Interesting essay here about one man's dream of building a cabin in the woods as his second home. It's not his venture that is anything remarkable (although anyone doing anything with real estate right now is somewhat remarkable), but rather his comments on doing so that struck me. The author writes of building a cabin by hand with his brother in the Maine wilderness and comments that, "Second homes are an American obsession, partly — maybe mainly — because of the chance they give us to live a second life, one that may be truer to our real selves than the first that we live out of necessity." Intriguing thoughts.
The landscape here is littered with second & vacation homes/cabins/palaces on the water. I had never really thought about the pysche of the second home. Obviously it is a place that we view as an escape, but I had never really thought about what people were escaping from. Well, besides society. But that one is basically a given, right?
The other thing that stood out for me was the authors harvest of the lumber that grew near a previous home. I've always enjoyed the idea of taking a piece of a property with you when you leave, something tangible in addition to the obvious memories. But harvesting the trees into lumber and then building another home from the product of that land? That is a whole new take on that concept.
Which makes me wish that I would have taken some sort of piece of furnishing from my last two residences to add to future ones. Especially now that one of them has been destined for demolition. Oh well, the memories live on forever. And always in the form of drunken bar-tales.
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3 comments:
What's being destroyed? Murray!? 427!? The Brothel!?
And I like what you got going on here, it definitely brings good questions to mind about the escape from corporate life, etc.
Sadly, The Brothel was bought by the county for their waterfront jail expansion. Then the county decided not to build the jail next to the river after all, and now owns 2.5 millions dollars of empty residences that will be destroyed for a parking lot expansion.
Thanks for the good words, too.
We should grab that book in the brothel basement before its too late.
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