To Have and Have Not

    Coming Right Up

One can’t
have it

both ways
and both

ways is
the only

way
I want it.  
      –A. R. Ammons The Complete Poems of A.R. Ammons


It was July hot, and the searing blue sky days seemed to hold on forever before they dissolved into cool shades of lavender and plum. The cold water called, so we grabbed the small boat and headed to the high mountain lake up the road at nearly 10,000 feet. We paddled, but aimlessly and without intention; we could do a lap around the lake in less than a half hour. As we floated along, careless and drifty, my husband and I found ourselves snapshotting where we are. We moved into our current place about five years ago, and we have never had it so good. We both have stable jobs, decent (if overpriced) wifi and live close enough to where we work that I can hike or take a bus. From my door I can access public land on a number of trails. I could wander through the forest, climb a peak, dunk my feet in the river, go out for a gourmet meal and see a concert—all in the same day if I had the time and the money. We have recycling services and mail delivery steps away from our house. We don’t have to plow to get to work. In our 30 years in the mountains of Colorado, it has never been this easy. It’s kind of ridiculous. 

And yet. 

This time of year, when the high country melts out and you can stretch your legs into the full reaches of this vast landscape, I often get wanderlusty. A few days after that lake day, I sent my husband a real estate listing for a two-bedroom, one-bath cabin for sale on that same lake that costs about what our place would sell for now. Other than its location—on a high mountain lake at the base of peaks—this place has nothing people want now. It has no cell service or internet. Covered in old gross carpet it has dated interior, mismatched everything and old appliances. The refrigerator is not even in the kitchen. It looks like what it is, a cabin from an earlier time that regular families scraped to put together and then owned and loved and stayed in for years and years. I picture it with kids sleeping every which place while the adults snagged the bedrooms, each of which is barely big enough for a queen bed. Perched on a hill, it does have an open combined kitchen-dining-living room with nice views and a wraparound deck (that is oddly missing a large segment of railing). But the shapelessness of the large room is made cramped by low ceilings. Limited by the housing association’s building covenants and its hilltop location, the cabin has maxed out its buildable site, and no outbuildings are allowed (shed, garage). My husband says it’s a bad investment, and he’s right. It’s a terribly inconvenient, ugly little cabin sitting proudly on a hill in one of my favorite places—a dream within a dream–and I love it.

I love it for precisely what it does not have. I have found that when I am in places without the internet, phones and cable TV–all the forms of connection and convenience seen as basic essentials now—I change. Without all of those things, inside becomes less appealing. I turn outward and connect to wilderness and its most popular hobbies of critter viewing, season stalking and weather watching.  

I have access to wilderness now, but between me and it are those aforementioned obstacles plus loads of neighbors, delivered mail, maintained trails, bus service, free live music, walk-to dining and something going on all the time. It’s a lot, actually, for mountain living. Maybe it’s too much. 

“You are right,” I tell my husband. “It’s not a good investment. It’s not anything people buying property around here want. Except me.”

And I mean it, at least in that moment. I want a phone that sits at home and takes your call when you are busy doing other things. I don’t want the internet and its on-demand access to, well, everything. I want to be at the mercy of snowstorms and get drifted in for days at a time when the weather turns on a dime to act all bitchy and bossy. I want to simple down so I can live in a tiny bedroom without much stuff. I want to have to stock up my pantry because you just never know. I want to stay home tending a fire night and day during the deep winter, when days can be sunny as a supernova but cold as a comet’s tail. I want to get stir crazy, catch the cabin fever so badly that I start talking to the trees. I want to find myself sitting in a chair and realize that I have been there for hours just staring at the same trees and sky, watching a cloud live its pictionary life, taking it all in deep to the core of my heart. 

You get the good with the bad, though, and intruding into my fantasy is the truth that the people who own homes on this lake aren’t here year-round. These are primarily summer homes and we are not summer-home people. We are full-time in one home people. To make this uninsulated dingy little cabin my forever home would mean more money or inconvenience than I can actually afford, and not just in the repairs it would need. I would also have to pay ridiculous sums of money to communicate at unpredictable intervals with the outside world, and often it would not be when I actually need or want to communicate. Between November and April, the wild world of winter will arrive and then the road will be drifted shut on the one day I have to go to town for a doctor’s appointment, important meeting, crucial workday, etc. I will run out of propane when the fill truck can’t make it out on those fickle roads and I will panic about heating my home, cooking my meal. The solar power will fail when I need to light the dark nights. When I need anything repaired and I explain where I live, there will be a long silence and then, “Ummm, well, not sure when we can get out THERE. Maybe in the summer.” When my idealistic wants face off against my realistic needs, I realize that I would be signing up to be just a little bit afraid all the time of getting stuck, waking up to a bear in the house, running out of wood, lightning strike, wildfire, getting lost, etc. etc. etc.

And I don’t think I like those things–what person does? Except maybe I do a little bit. Maybe a lot bit. I do love living that much closer to the honest unpredictability of life, the vulnerability. The possibility, no probability, that something unexpected and possibly inconvenient will happen today and I will have to adjust my fabricated little human life around it. When I am the only one in charge of my days, I tend to make poor choices, spending time tidying, paying bills, cleaning or sitting down with a book or my journal. I am better served by other leaders: when my husband or my kids or my friends or the weather reaches in, grabs a hold of me and pulls me up from the couch, out of bed or off my chair and into the world of critters and weather and seasons that like to interfere with each other. It’s getting over the threshold that stumps me, because once the door shuts behind me and my feet hit the dirt, I am startled awake and I remember that I am a participant as well as an observer and why don’t I do this more?

But observing is what I really love, whether it is taking a tour of my inner landscape or putting feet to path under a naked sky. And I can’t really think of a better home base than that little inconvenient cabin perched on that small knob looking down on that lake, hugged in by peaks and puffy clouds. 

The next weekend I went to the high country with my backpack to clear my head of this lake house nonsense. At 12,000 feet on a cloudless stretch of days, there was nothing but glory. I was welcomed into the basin by a sea of marsh marigold peppered by buttercups and primrose, with the occasional fuchsia paintbrush poking up. The tundra was an Irish carpet, squishy with standing water as it tried to soak up the three waterfalls pouring into it.  As the hours passed, I noticed that I had decompressed when thoughts of the lake and cabin and so much else were absent as my mind chatter was lulled to occasional thoughts floating on a gentle hum. My tent was my only shelter and when I wasn’t sleeping, I spent the hours outside watching the light change, exploring the intimate basin, chasing butterflies and having a brief but enigmatic conversation with a hungry ermine holding his dinner mouse. The lake house, I realized, was nothing but a dream, a symbol of what I really want. This alpine basin, with its effervescent creek and tundra of flowers that reaches beyond the spruce forest to the rocky peaks. This is the summer home I already have.