It’s just under two acres, on a mountain side above Coal Canyon to the east and Boulder canyon to the North. It is a getaway cabin cut into the hillside, one level from the street but two levels from the mountainside below. The view from the street is low and plain. Within one is surrounded by notched ceder beam construction. The cabin pops in the wind, making of the house a writer’s lurking friend.
The south front door leads inward to an open floor. To the right, where the coats and hats and boots are neatly racked, is the ceder and iron rail down stairs. Ahead is a walkway between the railing and the granite topped kitchen island. The kitchen is a standard L that tracks along the west wall, giving way to a cocktail cabinet, a window and a small round dinning table. Book shelves will be found in every room, as the one by the back door. That door opens on a ceder and iron rail deck that is covered by the triple picture window that faces north over a beautiful landscape, framed by evergreens near, focused on three conical mountains and more distant fellows marching north into whiteness.
The east wall of the main room is a massive stone chimney around which the entire structure is formed. On this level the fireplace is topped by crossed sabers, an antique rifle and crossed lances above a mule deer head. On the other side of the fireplace is the master bed room lined with books. Next to that is the office, lined with books, and inward along the south wall again, to the stairwell, is the bathroom.
There is no clutter. It is clean. Every item has been placed with thought. The benches and chests that line the north wall under the storybook window are filled with quality canned goods. The cupboards and cabinets in the kitchen alone contain food enough to see one man through a winter, and to spare. The counter top has plug ins, so that this ghetto gourmet can cook for his host with two pots at once! Beans, beef and bacon are going right now.
The west window behind makes for soft morning writing light and a final chapter done by the last fading light. Across the yard are two tarp covered pallets of split wood next to a row of log rounds awaiting splitting. A shed, next to the west curve of C driveway, offers all the tools for maintaining the property. The space between the south door up a gentle sloop to the street, is shaded in pine, with stumps of cleared trees piled with rocks and yard art.
The beans smell good. The writer looks longingly at the yellow-leafed aspen beyond the wrought iron table and chairs on the deck. There, we have coffee before Matt drives far away to work. Beyond that railing is a 10 foot drop to a mountainside yard that has a flying pig and alert cat statues. Between two retaining walls a lower cut of 15 by 40 feet has a camping spot and a bench.
The writer raked and gathered combustibles for four hours yesterday and was knocked down for a 13 hour nap. So, as much as he wants to rejoin obsessive yard work, he shivers in here instead, stiff, clear-lunged and muddle headed. The well-maid, light, wooden dowel chairs, at this table, are, it seems of oak, and are so sturdy as to offer dip presses for the relief of the writer’s compressed spine. On this table is a WWII German military bowel meant for some officer’s table. In the kitchen, one reflects, are many cups and utensils of antique European military origin.
A skylight breaks the slanted ceiling above near its peak. The ceiling is of ceder planks supported by five 6” by 16” inch ceder beams, the two over this table notched into the chimney.
The writer occupies the basement. Against the south wall, to either side of the stairs, there is a food storage room with weights and a boxing dummy, a very nice bathroom stocked with a winter’s worth of water in military grade containers, as well as 5 gallon buckets of MREs, and in the southeast corner, a wash and utility room.
The central chimney is massive down there. Before it is a wood stove piped into it, next to a wall of split and seasoned wood from the property; pine and aspen, not the best, but fast burning. The main room in the basement is shag carpeted in an autumn rust. Behind the chimney on the east wall is a large storage room with enough gear to outfit a squad with packs, bed rolls, and necessities.
On the west wall, beyond the chimney and the wood stove, is a smaller picture window that looks out over the patio and under the deck above, upon the majestic mountains, the one in the foreground nearly a perfect knob cone without trees. A shallow culvert needs dug to the west, east and south of the patio to afford melt drainage from the snow, which ices the patio in winter. The writer is already obsessed with doing that small task.
It is so fortunate, as a writer, to be able to inhabit such places, a place of such solitude, where many books and good conversations are available. To be able to help with hands the younger souls who offer lodgings so serene, increases the depth and breadths of the soliloquy’s that haunt a writer to his purpose. To have the luxury to chore on a mountain so distant from the gutters where one was spawned, helps balance the writing mind.
In the basement, against the west wall, before the north door to the covered patio, is an entertainment center alcove, the TV and DVDs backed against the inner wall to the southern storage/training room. The west wall is lined with a love seat. A long couch keeps the cold from the door and picture window off the back. A long oak coffee table makes a good stand for setting up this lap top to listen to DeFoe’s Moll Flanders last night. Night lights are plugged in along the walls at ankle to knee height. Before the sun rises dawn casts a pale light into the room. When the writer is summoned by this soft lumen to rise, he is treated to a red, white, gray, blue and orange sky streaked over the distant plane visible as a fallen world to the north quarter of the east, the lower mountains like garden walls in the near distance. In seven days, he will be down there, waiting for a bus to Albuquerque.
