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.
My father, Patrick Henry Gratton, occupied cabins in a different way, as a refugee from a world he largely disliked. Arranging a cabin so that it functioned for a good long stay was a pleasure for him; the thinking it through, the preparation, the packing and repacking and unpacking and setting up—all these enjoyments headed toward the goal of isolation and reading. Those two occupations constitute inheritances that man generously provided me. For PH, nature was grand to look at, but reading was a core activity, cooking cabin cuisine another, telling tales to his kids yet another. On the dark lonesome evenings in the scary night of the forest, he would launch into the songs of the Irish rebellions, his tuneless voice a vessel running back across the sea to sad scenes in soggy huts leaning into the bogs.
My father, and let's be honest, Lorene herself, also admired cabins for their extreme affordability. While other kids went off with their families to Disneyland, or sojourns on the beaches of California, we went to a cabin borrowed from a relative. Living well in a wild place for almost nothing seemed the right thing to do. I followed my dad's penchant for the book and refuge from the world, and followed my grandfather's and mother's penchant for the wild, sans the rifle and pole he used to kill nature's citizens. From boyhood, I sought to saunter through the woods without a worldly engagement, as if Thoreau had advised me to take that path before I knew Henry David existed.
Thoreau and Edward Abbey eventually did take me directly in hand. They caught me when I was most vulnerable. I had reached my late 20s with nothing to show for it. After the 1960s revolution collapsed, I faked my way out of political insurgency and into graduate fellowships in history. I had talent but little interest in the discipline and bore an ill-concealed disdain for academic life. Good teachers eventually discovered the fraud and began to sanction me for it. Their evaluation and the idealistic commitment of my nerdy colleagues in my graduate program began to wear down my arrogance. Failing all the meanings of the word curriculum, experiencing for the first time the contempt of good teachers, I lived a impecuniousness of Dickensian proportions in a Cambridgeport slum. Women discarded me with good reason, adding to the list of my self-inflicted injuries. I began to engage in an uncommon thing for me, self-appraisal. The bitter brew soon came in long draughts. I came to see myself for the failure I was. I perceived that my scorn for an academic career was the mark of a coward.
Fueled by despair and self-loathing, I failed to face my cowardice. Instead, I scurried out of Boston like a dog with his tail between his legs. I knocked on my parents' door. They took me in as Frost says they must. For a time, I nursed my wounds, contemplated my nothingness, and starved myself. Then I began to move toward a decision I still question, to take up the academic life and to try to master a discipline I had contempt for. I read historical work for hours upon hours, gained vague understanding, and moved toward an occupation I was to follow for forty years.
A different kind of literature prepared a different path. A friend from Albuquerque sent me Abbey's Desert Solitaire. That cranky westerner slapped sense into me. Abbey goes for a saunter one day, leaving his tin can cabin in the high Utah desert. He drives straight toward the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, just to see what the abyss was like from that side. He stops in the last town and buys a cheap round steak, because they are tough and you have to chew them. He camps out of his car, chews the steak for a long time, and drinks beer. The next morning he treks cross country to the rim. He glories in the sight of the greatest place on earth and then figures it would be a good idea to go down a ways to get a better look. He decides, as I did one hike in the Sacramentos, to hang on a table edge and drop a few feet onto a shelf below. He lands without breaking an ankle and goes to the edge of that shelf to find a way down. Ain't none. It falls in a sheer cliff to a depth he cannot even fathom, hundreds of feet into the chasm. Turning around to return, he discovers that the wall he dropped off is 3 feet higher than he can reach.
Everything about that story, from the steak to the mistake, seemed true to me. Abbey did it exactly as I would have. Here was the call to what I had been born into and trained for by my family. When I look at Maynard Dixon's "Home of the Desert Rat," I want to climb into the frame and walk over to that place beneath those red and brown slopes—the cottonwoods around the shack are thick. There must be water! The theater I wanted a part in was the desert, its canyons, and its sky islands, the same place as Walden Pond only different. In reading Thoreau, I judged that he had derived an American philosophy, one already impossible to imagine in Europe. Yet it was drawn from a logged woodland perch in well-settled New England, in the land of satanic mills, next to a busy railroad line and a short walk to the post office. Despite these distractions, Thoreau first gave shape to the meaning of wilderness and its loss in our country. I say this knowing that he did not have, nor could he have had, a penetrating environmentalism. He fumbled about, only slowly understanding why species had disappeared from Walden Pond, only slowly seeing that their preservation demanded the preservation of the forest he loved. His genius was that he married two things essential to environmental thought: the beauty of Nature and the unique value of solitude within it. My mother called the latter "high and lonesome." This was not loneliness; it was that being alone is part of what you've come to this place for. It is why you go to the cabin, to Thoreau's hut. A long line of American men and women like Abbey has followed Thoreau's first steps toward the idea that we find "in Wilderness the preservation of the world." They have bequeathed a great, sad literature. Tragedies about tragedy. The genre struggles unsuccessfully to convince Americans that preserving the wilderness means giving up many comforts and is worth that sacrifice. This runs so against the grain. Our nature tells us to exploit nature for our gain.
While floating on the brown waters of the San Juan right through that high desert he loved, Edward Abbey took a charmingly sacrilegious view of Thoreau. He considered him comically obnoxious and priggish, a view shared by a goodly number of Henry David's contemporaries, not least the woman who remarked that she would rather walk holding the arm of a tree than his own. Yet, in his boisterous unphilosophical Southwestern way, Abbey retained the canonical principal Thoreau had lived: isolation was required. Live in a rough shack out in the nothing. I cannot claim anything high-minded and Thoreauvian about my early thirst for rough cabins and rough wilderness. It was an ill-understood appetite that drove me, a condition as pressing as that which compelled Carl Johnson to fashion a fake refuge in the crumbling Victorian. It was in the crisis of my late 20s that I began to perceive that isolation in nature, life in remote places, was not only my path, but one that ought to be celebrated for those yet to take a step, not least a daughter and a son that were to be given to me.
The chapters that follow describe those shacks and the way of living in them, and, the way of living in the forests and deserts that surround them. I hesitate to write the word Covid. We know that supernova in our species' history will crowd the pages in every piece of writing for the next 50 years. The pandemic had no effect on the plan or execution of this piece, save that in the final stages of composition, the isolation cabins favor proved useful. As the reader will see, a different theme intrudes on the narrative. The text regularly wanders away entirely from the shanty and that wilderness into a memoir and reflections that are surely of little interest save to family and friends. I plead guilty. I beg mercy on the grounds that these contemplations had their origins in the rough places I lived and that they have all reached their full expression there. For such is the fecund ground of cabin life.