The cabin on the property was ramshackle and in ill repair. You could actually see daylight through the cracks between the wall boards! The cabin itself was a single room with a large wood stove in the center. A small kitchen was set up in one side of the room with an old fashioned hand pump for water which drained somewhere under the floorboards into a redwood box – the country version of a septic tank.
There was an actual bathroom with a metal-sided military style shower stall, a real flush toilet, and a sink with a distressed chipped and cracked mirror. A small window looked out over the pond where people could see you sitting there on the pot if they cared to look.
In the redwood forest ringing the property there was another bathroom of sorts set on a platform completely out in the open, so you could take a shower or a long crap while viewing the whales passing by.
Kristie just couldn’t get over the idea of being so vulnerable out in the open like that…. even though there was a nice screen built around the back and sides of the toilet. She imagined that early in the morning when no one was around, it might be quite gratifying to drop a loaf right out there on top of the world.
She sat looking out over the lake stocked every few years with trout. The herons gladly fed themselves much to the frustration of the Old Man. He camped out on the front porch with a shot gun to scare them off, and accidentally-on- purpose shot one once. Marianna, his wife, the only environmentalist in the group – threw such a fit nagging and threatening him that he never did it again – even though he wanted to.
Old Man didn’t hunt much anymore, but the literally hundreds of deer racks adorning both the inside and outside of the cabin were a testament to his skill. In his older years, he was content to let live all the creatures he used to hunt with relish. He fed the wild turkeys, and watched a mountain lion stalking a family of deer without the slightest inclination to pull the trigger.
When rumors surfaced of a brown bear living in a cave nearby the shack, he raised his eyebrows in surprise and an unobtrusive smirk. He thought he had killed all of them years ago. It was good that there were some left he decided. If it became a threat to livestock or the children, he would help track it with the game warden and have it relocated. Relocated. It always seemed funny to him… ” relocate a bear?” Like who would want it in their backyard anyway?
(First published 10/11/11)
