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

II. The Rock Cabin

The Rock Cabin at Cannonball Mountain

The little terrier went in like an arrow, a canine streak across the rough terrain, sharp barks, jostling sage, an agonized whelp, and Pete took quills straight into his open-jawed face. So courageous and urban was that dog that he provoked a second blow from the porcupine's bristling tail before retreating, whimpering from the prick of a thousand pricks. His encounter came as my dad and I were making our way up Cannonball Mountain from the Rock Cabin. We picked the pup up and carried him back down. Pete's square visage reflected more porcupine than dog. No quill had punctured his eyes, but his nose and muzzle, and a tender ear, were thick with embedded needles.

I spent hours crying and cutting off the stalks, then jerking them out. There was a country belief that cutting deflated them and made them less painful to remove. All I discovered in the process was the nurse's regimen of observing unremitting pain. When we were done, my patient's face was so swollen my ten-year-old heart could hardly bear the sight.

We had come up to Cannonball from New Mexico, crossing the great watery mesas below Las Vegas and then traversing Raton Pass. The Comanche had once ruled there, their great cavalry riding in once a year for the market and their tribute, meeting the Spaniards to get corn, guns and ammo in trade for buffalo skins and a promise of peace. An unwise bargain in the long runfor the beleaguered managers of the distant imperial colony. After Raton Pass we usually stopped for a night in Pueblo at his sister's house, my Aunt Helen's. If he was home from the state hospital, her schizophrenic son, my cousin Bill, wandered about the rooms saying Mass and blessing me, a white towel around his shoulders. From that old steel making town, we set out to encounter the Western Front. Not to stretch the metaphor too far, the encounter a New Mexican or Arizonan has with the Western Front reminds me of the description of heroin's effects: a sudden jolt of majesty, slamming through unpracticed veins. We tried to sneak in my daddy's back ways, the old railroad ways, across the northern edge of the Valle de San Luis, the town names ringing the sounds of my youth: Canon City, Salida, Saguache. He picked his passes by their altitude and if his dad's Denver and Rio Grande narrow gauge had ever used them. Poncha was his favorite, gravel road and all. Then into Gunnison, walking for a while along the streets where irrigation water ran in ditches, just to look at the little house his Irish family had lived in. A few people still knew him, waving at the boy who had once ruled the gridiron, that college star now a man in his mid-50s.

The cabin was remote. Leaving the highway outside Gunnison, one drove ten more miles on a caliche road, the last ranch house 2 miles back. You then turned up a rougher path away from a little creek. The path ran through a field standing with rhubarb, the feral outcome of a garden planted surely by a woman who once lived in the place. The mountain stood directly west. By the end of our month long stay, the dog and I had made it to the top of that bald peak a dozen times. From that perch one did not look out on a Colorado fantasy. Hardly a tree could be found in the high desert that spread south and west from the Gunnison River. Sagebrush country, even at 8000 feet. The cabin was there not because meadow or timber could be exploited, but because hard rock lay beneath the ground. The rough place we lived in for two summers had been built by quarry men. They stacked the walls with the stone they pulled out of the earth.

A rock cabin has its advantages. The heavy stone persisted decade after decade, standing up against the elements. We arrived 50 years into its life and its aging self leaned just slightly to the east. The walls stayed cool from the night air during the warm summer days we spent there. Plastered walls inside kept out the bigger beasts of the land. The sod roof was made of less stern stuff; during the rare summer rains, buckets set out across the floor captured water for washing up. A detached shed had been thrown together using roughly mortared quarry pieces; planks laid across the intervening space provided a car port for the old station wagon.