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Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The cabin in the woods. Seven miles from a main road. North of Interstate 90 in Samoy, New York. A log cabin with one bedroom, a small kitchen, and a view that overlooked Lake Samoy. There was no running water; we fetched it from the lake and boiled it. We did have electricity, though, a gas-powered generator that belonged to my father. The cabin sat on a small plot of land near a set of thick pines, half-shaded. The place was cold in the winter and muggy in the springtime. A buggy area by the lake that my father loved and cherished, calling it his home after my mother passed.

He paid almost twenty thousand dollars for the property along the lake, which was a small fortune for my father at the time. Happiness purchased. Found love. A tiny sliver of land—three-point-seven acres—that he frequently returned to with a smile on his face, overjoyed with what life had to offer there. A dwelling he could call his own. A place that lacked memories of my mother’s intense and heartfelt demise. The cabin and property were my father’s sanity. Medicine away from his city life, a wife and child, and his career. His solace. A sliver of Heaven. My father’s passion. Something I had come to call “his Walden.”

The main room overlooked Lake Samoy. It had a stone fireplace, two rockers, and framed photographs of golden-bright sunflowers hanging on the oak walls. There was a box near the fireplace filled with kindling, a bucket of coal, and a brass tin filled with matches. Firewood was meticulously piled next to the coal bucket. Over the back of one rocking chair was a wool blanket to use on chilly nights. There was no television within the single room, no radio, no computer. The place was rustic, a box-shaped structure in its original state, over sixty years old.

The single bedroom was located at the rear of the cabin, so small in size, eight feet by seven feet. There was a cot inside the room, two windows, very narrow drawers built into the wall for clothes. A shelf of paperback novels hung over the bed, shading the cot’s pillow and part of the cotton sheet and tweed blanket. An oval rug made of thick wool decorated the floor. Flashlights lined the windowsill for easy access in the middle of the night. And there were more framed photographs on the walls: sunflowers in their rich yellow and green hues and summer sunshine.

The bathroom was located outside. An outbuilding about fifty feet away from the main building. A tiny space hidden among seven pine trees. A narrow box-like structure crafted from extra lumber: six-feet high, three feet square at the bottom. A crescent-shaped window was cut out of the hinged door and offered rays of creepy moonlight inside. My knees almost touched the front door while sitting on the commode. A toilet that reeked of feces and God knew what else in the spring and summer months. Enter, if you dared. So miniscule and claustrophobic. An upright coffin of sorts. No wonder I preferred pissing in the woods, honestly.

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Reflection: My father took me to the cabin in New York. I swam in Lake Samoy and felt at peace there. I fished and took hikes in the surrounding woods. I bathed in the lake, chopped wood for the fire, learned how to fly fish and hunt. My father said that he felt refreshed there, which I understood. The air was lighter at the cabin, more wholesome, less polluted compared to our city lives. I found that place to be a comfort in my youth, soulful, a recluse where a father and son learned to appreciate each other. I knew Lake Samoy was my father’s solace, his real home away from Pittsburgh and my mother. He loved it there, unconditionally, ceaselessly. For hours he would vanish from the cabin, abandoning me. I was left to survive on my own: entertainment, food, sleep. I asked him once—and only once—where he had vanished to. His response was simple and innocent, which caused me to feel embarrassed. “I went for a walk, Nicholas. Honestly, where do you think I went?”

Throughout the years, in the back of my mind, I thought of sin. The questionable disappearances of my father. His love for the cabin in the woods. The way he would leave my mother without a notice. His passion and lust for Lake Samoy and that northern property. So odd in the eyes of others. A hermit of sorts who—so easily and without trepidation—abandoned his wife and son. And the oddest, most peculiar reality that I thought of regularly, truly believing him sinful: he never took my mother to the cabin—another mystery in my youth that I didn’t understand.