Cabin Life. Chapter One. Introducing the reader to Carl Johnson 'of course'

III. Ulysses

Up here we had the Romance of Colorado. My dad's college fame had lingered long enough in Gunnison for a loan of a fine cabin at 8500 feet, deep in the forest near the tree line. Mr. Sloane, the aged owner, liked my father. Looking at the 58 year old man, he saw the college quarterback three decades before, throwing the ball 40 yards into the hands of Bobby Sloane, who galloped into the end zone. That boy was now lost forever in the deep blue sea, his warship sunk in the Pacific Theater. He wasn't to inherit the cabin of the President of the Crested Butte Bank.

Fittingly a banker's property, that place was. It was a cabin like ours never were, great stacked logs to a peaked roof, big space inside and loft to boot, the inside walls plastered and painted such that there was nary a whistle in a high wind. The shake roof shed the rain and bore the weight of the heavy snow in winter. It had no electricity but enjoyed a good spring. The road to it passed the last of the pines; the fir and the spruce came up thick, darker and low to the ground. The aspens quaked just like Van Gogh's poplars, white, then green, green then white. Water ran freely everywhere, flooding down from the 14Kers above where the cabin stood; water ran in streams down each side of the road, and sometimes water flowed across it, to our peril in trying to get in or trying to get out.

The place sat at the edge of a snow meadow, spongy to walk on, deer edging in from the conifer borders, wanting the lush grass if leaves and berries were not to be found. From that meadow one looked west across all the Gunnison country, right into the black heart of Black Canyon. Turning the other way, mountains obscured mountains above, and thick fir and spruce girded the slopes until the bare meadows and rocks appeared below the peaks.

I recall almost nothing about the inside of the cabin.... a low bench near the door with southern facing windows above it. I lay there for hours reading our library books. A set of windows toward the west won an admiring smile from my mother when she came for a few days with my horrible older sister Jeanie. "How gorgeous Pat, so like the Mill Creek Cabin where we nearly killed little Pat." That was a cabin before my time. I certainly do not recall reading Ulysses on that bench, though its reported completion raised my flag high among family and friends. An undeserved fame.

Yet I remember the hike to Wilson Lake as if I walked it yesterday. It lay 6 miles from the cabin, with no great elevation change. Certainly within my range at 12 years of age, with Cannonball under my belt. My dad and I sat down together at a table and studied the maps. He loved maps. They, like poets and physicists, he said with gravity "told the truth." He taught me to gather them, to trust them and to not trust people who did not use them. Those fatheads got lost. We did not. We did not ask for directions. The way was right there in black and white. The ones we studied were not finely grained guides to the wilderness. Topographic was a word we did not know. We relied on the low resolution of forest service maps. But the one before us showed the truth. A marked trail led out from where our road ended, not 30 yards from the cabin. It crossed the meadow heading southeast, into the unknown. Its trail sign bore a bear danger graphic. According to Gunnison National Forest cartography, the route wrapped around the shoulders of the mountain we were on, down through one small drainage and up the other side. And from that other side one plunged down a few hundred feet into the great basin of an alpine lake. Wilson Lake, my destination. That high pond was a fisherman's paradise; a damn road went right to it.

My dad made a questionable decision to let me go alone, at the age of 12. When he was older, he began more solicitous of my health than my mother; when I began to run in my twenties and came back in a sprint, then bent over in the yard, praying for breath, he grew anxious. To give him credit, at the time it wasn't just the hard running; my frame exposed the anorexia I had taken up as a sign of control over things. I could hear them arguing in the kitchen, "He might overdo it," said the great athlete," "Oh Pat, he's 27. You ran like that then." Looking back I wonder why he didn't choose to go on this hike with me, as I have with my kids. Well, he did prefer the book to the trail.