CABIN, TYPEWRITER & TIME

Keep your fingers on the keys as long as you can.

Decades ago, as a high schooler, I stated that one of my goals was to be nestled in an off-grid mountain cabin with a manual typewriter, with the precious and madding world waiting for me to mail in my next novel manuscript.

Knowing I would be a writer, I took just enough of a high school typing class to learn the basics. We learned on manual typewriters. This was good, for I was not counting on electricity.

In the fall of my first year studying natural resources technology at the community college in Ely, Minnesota, I bought a used manual typewriter from the college president. He stressed to me the good buy I had made. Forty dollars. That word machine was not a dinosaur. Typewriters were still a thing. I had never heard of a personal computer.

At that same time, renowned outdoor writer, environmentalist, and former biology professor Sigurd Olson also lived in Ely. One of his most famous works is The Singing Wilderness (1956). Wanting to meet this man and ask him to sign one of his books, a classmate and I found his address and searched the town one evening. For various reasons, we could not find Olson’s house.

The next November was November 1981, and that was the beginning of an exceptionally cold season, and it was then that another college student and I moved into an off-grid log cabin in the Ely woods. We had helped build the cabin. It was still unfinished, but quaint, warm, livable, and priced right. The cabin was warm even when the temperature went down to fifty-five degrees below zero one night that winter.

This was a remote writer’s dream. Cabin, quiet, typewriter, and time. But I was a young man distracted by college work and other adventures. My typewriter was mostly idle.

Come the morning of January 14, 1982, my old Chevrolet Caprice was buried in the snow and stiffened by the cold. I was toasty in the cabin, but the air outside had reached at least twenty degrees below zero the night before, and there was no plug-in engine heater there off the grid. My roommate must have been spending some nights in town with friends. He was not around. With the temperature moderated up to zero, I hitchhiked the nine miles to the college campus. I knew I would be late for class.

The regular classroom was empty. I found my classmates in a lower-level darkened classroom. More students than usual crowded into that room. The professor had gathered students from other classes. A projector was rolling a film and firing the images onto a screen.

I slipped in and watched the rest of the film: The Wilderness World of Sigurd F. Olson. When the film ended, one of our forestry professors talked to us earnestly about the significance of what we had just seen. The day before, author Sigurd Olson – who had also once been the dean of the college – had died while snowshoeing near his house. He was eighty-two years old.

Several years later, I easily found Sigurd Olson’s old house and visited the adjacent “Writing Shack,” where he had done much of his writing. The shack, a converted one-car garage, remained as he had left it. It is now a museum. On his desk, I saw his typewriter with the famous last words he had tapped onto paper: “A New Adventure is coming up, and I’m sure it will be a good one.”

I do not know where my old Ely college typewriter now rests. I have had a few other typewriters, but I do not know exactly where they are. Some I gave to my kids.

Wherever I write is my “Writing Cabin.” A Writing Cabin is a place of solitude, a room of one's own – whether in a quiet wood or in a bustling metropolis – where one's creativity can do its thing.

Even though I am usually based in my home office and write on a computer, I keep the cabin theme and the off-grid romance of a manual typewriter in mind. If I need to or choose to work away from my home office, such as in my off-grid Idaho desert cabin, battery or solar power keeps me writing.

But I should get a typewriter tuned up and in place. Just in case.

My mother’s typewriter.