Cabin Porn

INTRODUCTION: BEAVER BROOK

A beginner creates a shared retreat in the woods for learning and doing.

How to Build a Community

Barryville, New York

I needed a remote piece of land where anything was possible. I'd spent six years in the city building online communities and now I wanted to build one offline. Specifically, a place for a bunch of friends to be outdoors, somewhere we could be less preoccupied by our professions and more reliant on each other as we practice new skills together. I imagined a landscape nested with shelters we would make ourselves without any previous experience. My search began in upstate New York. I was looking for a place where the locals wouldn't mind our experiments with architecture, assembling what would surely look like a commune.

Like most people who go upstate, I had previously stayed close to the Hudson, a vital river in the Northeast, which runs down past the leeward side of the Catskill Mountains through a wide valley that reflects New England with its u-pick orchards and colonial towns. It's pretty, but I couldn't find land that felt sufficiently wild. I had decided to explore elsewhere. After a year driving wider and wider circles around New York City, I got a tip on a barn and some property for rent in the hills above the majestic Upper Delaware Valley, a part of the state I had never visited before.

A friend and I made the trip in late April, and I knew as soon as we left the highway at Port Jervis that there would not be any gentlemen's farms here. The hills hemming the Delaware River are densely forested and slope steeply down to the banks, leaving just enough room for a sinuous county road to be carved out, with dilapidated houses serving as milestones. Alongside us, a thick band of fog hovered above the water, and streams trickled down muddy banks into shoulders of ferns. So much had grown back since the late 1700s, when these forests were nearly all clear-cut so that logs could be floated down to Philadelphia to be milled for lumber, or sometimes as masts for British ships (the King of England once laid claim to all large trees within ten miles of a navigable river). Nowadays the trees are cut for firewood, and out-of-towners float down the Delaware with rafts and coolers of beer.

The barn didn't work out; too many rooms lacked floorboards for the price. But I fell for the area. We stopped for BLTs at a motel restaurant, and I took out my phone to swipe through real estate listings. When I saw the thumbnails on the realtor's page, I just knew it. Two and a half miles upriver, 50 acres of forest were for sale. The property had a dirt road cutting through a stand of shagbark hickories, leading to a simple shed-style cabin with no electricity or plumbing that sat high above a brook feeding back down to the Delaware. Along the banks of this brook, century-old eastern white pines, known as the sequoias of the East, tilted at gravity-defying angles, their root systems exposed and clinging to the mossy, wet piles of stone left behind by erosion.

Beaver Brook's residents built a suspension bridge in 2011 using pressure-treated Douglas fir and zip line supplies.

A few months later, in August, I headed up with my wife, Court, and two dozen friends to camp on our new land. At the market in town, river rafters spotted us and followed us for three miles back, believing we would lead them to a party. We invited them to stay, and all of us spent the day cleaning the outhouses and assembling a wood-fired hot tub, which we filled with fresh water from the brook. Chain saws whined as we thinned some birches and built our first supply of firewood. We wrenched field stones from the hillside to make a path for hauling water from the brook to the cabin. That evening, we braised lamb shoulders in Dutch ovens smothered with coals. The cooking took longer than expected, and we ate by headlamp after sunset. Later, we piled into the one-room cabin and lay beneath wool blankets while listening to our friend Jace Cooke read aloud. I was pleasantly warm from the long soak in the tub and looked around the cabin at all my friends. That weekend touched off what have become the happiest years of my life.

A bunch of us still share Beaver Brook, which is now named after the tributary running through it. It's our camp, where we experience splendid nature; make architecture, art, and food; practice community-building; learn new skills; and maintain a place where we—a diaspora of friends and family—can enjoy each other's company. It's a place of remarkable haves and have-nots: trout just big enough to eat; an international convention of fireflies every summer; in the winter, countless tracks of squirrels and snowshoes over the frozen brook. There's also no plumbing or electricity or insulation in most of the buildings. A total lack of cell service (a few of us will admit to seeking out the one spot on the top of the hill with some reception). Deafening quiet on some days, on others it's howling. And always plenty of mouse poop on anything you leave out overnight. We wouldn't have it any other way.

Scott's cabin, the first structure on the property, was built using a salvaged timber frame barn.

In the early 1800s, our land had been cleared and converted to farmland, then abandoned because of poor soil and growing conditions. Many old stone walls throughout the woods mark the boundaries of the ghost farm. Again in the early 1900s, the trees on the property were cut down to supply local factories that manufactured acid, charcoal, and wood alcohol. The property has since been allowed to regenerate naturally into a native hardwood and pine forest with ground that smells magnificently of resin when warmed by the sun.

The brook flows quietly most of the year but moves ferociously after a summer storm, further deepening the valley, revealing boulders and bluestone slabs in its bed, where we swim and bathe. Often during these storms, a lurching tree falls to a gust of wind or a lightning strike. The next day we busy ourselves with bucking it up for firewood. Once, one fell perfectly in place to make a bridge from one side of the brook to the other. For a summer, it was our only means of crossing besides wading, though it was dangerously slick. After a friend fell, we replaced the trunk with a suspension bridge made with zip line supplies. Since then, we've had no injuries to report.

Today, five years into our stay at Beaver Brook, we have an official process for residency, with dues and a few rules. The gist is that you come and do a lot of hard labor in exchange for good food and, once we're certain you have a good heart and a strong work ethic, an invitation to join. There are months when we visit only on weekends; then we take advantage with long summertime binges. Usually at least one person lives here year-round. We've collaborated to design and build various amenities. There are five shelters, a bunkhouse for large gatherings, a wood-fired sauna, all sorts of toolsheds, several outhouses, and a paddock for dumping our humanure, though we never really get around to it and mostly store firewood there.

One ambitious cabin conceived by my friends Brian Jacobs and Grace Kapin has been in progress for more than three years. It extends 20 feet over a hillside and is held by tree-mounted hardware designed to allow for the anchor trees to move in the wind. The couple has done all the work themselves, working on weekends, only getting help from the rest of us to transport heavy construction materials during summer sprints. The wood siding is coated with pine tar and linseed oil, a technique originally developed by Nordic shipbuilders to protect wood from moisture and harsh climates; it performs especially well in Beaver Brook's damp climate. One of the cabin's most striking features is the three pivoting windows, which permit seemingly aerial views of the brook. Nearly eight feet square, each window pivots open to let in the air and sounds of the brook in warm weather, and seals shut to keep in the warmth of the wood stove in winter.

More recently, we founded the Beaver Brook School, an annual invitation for a dozen applicants to come stay on the land and learn building techniques. Since 2013, students ranging in age from seventeen to seventy have traveled to Beaver Brook from all over the world, including Halifax and Helsinki. In 2014, participants with little experience felled a few trees and built a cabin on top of the remaining tree stumps using Japanese timber framing techniques. We plan to run the school year-round and hope it will help further our goal to make Beaver Brook a model for similar attempts at preservation and community. Taking the leap from fantasy to reality isn't difficult; it begins by looking around for inspiration.

The hand-built, cantilevered studio in progress.

The bunkhouse was constructed using a barn salvaged from Pennsylvania.

Not long after I founded Beaver Brook, I made a Web page called Cabin Porn. A few of my friends and I collected photos of buildings that had shaped our ideas of what homes could be: the kind of buildings that are made by hand, fashioned with imagination and easy-to-find materials made interesting by ingenuity and craftsmanship. The kind of buildings built by bold people who learned as they went along and never wavered in their determination. Nearly ten million people have visited the site since 2010, and twelve thousand people have shared their cabins with us.

It doesn't surprise me that Cabin Porn appeals to such a large audience. The more we migrate to a technical world, the more sublime nature is to behold. Pictures of cabins, for their part, often have an effect of recasting wilderness as move-in ready. While that's rarely ever true, what these photos do consistently—the part that interests me most—is remind each of us that we have a home inside us ready to be built if we try. It's a wonderful kind of confidence to discover that you can provide yourself shelter and offer warm hospitality with such simple construction. I hope more and more people realize the joy of the challenge and take it. The tools have never been cheaper, the know-how never more free. And online and offline communities are helping to connect us with mentors and models that show us what we are capable of making for ourselves.

—Zach Klein

Most of the wood-fired sauna was constructed by novices in ten days.

The stove is loaded from the entryway to keep the sauna free from debris.

The exterior is clad in shiplap stained with pine tar.

Beaver Brook's residents chose Knotty cedar, an affordable rot-resistant material. The benches are removable to make sweeping easy.

The wood-fired hot tub is filled with water from the brook. In the summer months it takes about two hours to heat the water to 105°F.

1
BACKCOUNTRY

How to Make a Homestead in the Wilderness

Pine Valley, California

In September 1976, Jack and Mary English were hunting with their fourteen-year-old son, Dennis, in the woods east of Big Sur, California. A 260-square-mile section of national forest with rugged peaks, hidden valleys, and hot springs, the Ventana Wilderness is located in a region known for having California's largest density of mountain lion, and abundant wild hogs, turkeys, and deer. While Jack and Dennis were off tracking deer, Mary encountered a small group of twenty-something hikers who were looking around curiously. They said they'd read a classified ad in the local newspaper: someone was auctioning off a 5-acre plot somewhere in the middle of this national forest in a place called Pine Valley. The hikers had found the right spot. Later, after they'd left and Jack and Dennis returned, Mary relayed the news. "Somebody is gonna get this land," she said. "It's gonna be us."

Since 1930, when Jack was eleven, he had been frequenting Pine Valley to hike, camp, hunt, and fish for rainbow trout. His family lived on a farm about 50 miles north, as the crow flies. Surrounded by a forest of ponderosa pine, Pine Valley is accessible only on foot or on horseback via a pair of dusty trails that descend and meander over 6 miles through the rocky Santa Lucia Mountains. Around 1880, after the passage of the Homestead Act, settlers began staking claims on 160 acres in and around Pine Valley. Over the years, families continued trading back their undeveloped parcels to the Forest Service. Jack had come to know one 15-acre plot well. It was situated right along a stream, near a sunny pasture, below a massive sandstone formation that glows in the moonlight. There were dilapidated remains of an old cabin, but no one had lived there in years. So in 1936, when Jack was seventeen, he contacted the owner. She wouldn't take less than $1,000 per acre. (For all 15 acres, that translates to roughly $257,000 today.) Oh, well, Jack figured.

After serving in World War II, Jack returned home and found work as a carpenter. By then, he'd met and married Mary, a feisty pig farmer's daughter who was a descendant of Abraham Lincoln. "She was a cute one," Jack recalls. "Five foot two, a hundred and five pounds, and never varied much." He nicknamed her Scrumptious. Together, the couple traveled to the backwoods of Alaska and Canada on hunting trips. Jack built them a house in Soquel, a two-hour drive from Pine Valley. Jack and Mary made the trek frequently. When Dennis was six months old, they brought along their son. By the time he was a teenager, the family had spent countless days on the trails and nights camping. So in 1976, when the opportunity presented itself for Jack and Mary to claim a small piece of Pine Valley, they didn't hesitate.

Located on a 5-acre plot of private land in the middle of a national forest, this cabin is only accessible by hiking a 6-mile footpath.

Jack English began building his off-grid cabin in the Ventana Wilderness in 1976.

After dressing and packing up the deer Jack had shot, the family hiked 6 miles back to their forest-green 1966 Volkswagen Beetle and drove back into town. They picked up the local paper and found the ad. Sometime after 1936, when Jack had tried to buy that 15-acre plot, the land had been whittled down to 5 acres. The owner had recently died, and the family was liquidating assets. At the auction, there were four bidders. Jack and his brother, Phil, offered $11,000—more than three times the next closest bid.

A month later, Jack set out to build his family a proper cabin on his new acreage. Phil couldn't understand why his brother wouldn't settle for a campsite with tents. The land was 6 miles from anywhere you could park a truck. All the lumber would need to be gathered and milled on-site, which meant hauling in all the tools, equipment, and other materials by horseback and backpack. Jack picked out a site right below the sandstone formation. Phil warned him their cabin would eventually be pummeled with boulders. The brothers argued. Jack couldn't be dissuaded. He sat down and drafted a standard house plan for a rustic Colonial-style cabin with one big room and a tiny bathroom.

In Fall 1976, Jack and Dennis began transporting supplies into Pine Valley. They set up a big World War I–era canvas tent with sleeping bags, pads, lanterns, and flashlights, and not much else. The water source was a natural spring by a creek 300 yards away. Food was packed in and cooked by campfire. They'd catch fish and occasionally hunt deer.

On Fridays after work, Jack would load up his pickup and drive with Dennis to the nearest campground parking lot, arriving by 8:30 p.m. They would start hiking and would get to Pine Valley around 10:30 p.m. Each trip was meticulously planned out so they could avoid hiking back and forth more than once. With a handmade sifter he'd fashioned out of a redwood frame and wire screen, Jack started creating two separate piles of gravel and sand by the creek. Gradually, they hand-carried the sand and gravel in 5-gallon buckets back to their site.

Lumber was cut and milled on site. All of the tools were packed in, hand carried, or carted by wheelbarrow.

Whenever Jack came across a larger stone he liked the look of, he'd grab it and put it on a pile by their tent. On the trail, if he spotted a handsome stone, he'd toss it into his pack and bring it to Pine Valley.