. The rotting rim joist failing to support an entire corner of the cabin would eventually catch my eye, and a militia of mosquitoes would soon welcome me to the neighborhood. But I noticed none of it then. I didn’t see that there were signs of a leaking roof or of a rampant mouse infestation. I overlooked the swamp of a driveway and the tetanus-riddled loft and the old wood and the bent nails. Instead, I saw the flushed faces of friends after a day of snowshoeing. I saw boots drying by a woodstove and a pot of soup warming on the fire. I saw summer days, the car filled with new wood, a trunkful of tools. I saw only potential, and I saw a version of myself that was capable of making it better. Not great, necessarily, but better. Most importantly, for the first time in a while, I felt the pull of something a bit bigger, a grand pursuit, a thing to dive into that was different and new and exciting. I could buy a cabin and fix it up. Why not?

As I locked up the door and replaced the key, a new wave of anticipation began to grow inside me, one that obscured the meth houses and scrap-filled yards from my vision on the way out. Instead, my eyes belonged only to the waterfall, the trees, and the mountain, and I took them all in while wondering how much a circular saw might cost.

2

DOING THE DEED

The drive home sobered me up a bit. Reflecting on the sexy-cool cabin-fix-it-guy dream as I waded through traffic on my way home, I admitted to myself a few potential problems. Small problems. For example, I didn’t know how to fix up a cabin. I could hang a picture and put IKEA furniture together with the best of them, but I hadn’t held a saw since my adolescent days building tree forts when I considered sap to be a fundamental component of a structure’s integrity. As such, I was also a poor judge of the cabin’s current condition. It was either a few swift kicks from crumbling to the ground, or it was merely the victim of many aesthetic shortcomings. My total lack of experience made it impossible to tell.

Beyond the cabin, there were other issues. The neighborhood and its gallery of horrors were certainly not inviting. The cabins on Wit’s End were charming in a dystopian sort of way, but the abandonment was troubling. It was clear others had the same idea as I did, to create a cozy escape in the woods. But the evidence indicated their dreams were unanimously abandoned. I worried there was a reason.

I also had to admit how far I’d come from the initial idea of a cabin, an idea partially born out of a desire to plant a flag of responsibility, to show others or maybe just prove to myself that I was doing more with my life than just sitting at a desk churning out marketing emails. It felt absurd to think that a leaky, moss-covered box in the woods was just the thing to propel me into the alum of adulthood. Even so, there was something about it that felt right. When I got back into town, I decided to play it slow with Tony. I’d take a few days to decide if I even wanted it, then I’d offer him $5,000 and definitely not pay more than $6K. I dialed the number. He picked up after the second ring.

We exchanged pleasantries, and I asked him to tell me all he could about the place. The story wasn’t complicated. He worked in Seattle as a tugboat captain, had always wanted a little place in the mountains. He’d bought the cabin at the county auction for tax-foreclosed properties. The idea was to have it as a weekend retreat, a place to fix up when he had the time. But that time hadn’t come. The tug business was a bit too good to afford him the free weekends he’d hoped for, so he’d decided to pass the cabin on to someone who might pick up the project where he couldn’t. Besides, he told me, a buddy of his had just bought a place down the road that was bigger and finished and—shockingly—apparently much, much nicer. He’d just abuse that relationship and skip the whole working-on-it part.

“Well,” I said, getting down to business. “It looks like it definitely needs some work, so I think I’m gonna need to give it a few days of thought, then maybe make you an offer.”

“Well, I’ve had a few other offers, so I think I’ll probably let them know it’s still avail—”

“I’ll take it,” I cut him off.

“Okay, I’ll grab the papers. Can you meet tomorrow night to sign it over?”

“Yes.”

“All right, I’ll let you know a good place. We’ll need a notary.”

“Sounds good,” I replied while simultaneously heading to my computer to Google what a notary did. It was happening. I was terrified.

Committing to the sale brought up the final problem with buying the cabin—namely, that I did not have $7,500. But I was confident that obtaining a loan from a local bank would be easy enough given the low price.

Credit where credit is due, none of the loan officers I met with outright laughed at me when I showed them pictures of the cabin. Their reaction, however, was about what I would have expected if I’d asked to borrow money for a pizza-powered time machine. The meetings were short. There was no creative work-around as far as they could see. When I ran out of banks to call, I dialed my last option: my mom. Parents must dread conversations with their children that immediately sound like business proposals. To her credit, she let me make my argument, which was basically, “Please?” and a promise to pay her back at an interest rate better than her savings account. Ultimately, she agreed to loan me the money, although I could tell she would have preferred if it were going to something more like grad school and less like a dank tree house for aimless millennials.

With the funds secured, I turned to the transaction itself.

From my brief foray into looking for real estate, I knew that in standard deals there were a litany of safety measures. There were appraisals and inspections and insurance companies involved to protect folks who didn’t know any better from making terrible financial decisions. But this was not a half-million-dollar house in the city. This was a $7,500 shack in the woods without so much as a light switch. Employing the normal professionals for this transaction would have been like putting a helmet on to empty the dishwasher. Instead, there was just Tony and me and the hope for trust between strangers. Tony suggested we take care of the deed ourselves, and I happily agreed to the version of a deal that cost both of us less money. I imagined our exchange would be like the scenes in old westerns, where a grizzled cowpoke would throw a few coins to a bartender, make their mark on a slip of paper, slam a shot of whiskey, and walk out of the saloon a landowner. The reality wasn’t far off, although there wasn’t any whiskey, the saloon was a UPS, and the rough-hewn bartender was an acne-riddled teen in a brown visor.

When Tony arrived, he looked every bit the part of a modern-day tugboat captain. About five foot ten, dressed in a ratty baseball cap, paint-splattered sweatshirt, and heavy canvas pants, he looked strong enough to pull cargo ships around the bay without much more than a rowboat. He met me with a smile and a crushing handshake. Greetings were exchanged, and he produced the necessary papers. Inside, the UPS boy efficiently stamped and notarized our forms, I handed Tony $7,500 in cashier’s checks, and somehow, that was it. In less than five minutes, it was over. Tony had all my money, and I had a piece of paper.

As we said our goodbyes, I asked Tony, “Oh, anything I should know about the neighborhood?”

Backing up slowly, he casually responded, “Uh, no, not really. There can be drama up there, but I’d just stay out of it. There is one guy next to you who thinks he owns part of the cabin, but it’s fine,” he said with a final wave to let me know there’d be no more discussion about it. And with that, he disappeared down the crowded sidewalk. Assuming I’d been scammed, I started thinking about which power tools to buy first.

3

TOOL CHATTER

For someone who imagined they’d like to build a thing or two, I had an embarrassment of tools. Most of what I had was acquired by occupation or accident. In college, I’d worked as a delivery “driver” for Jimmy John’s. I say “driver” because I, along with every other delivery person there, distributed late-night sandwiches to drunk kids on sorority row by bicycle. The remnants of that job were a few wonderful friends and a collection of wrenches and tire-changing implements that were largely useless for anything other than repairing a bike. Nevertheless, I added them to a corner of my room I’d set aside for cabin supplies. I also scrounged up an old hammer, a measuring tape, a dull handsaw that I was pretty sure was for cutting metal only, and a collection of screwdrivers, all flathead in nature. The one power tool I did possess was an electric drill on loan from my brother. Considering the drill had to be plugged in and the closest outlet to the cabin was probably a quarter of a mile away, its presence in my cabin tool corner was mostly symbolic.

I had used the drill once before. The goal had been a small hole in some drywall for a modest hook, but I underestimated the drill’s power by a factor of six or seven million. The drill bit and then the drill itself went through the wall much like that Kool-Aid fellow tends to enter a room. Subsequent attempts produced smaller and smaller holes until I finally got what I needed. Thankfully, it was a big picture. As the proud yet incapable owner of a cabin vacation home in need of a few updates, it was clear that I’d need some new tools. Chief among them would be a battery-powered drill that I could take into the woods and operate, as they say, off the grid. But the search for drills had been far more stressful than I had imagined it could be, the sheer number of options and combinations of power tools available seemed designed to break down people’s sanity.

One evening at home, while my roommate, Indy, stood over the stove slamming thick burgers into a cast-iron pan with a spatula, I recounted my troubles.

“It’s the sort of thing where it’s going to cost between two hundred fifty and probably four hundred dollars, no matter what I do. I want a cordless drill and circular saw, which seems simple enough, but it makes sense to get both the same brand; that way, you can share batteries. I learned this,” I said to Indy while I paced the kitchen.

“Yes.” Indy was really on board so far. Smoke from the burgers was rapidly filling the kitchen, so I opened the side door and continued explaining while batting the door back and forth to encourage the smoke into the yard.

“Now, for whatever the hell reason, manufacturers don’t offer, ‘Here’s a box, inside is a drill and a battery. Here’s a box, inside is a drill and a saw. Here’s a box, inside is just a drill.’ No, it’s, ‘Here’s a box that contains two drills and two batteries.’ Now, one of those drills, you don’t even know what to use it for. That box is twenty dollars more than the box that only contains the drill you want, but do you want to spend twenty dollars extra for a drill you don’t even understand?”

Presumably someone understood what the extra drill was for, but it wasn’t about to be me.

“And! Then you need a saw, and saws typically like larger batteries, larger than the ones that come with your drill. But Home Depot doesn’t carry ‘saw with battery’ kits. They have the saw only, so should you buy a larger battery for the saw? Well, that’s ludicrously expensive, so now I’m thinking maybe I’ll get the kit that contains all of them! But that has a light too and a holder bag that I don’t need, and it doesn’t matter, because it’s not in stock anyway. Now, add to that, there are three different brands, and I was stuck in there, talking to a fifty-four-year-old father of three, grandfather of seven Home Depot guy who’s been selling tools for thirty years, and he’s telling me to trust him because he ‘sees a lot of that Milwaukee stuff gettin’ returned.’

“And according to this guy, Paul, there’s ‘a friggin’ killer sale on Bosch drills right now.’ So I say, ‘Yes, Paul, but do you have Bosch saws?’ And Paul says to me, ‘Nah, they’re online only.’ And so now I’m back to square one, because if you don’t get all the same brand, then the batteries won’t work between them, ya know?”

Indy was smiling, either because he enjoyed watching me unravel or because he didn’t want to provoke someone who was already so clearly unhinged. “All right, these are ready,” he said, clicking off the stove’s burner and moving the burgers onto a plate.

Most of the smoke had dissipated—though, in hindsight, I realized that fear of a smoke alarm would have required our smoke alarms to have fresh batteries in them or at least, and possibly more importantly, to exist in the first place. I shut the door, grabbed another beer out of the refrigerator, and sat down at our kitchen table. Pushing a week’s worth of mail aside, Indy slid the plate of burgers toward me. This is how we ate then. No sides, just a pile of burgers.

Grabbing one and squirting a healthy dose of mustard underneath the bun, I ranted on.

“I spent an hour and a half in Home Depot last night. I only left because they closed and kicked me out. Just so they didn’t think I was insane, I impulse bought a drill set at random. Now I’ve got a roomful of tools I’m too scared to open for fear of not being able to return them, and if I do return them,” I said, bits of burger likely spilling from my mouth, “I’m gonna have to drive to the Home Depot in North Seattle, because if Paul sees me returning drills that aren’t Bosch, I won’t be able to stand the humiliation. So I’m back to square one with this stuff I don’t know anything about, and there are eighteen different tabs open on my computer, and I’ve got Excel documents opened up with specs on torque ratios for drills I don’t even understand how to turn on, and charts and manuals like you wouldn’t believe.”

Calmly, Indy asked, “Why don’t you just return all of it and go to McLendon’s?”

“Dude, McLendon’s doesn’t even carry Bosch,” I replied, sighing with the undeserved confidence of someone who had learned less than twelve hours ago that A) Bosch was a company, B) they made power tools, C) they were considered good, D) McLendon’s didn’t carry them, and E) McLendon’s was a hardware store.

“Does the entire world agree Bosch is the way to go?” he asked.

“Paul seemed to think that was my best bet. He had a real Little League coach vibe. I felt uncomfortably in his control. I have heard amazing stuff about Bosch, though. If I can get a Bosch drill, four batteries, and the saw for eighteen dollars more than what I’ve spent to get the Makita saw and drills with only two batteries, then I think I’ll be in business.”

Tossing the dishes in the sink, Indy said, “Makita?! What ever happened to DeWalt?” Now he was invested.

“Bud,” I said with a chuckle that made it clear how far behind Indy was, “DeWalt is for plumbers. Know what I’m sayin’? That’s what Paul says anyway. He also says I should quit my job. And he said I’m dropping my hands on the curveball.”

We wrapped up the dishes, and I grabbed another beer to take into my room and revisit my drill research project. There was no clear answer. But a decision had to be made, so I went with what seemed most convenient: a drill set combo that I hoped would have plenty of battery power for weekend trips, a circular saw that seemed ideal for a wide variety of tasks, and a Sawzall, which—according to YouTube footage I’d seen—was about as destructive as it was dangerous and the perfect tool for any kind of demolition work.

When I got the tools home, I brought them into my room and shut the door. Carefully, I opened each one and turned them over in my hands, marveling at the sheer number of settings, dials, and gauges. The heft of them felt good. I pored over the manuals and fiddled with the settings. From outside the room, you would have heard the crinkle of plastic wrap followed by the intermittent whir of an electric motor. For the rest of the night, I practiced. I swapped different bits in and out of the drills, I adjusted the cutting depth of my circular saw back and forth until it felt natural. And at some point, the fever got the better of me, and I drilled a few holes in a corner of my closet where the landlord was unlikely to ever notice.

Climbing into bed that night, I felt a glow that reminded me of Christmas nights growing up, falling asleep to the reality of new toys and the knowledge that the future held many, many days of good times. In months prior, it was all too easy for me to feel restless at night, wondering what to do with my time, wondering if I should quit my job and try something else, start a new workout routine, investigate some new hobby. Nights were all too easily turned into sessions of self-doubt about how I was spending my time and whether it was something I’d reflect on fondly or look back at with regret. The fear that I had about not having an answer to the question “What are you up to these days?” was ever present, especially when that question was asked while I looked in the mirror. But for now, even if the cabin was just a distraction, I felt like I had an answer.

Merely looking for tools had occupied my mind for weeks. The work had not even begun, and I felt cured of a listlessness that had gone on for what felt like years. It was a welcome change, and I felt myself drawn to go even deeper into whatever it was that was offering up the reprieve.

There was one other tool I acquired early on, in addition to the drills and saws. Foreseeing the need to charge batteries if and when they did go dead, I purchased a small, gas-powered Honda generator from a kind woman on Craigslist. She had mostly used it as a power source when camping at Burning Man. I wondered what kind of hellish treatment the little engine had gone through, but the price was right, and when she invited me to pull the cord and start it up, it purred to life immediately. The generator was the last big tool purchase, but I couldn’t help myself from going into the hardware store whenever I’d pass by on my way to work. And so it was, within the first few weeks after I bought the cabin, that I ended up with a new level, a good pair of leather gloves, a fancy new extra-long measuring tape that snapped back into its case with spectacular vigor, and some earplugs and safety glasses that would almost certainly go unused because they were so easy to misplace. Luckily, I was good at squinting.

Copyright © 2024 by Patrick Hutchison