My siblings, our cousins, and I grew up there and in every neighboring restaurant, store, amusement park (The North Pole!), and back road. In fact, my parents drove to the cabin from Kansas when I was a newborn in winter 1974, and at a restaurant in nearby Florissant, the waitresses asked if they could hold me while my parents ate, since Mom and Dad were one of two couples in the entire place during the off-season and the waitresses didn’t have a lot of tables to tend. They spent the next hour walking me around and apparently taking me back to the kitchen, which was not a thing first-time parents concerned themselves about in the seventies.
To paint a picture of the cabin, you first have to know my grandparents. They were quite posh. (Y’all, my grandma passed away at ninety-four a few years ago, and she had her nails done four days before she died. She couldn’t walk and could barely move, but heck if she was going to be delivered into the arms of Jesus with grown-out acrylics.) If something was stylish, gaudy, or flashy, my grandma possessed it. Do you think a full-length mink coat just buys itself? No, it does not. And my grandpa regularly walked around with a boss fedora, casually smoking filtered Winstons like something out of a swanky Pan Am ad.
So any cabin of theirs built in 1971 was going to be awash in the current style: it had the thickest red shag carpeting probably ever invented. It looked like the entire floor was covered in Muppets. The kitchen was decked out with avocado-colored appliances and bright-red Formica that did not even mess around. The mid-century modern furniture game was strong: blond wood, skinny metal legs, low and lean cabinets, tufted curved sectional. The console TV was on a mirrored brass beverage cart, because obviously. The cabin was three levels with a huge wraparound cedar deck. The top floor had slanted walls, and we’re pretty sure the bottom level was haunted.
It was the cabin of our dreams.
It was the scene of every fourth childhood memory. My parents’ tribe often came, too, so my friends share all the same memories. The cabin was in our family for twenty-two years, and during that time, we drove there at least once a year from wherever we lived: Wichita, Kansas; Fort Worth, Texas; Little Rock, Arkansas; Houma, Louisiana. We were a middle-class family that didn’t take fancy vacations, so the cabin was our escape, our shared obsession, our summer thrill.
One time we attempted the thirty-six-hour drive from south Louisiana in our 1972 VW van in the dead of winter, and it broke down three times, stranding us in Sharon Springs, Kansas (population 738), where the locals kept visiting the garage to take “that nice family with the unfortunate van” to eat at the diner. We prayed for its recovery because it was truly a van fit for legend and lore. Who wouldn’t have wanted this ride: Dad took out the middle seat, cut a piece of carpet to fit, and we spread out sleeping bags and books like we were having a slumber party instead of hurtling down an icy highway unsecured. The only downside, besides imminent physical danger, was how our crayons would melt from the scorching engine a mere four inches away from our sprawled bodies. (My brother doesn’t remember this, because he was just a baby in a Moses basket wedged under the stick shift. Safety first.)
When we finally made it to the cabin, my grandpa was so upset, he took my dad straight to a dealership to trade in the van for a brand-new gray station wagon that we named The Ghost. How old school is this: my grandpa told the dealer, “This car will be in my son’s name. I don’t have any money in my main account to cover it, but I’ll wire it over when I get back to Kansas.” And the dealer shook his hand and let us drive The Ghost off the lot, deeded to one man because some other old guy promised to pay for it later. He simply asked my dad: “Could you ship me that middle seat sometime?” It was the nicest car we’d ever owned.
The Ghost was an accomplice in one of our favorite cabin memories. My brother Drew and cousin Dori asked to watch a movie in The Ghost, because our only VCR plugged into a car lighter. They were six and seven years old respectively, and I have no idea how to help you process this, but the movie our parents allowed two first graders to watch inside a parked station wagon in the woods in the black of night was Candyman, an R-rated horror movie that made grown adults flee the theater.
This outrageous parenting decision from yesteryear was bad enough, but my dad and uncle snuck out the back door of the cabin, counted to three, then banged on the car windows and screamed to further traumatize their youngest children who had just learned to read. To this living day, Drew and Dori break out in cold sweats at the memory and refuse to watch scary movies. It never even occurred to Dad and Uncle Tom to feel bad, because those were not the days of parent guilt, my friends.
My grandparents’ best friends, Ann and Hoppy, built a cabin right across the street, and by “street” I mean the one-lane gravel road that precariously snaked up the mountain to the “estates” (we had to pull off the road to let oncoming cars pass). Virtually every day, we’d trek across the crunchy street to pitch horseshoes with Hoppy and drink Ann’s Tab after Grandma cut us off. They would come to our cabin at night and play Chicken Foot and 42 with us for hours. Nothing said “I am a child of the seventies” like having grandparents who taught you dominos on their lacquered table while drinking Sanka.
Our parents basically let us have the run of the mountain in those days. We spent 80 percent of every day outside scrambling up boulders, riding our bikes, climbing trees, and making up “programs,” which we inflicted on our parents with no restraint or mercy. As the oldest cousin, I was always the director and everyone else my subjects. The programs were endless and complicated, and to this day I can still conjure the barely suppressed rage when none of those fools followed my choreography correctly: Lindsay, raise the umbrella and say your line! GAH! One time we held a beauty pageant in which I was the director, Lindsay and Angie were the emcees, and Cortney and Dori were the only contestants. They dressed up in sheets. Dori won and Cortney got Miss Congeniality, for which she is still enraged. (Seriously, get some counseling.) Our parents tried to pull the we’ll just turn the TV down during the program, but we weren’t having it. TV off, jokers. We’ve been practicing for six hours.
The cabin encapsulated the magic of childhood. Every year, we’d build another layer of memories, adding to the growing monument of our family story. Even now, a smell, a sound, even just a key word sends us deep diving into the stored vault of twenty-two years out there together. The enchantment is all certainly inflated in memory, as these things often are, much like when you return to your childhood home and find it impossibly shrunk, but the cabin years provided touchstones for family solidarity into adulthood: this is what we did, this is where we went, this is how we laughed, this is what we shared.