One Cabin One Cat Three Years by David Marler, Paperback | Indigo Chapters

In 2013 my wife, Jeanne, and I, she in her late sixties, I in my early seventies, set out to fulfill our long held dream of living in the woods for a year. Before leaving our home in the Eastern Townships of Quebec, I contacted the editors of Tempo, the monthly news magazine in the Town of Lac Brome (which I will refer to as “Lac Brome"), to enquire whether they would be interested in receiving reports of our progress in the endeavour. They said, “Yes." This book is based upon those articles. My original intention was to produce a work echoing the objectives of Thoreau who, in addition to describing his daily life in his chosen wilderness, commented on the mores and politics of his time in his Walden. However, each time that I penned such a commentary, I realized that it detracted from the essence of our experience. The reaction to the Tempo articles proved that the unfolding of the tale of our daily lives was all that was required to engender intense interest and comment. Thus this memoir has to do exclusively with living in the woods. How It All Began We arrived in the mid-afternoon of June 15, 2013. The car and trailer were loaded to the gills. Scooter, our cat, lay sedated in her cage. She does not like to travel and hates being in her cage. She, particularly, does not like the movement of the car if we are going over any sort of bump, bumps being inevitable on the thirty-five km of forestry roads we take once leaving the highway in La Tuque. The unloading of our stuff and the carrying of it to the cabin was a major effort, all being by packsacks, boxes and bags. The parking spot on the track in is 350 m from the cabin. I made ten trips, thus round trips totaling 7, 000 m, 3, 500 of them loaded. We had decided that to be true to our wilderness endeavor, we would not have a road excavated to the cabin. The ground, as was discovered during the building process, is too rough for anything other than a high clearance ATV (all-terrain vehicle). The track, from where we park the truck, which leads to the cabin, is a series of drops over rock ledges. Given the nature of the ground and that the ATVs and their trailers were generally fully- loaded, it was not surprising that two of them were wrecked during the building process. The carrying of immediately required articles and food accomplished, we then indulged in a soothing swim and returned to the cabin as enthused and as excited as newlyweds. We opened a bottle of wine on the west-facing balcony, watched the sun set and rejoiced to see a pair of loons on the lake. Supper, then bed, exhausted but exhilarated. ******************** For about as long as I have known Jeanne she has wanted to spend an entire year, three hundred and sixty-five consecutive days, in the woods. This is not motivated by a desire to be a hermit or because she is anti-social. To paraphrase Montaigne, she is quite content living a private life but that does not mean that she is unsuited to a public one. After all, she insisted, it is only for one year. When I asked, “Might it be that you would never come back?" she answered, “It’s only for a year." I should immediately add that this was not to be a year alone. Jeanne insisted that I was part of the plan and was to go with her. I like to think that this was because she loves me but if that was only part of the reason, for she would need a hewer of wood and fetcher of water, a man servant in the general sense, then I was content, for I need looking after myself and our lives have been inter-dependent since the day of our marriage which was over fifty years ago. Our adult lives have been outwardly quite normal. I am a lawyer specializing | One Cabin One Cat Three Years by David Marler, Paperback | Indigo Chapters