Seeking solitude in a remote cabin is hardly a new idea. Henry David Thoreau popularized the concept in Walden; or, Life in the Woods back in 1854, and writers, especially male ones, have been replicating the experiment ever since. Back in 1990, for instance, John Hanson Mitchell even set up a tiny house on Walden Pond and wrote about the two-year long experience in Living at the End of Time: Two Years in a Tiny House. There are other examples in the genre too, especially propelled by the growth in interest in tiny houses, off-grid living, and housing affordability, like Dee Williams, who chronicled the construction of her tiny home in The Big Tiny, or Jay Shafer, the godfather of the modern tiny house movement with numerous titles to his name.
Patrick Hutchinson’s journey in Cabin: Off Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman follows in these traditions. He buys a remote moss-covered cabin in the Washington State wilderness, on a whim, seeking a kind of awakening from the isolation and solitude Thoreau solitude celebrated but ultimately finds a community, both in the friends who help him build out the cabin, and in the neighboring land holders.
The central tension in this narrative is built around overcoming the challenges of the dilapidated dwelling, of which there are many. There’s no electricity, plumbing, or water source. The cabin does have spiders, leaks, freezing temperatures, and gun-toting neighbors. While this memoir is far from a how-to guide, Hutchinson does come up with some solutions, though some might come across more as warnings than helpful hints.
To solve the plumbing problem, he builds a makeshift outhouse. The legal requirements for this sort of bathroom are in a gray area, but there’s an existing hole that he expands. He calculates his 55 gallon drum will fill with excrement in about six years, and instead of setting up a long term solution, he jokes about selling the house before then. For his kitchen sink, he builds a custom solution with a butcher block inset with a vintage sink fixture. There’s no water source, and the sink only ever drains into a bucket. He never solves the electricity problem. There’s nothing glamorous about cabin life the way Hutchinson lives it, unless going to bed in frigid temperatures drunk on whiskey sounds like a rollicking good time.
The memoir focuses on each of these problems with their solutions presented as vignettes set within the broader story, Hutchinson aptly distilling each of these adventures into smaller, focused, linear narratives within the larger context. He has almost certainly unraveled the overlapping and concurrent timelines into much more easily digestible portions, and each of these stories adds to the overall tension in the book, of whether this whole experiment is a success.
If solitude is the goal, however, Hutchinson is perhaps less successful at finding it. Fun is the focus of many of his early efforts. He tackles the cabin projects with groups of friends fueled with cases of beer: “No one cared if the floor sloped a little or if the driveway wasn’t really firm enough. We just wanted to play with power tools and cut wood.” They’re lucky nobody lost a finger. But it does show how the idea of Thoreau’s solitude was more an ideal than practical. Hutchinson does find time alone in the woods, but from this memoir, at least, it seemed far more common for him to be surrounded with people in a small space.
Hutchinson is self-aware enough to realize his aspirations of isolated cabin life are something of a hobby. He learned new skills along the way, but was still very much an amateur when it came to the more technical work required to improve the cabin. To some degree too he acknowledges his privilege observing that “cabins were like gym memberships that start on a New Year’s resolution, get used a few times, and then simply suck money out of a bank account because of the possibility that maybe, just maybe, next week you’ll be gripping kettlebells again.” For much of the book, he easily can fund the capital upgrades in the cabin through working a day job in Seattle.
His situation is far different than the people who live full time on Wits End. His neighbors, at least the ones who are permanently part of the landscape, struggle with their existence. On his first drive through the area, he notes many of the shacks look like places where people cook meth. While Hutchinson does meet some of his neighbors, mostly he encounters people like him, part-time folks who have flexibility to leave when things are hard or bard. But his description of the more depressing cabins reminded me of the kind of people Ted Conover meets in Cheap Land, Colorado, who were enticed to move to a relatively inexpensive, but barren part of Colorado where homesteading is nearly impossible. Conover, like Hutchinson, eventually sets up his own off-grid outpost. But Hutchinson remains much more outside the local orbit. Poverty is clearly part of the community, but it isn’t actually part of Hutchinson’s narrative. He doesn’t interact with the neighbors he projects as hosting meth labs, but focuses instead on the mirror images of himself, the neighbors who look like him and whose lives he recognizes as like his own.
Ultimately, the central question in so many of these narratives of off-grid living is, as The Clash ask: Should I stay or should I go? Hutchinson creates tension throughout the memoir around the outcome. There are several distinct moments when it seems he might want to simply walk away, not least of all after handing over the money to buy it, and other times when he’s moving his most prized personal objects, like an inherited typewriter, to the cabin. Despite these ups and downs, it’s impossible to predict whether he does stay or go, and there’s a surprisingly satisfying conclusion.
Patrick Hutchinson’s journey in Cabin: Off Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsmans delivers a modern reworking of the long-standing self-exploration story. The book reminds us that living alone in a cabin in the woods is never about the romantic idea of solitude, but the discovery of who we are as people.
NONFICTION
Cabin: Off Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman
By Patrick Hutchinson
St. Martin’s Press
Published December 3, 2024
