A cabin in the woods pulls up many images, from peaceful Grizzly Adams-style relaxation and fun to Evil Dead-style horror. Really, horror movies have likely made most of us a bit nervous when driving deep into the woods to stay at an out of the way cabin with no one anywhere near you...to hear you scream. What's worse is my wife's availability off work had us book this horror movie cliche on Friday the 13th. My wife talked me into taking the family to a cabin in the woods near Boone, North Carolina. We try to alternate my busy type of vacations, which have a lot to do with a lot of stops and a scheduled itinerary, with her type of vacation, where you go sit in one place...and read a book. This was her turn. She's read books on beaches, in historic cityscapes, and mountains. Sitting. Reading. Boring. Or at least I thought so. Don't get me wrong, I like to read. However, I have always thought to myself, why not just stay home if you're just going to be looking into a book? But, I did it. And, I have to say it was nice. Peaceful. Relaxing. A moment to yourself where you just kind of melt into your chair while escaping into a good book. It was wonderful really. But, when that moment was over an hour into our first night there, I still had the rest of the weekend to figure out what to do next. I couldn't escape into my book the whole weekend. I'm reading Stan Lee's Excelsior, the story of his life. While that is a highly entertaining book...I just can't sit there and do nothing but read. If I'm being honest with myself, my personality won't let me.
I always have to be doing something. But, a close second reason I can't sit there that long? Our twins. They're eight, and they expect Daddy to be in the mix of whatever they're up to. I really need to look into whatever magic my wife pulled that led them not to expect HER to do everything with them. She still has to do MOST things with them, but gets a few get out of jail free cards where she gets some time to herself. So, I exited my "lost in a book" moment and looked around to see what my cabin experience had to offer. Plenty. There's a lot of stuff to do in your average cabin in the woods...besides contracting cabin fever. One source of entertainment that you may not be lucky enough to experience was a mentally disturbed cardinal that would come sit on a branch outside of the kitchen window and repeatedly bang it's head...not beak...head, and other times its whole body, against the window. The poor thing did this all weekend, over and over. One of my sons said it kept him up over night. That is, he thought that until a bat swooped down to drink water awfully close to me while I was standing beside a creek that ran through the property. With the squeaky noises it made, my son then thought that's probably what he'd heard the night before. I decided to enjoy the slower pace the mountains had to offer and do things with my boys that harken back to a simpler, many would say better, time. A time before smart phones (we didn't have much signal there anyway). A time before the Internet. A time not burdened with so much to do. A time when people enjoyed each other's company and interacted with each other in person, not digitally. My boys and I played in that creek, splashing into the water, looking for river rocks that we found interesting. We looked for the coolest shape or color. We tried fishing and skipping rocks. I had to teach them the proper way to throw the rocks to get them to skip. It was nice. Another "moment." This time, a great father/sons moment. Now, the creek wasn't that wide, so our maximum skippage only reached 3...but that was still a fairly monumental feat for the kids. We built a campfire, roasted marshmallows, and told jokes and laughed.
No need to move faster. Nothing "on the go". No meetings. No getting behind. No schedule. Not fast paced, rather "no paced". Sometimes, that's nice. Not every time, mind you. But, sometimes, you need it. Need to reset. Need to connect without a TV in the background or a handheld video game in your kids hands. Our kids' normal answer when asked what they did that day is, "stuff. A weekend like this, trust me, any kid will have stories that go way beyond, "stuff".
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