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

Chapter One

Introducing the reader to Carl Johnson 'of course'

My grandfather, Carl Johnson, impressed upon me the necessity of cabin life despite never having possessed a cabin himself. He and my grandmother, Molly Grace Wright Johnson, lived in a cavalierly constructed Victorian house in an old neighborhood in our river town. Their home was subject to floods when the Spring River and the Hondo River decided to get together. Despite these risks, Carl had a lean-to built on the back of their placee near the flood line; in its interior, he created a fictional cabin. Why he didn't just buy one in the nearby mountains, I cannot rightly say. I figure he lost a lot of money in yet another one of his loco schemes and Molly exacted a promise. He could hunt and fish and drink whiskey at campfires all over New Mexico, but he had to come home when he was done.

I have a photo of his invention, with its creator leaning against the mantle of the brick fireplace. He was already stout, his once fabulous red hair gone away. He looked right proud of himself. His tie was pulled rakishly short in Will Rogers style, hanging halfway down his pure white shirtfront. Western slacks ran to Mexican boots. They had a shine still visible after 90 years in a scrapbook. A well tooled, worn leather satchel slumps at his side, the one he took on his trips to the Shriner and Mason conventions; the Shriner cap and the Mason regalia hang on the coat rack, along with the crumpled Stetson he favored when he wasn't in fraternal costume. He has his prized hunting rifle standing by his side, a Savage 303 I have been told. He looks across the room to the photographer, having his image made as he wanted to be known, his cabin as his frame.

Half split logs pressed against the framed walls made the interior seem real enough; deerskin chairs and bearskin throws added more authenticity to the masquerade. He covered the floor with splendid early tourist Navajo rugs, traded from the poor Indian souls short on liquor who came into his second-hand shop. That transaction added up to a grotesque waste of a woman's skilled labor. Still, her craft was well honored in our family; we kept those rugs for generations. And in the Navajo way, on the floor and not on the wall. The big rail bed claimed the prize; a Rio Grande split weave blanket covered the mattress we kids loved to bounce on. Tack and camping lanterns and gun cases were scattered about the den, next to the Indian baskets and the horseshoes. A set of spurs, two Katsina, Hoppe's gun oil, and a bottle of bourbon burdened the top of the hand painted wooden bureau. That's a bureau I still have, along with a companion Santa Barbara desk in which he filed a collection of "Carl Johnson of course..." ads. He placed these systematically in the newspaper, urging the locals to buy his used furniture or slightly used cars. After a bit of philosophy and sales pitches, he ended the ads with the line, "Ain't us Democrats pure?!"

The rifles stacked against the sides of the fireplace told the main story, one whose murderous scenes were stuck on the walls: the 8 point buck from Cloudcroft, the big horn he nailed in the Gila, the pronghorn shot out on the Llano Estacado, even a white alpine goat garnered in a foreign land. A few fish, improbably open-mouthed. Most bracing of all, or at least for the grandkids who adored him and this place, the big bear spread out on the logs, its huge maw forced open by the taxidermist, the great teeth ready to grind us all into bits. We turned from that fearsome beast only to be threatened by the cougar leaping from the other wall.

Carl Johnson's fancy was the mystique of a way to live; the factual experience of cabin life was conveyed by my mother and father, who took us kids into the rough places from the get-go. The Rock Cabin in Colorado and Gavilan Canyon Cabin in the nearby Sacramentos were my earliest encounters with that way of living. Other cabins had existed in the family before my time. In distinct ways, my parents were on familiar ground in remote shanties. My mother was as natural to the forest as a deer. Hell, the deer liked her. One day, as we gamboled through the woods near the Gavilan place, a doe broke up from a copse and seeing my mother, limped away. Lorene drew me to the oak stand and beneath their leaves the spotted fawn lay, the slender chest rising and falling, the velvet eyes assessing strange beings.