The Cabin

On our way to Traverse City a couple of weeks ago, we stopped in Baldwin to try to find the vacation cabin of my youth. Things hadn't really changed that much in the area, Baldwin being kind of stuck in no man's land in the middle of the state, but it still took a couple of passes on Route 37 before we found the access road, still unpaved but now graced with a street sign, West Harmony Lane. The road still wound down the hill towards the river, the power lines still hummed, the several driveways to the right still approximated my memories, but when we reached what had to be the place, I almost advised Cindy to turn around and try again. It was completely transformed, from a simple log cabin with a falling down garage, to a semi-fancy year-round house, with pole barn and gardening shed.
This wasn't its first transformation. My parents sold the cabin to someone who apparently (as they reported on a clandestine visit some years later) covered the place in yellow siding, as if nothing was safe from suburbia. The current owners at least made it look like a cabin again.
The river in front, the Little South Branch of the Pere Marquette, looked essentially the same, however. The dream had not changed. We owned the cabin for almost all my teenage years, and my longing for it, for trout fishing in the river, for summer in the verdant woods, for family time away from small-town Minnesota, away from the dry and inhospitable prairie, was almost indescribable. I felt as I did when we started coming to Maine: pure escape, from corporate pressures which indeed are quite like small-town life, from ambition, from public responsibilities.
I still think of the cabin as a savior, and expected upon returning and finding it again to be overwhelmed by grace. I was even nervous, as if I was about to give a presentation. It didn't happen. I was happy to see it, of course, but being saved when you're fifteen and being saved when you're fifty is a different level of heaven. Still, as we said goodbye to the current owners and drove out the driveway, I gave a little prayer of thanks to the place that prepared me for Maine.