I cannot encounter the word “cabin” in a literary context without recalling Thoreau’s Walden — both pond and book — often followed by Yeats’ blissful evocation of them in “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”:
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
Yeats’ poem, more succinctly than Thoreau’s book-length reflections, feels like a summons. Its 12-line invitation to change one’s life concludes: “I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” Besides its totemic name, Innisfree is an actual uninhabited island in County Sligo, Ireland, but Yeats never built a cabin there. Thoreau did build his cabin, but however free he may have felt, he was hardly alone in a “bee-loud glade.” He famously mooched off his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, spent plenty of time with other Transcendentalists and often walked to his parent’s home in nearby Concord for meals. Thoreau’s one-room structure was sold after he abandoned it and soon dismantled for scrap wood, its roof used to cover a pig sty. One writer’s cabin was short-lived, the other’s was entirely symbolic.
It’s not just “the deep heart’s core” of poets that hears and answers such calls. Mark Phillips’ recently reissued 2001 memoir, My Father’s Cabin, intertwines the cabin-building of his father, Jim, a power-plant welder, with Mark’s own dwelling in that same cabin. Jim Phillips’ cabin is neither mythical nor symbolic. It was his forested escape for hunting and fishing far from “the Huntley power plant in western New York” and its “coal dust and fly ash.”
Three times the size of Thoreau’s 150-square-foot room, Jim’s cabin was five years in the building before he and Mark finished its creekstone fireplace. Unbeknownst to Mark, his father scrawled a message in black with a piece of charred wood on the firebrick behind its wall:
This cabin
built by Jim Phillips in
the years of our
Lord 1966-1971.
His father was belligerent about the cabin’s being off the grid. Discovering Jim’s message long after his agonizing death in his early 40s from prostate cancer, a death “the plant might have generated,” Mark remembered him growling, “and absolutely no goddam power company electric,” a cri de coeur from his early days of planning the cabin. Jim’s punishing day job left him daily with “filth clung to (his) sweat-drenched work-suit and ground into his skin.” Sadly, he kindled his first blaze in the cabin’s completed hearth,” Mark writes, on the day of “his final visit.”
Two years later, after Mark’s mother married a man “who had no interest in green hills or trout ponds,” she wanted to sell the cabin and its isolated 42 acres and “be done with it.” After Mark convinced her to deed it to him and he began living there, he felt “the land . . . taking ownership of me.” At first this feeling seemed to him an inchoate effort “to feel worthy of my father’s land.” But where Thoreau shaped his two years, two months and two days at Walden into a single year’s narrative; Phillips goes in the opposite direction. My Father’s Cabin becomes a lifelong exploration of his and his father’s lives decades after Jim Phillips’ premature death. It pays homage to his father’s life while making brave revelations from the core of Mark’s.
During Mark’s and his wife Margaret’s first winter in the cabin in 1979 — with no indoor plumbing and only that fireplace and propane for energy — his relatives worried he was becoming a “hillbilly hermit.” The couple had no telephone, electric blanket or pop-up toaster as he was “going Thoreau”; his mother asked, “Won’t you be bored without TV?” But Mark was not idling in any “bee-loud glade.” The cabin, upgraded and modestly expanded over time, became home base for his and Margaret’s hardworking life.
Readers can learn in another Phillips essay (“Spring,” published in his collection, Love and Hate in the Heartland) of the couple’s maple-sugaring and cultivation of bees. How, come late winter, the white snow “browned a hundred feet around the hives” as the bees cleaned their home of fecal matter. Elsewhere in that essay, Margaret, pregnant with their first child, insists on the family’s need for electricity. She concedes with, “Okay — but you will be in charge of washing the diapers by hand.” The Phillips cabin is no symbolic abstraction.
My Father’s Cabin resonates with broader histories and insights and implications far beyond the interlacing of two generations of Phillipses. Brief inter-chapters, in italics and worth reading straight through on their own, ground the author’s sojourn near Ischua, New York, in the cabin site’s “pioneer” days. In the first inter-chapter, recalling 1792, Mark imagines an axman in a surveying crew seeing wolves “almost daily,” but no Native Americans. Instead, Mark writes, “defeated Senecas” are “on remote Allegheny reservations . . . starving and diseased and drunk and converting to Christianity too late to be saved.” Subsequent inter-chapters tell the stories of the Horace Guild family, the land’s first “owners,” and of the cabin’s forested acres and stream up to Jim Phillips’ purchase. The final interlude includes Mark’s discovery, 30 years after his father’s death, of the pistol Jim never used to shorten his suffering, and Mark’s belief that his father thought his son would never find it. But the pond had been drained, and the pistol Mark had seen his father toy with so many times in his agony lay in the muddy bottom.
Thoreau left Walden because, as he famously explained, “I have other lives to live.” The Adirondacks far to the north and east of Ischua, Mark’s memoir shows, are reforesting, and even if that trend falters, “some other invisibly driven wildness [will] take the place of the forest. A glacier or desert or radioactive mold dreamed by the land, watered by time.” My Father’s Cabin suggests Mark Phillips may never leave. This cabin is home.