Spike Carlsen - Cabin Lessons: A Nail-by-Nail Tale: Building Our Dream Cottage from 2x4s, Blisters, and Love

My sister, Merilee, and me at The Roost, trying on Grandpas fishing waders and boots

There were two morals to the story. The first moral: name your cabin carefully. When Kat and I built our cabin, we took the rooster lesson to heart and named it Oma Tupa, Oma Lupa. Translated from its Finnish roots, it means Ones cabin, ones freedom. Unlike for roosters, there is very little oma tupa, oma lupa memorabilia available in gift shops. The second moral: we learned that life is short, so live and love while you can.

Many books are simply good, long allegories. In Secrets of a Very Good Marriage: Lessons from the Sea, Sherry Cohen uses fishing experiences as a way of examining her relationship with her husband. She offers such parables as See the beauty in what he loves, even if it looks, for a minute, like ground-up fish bait. And Spend time together: hearing about catching the shark isnt the same as feeling the sharks breath. A 1960s book called Centering by Mary Caroline Richards was, at face value, a book on throwing clay on a potters wheel, but just below the glaze was a treatise on centering the soul as well. In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway is wrestling with something larger than the marlin on the end of his line.

Likewise, we found building our cabin was more than just whacking 24s together. Designing a 600-square-foot cabin a dwelling the size of a double garage forced us to consider which things and activities were most important. Watching Kat, my wife, and Sarah, our oldest daughter, install deck boards at what to me as a seasoned carpenter seemed a glacial pace held a lesson in determining which was more important a quickly built deck or the pride they felt in their newly honed skills. A thousand questions arose. Should we have blue or brown siding? Internet? Sleeping places for all five kids? A washing machine? Sex after insulating? A big or small kitchen sink? These were all questions we grappled with. Our cabin is the art of compromise memorialized in wood.

When some couples reach midlife, he buys a red Miata sports coupe and she gets a facelift and a walnut-size cocktail ring. Not us. We decided to buy a nearly inaccessible cliff of eroding clay on Lake Superior and build a cabin together along with five kids, a handful of friends, and a half-blind, gimpy Pekingese. We decided from the start that the process of building would be just as important as the final cabin. And in the end we wound up with a cabin perched above three quadrillion gallons of water and a bucket of memories. Welcome inside.

If you cant find a perfect piece of land, buy an imperfect piece and make it perfect.

Most couples who enjoy each others company nurture a relationship with a place as well as with each other. This place can be near or far; sophisticated or simple; metropolitan or rural. This extramarital affair can begin early or late in life. It can be a place of adventure or tranquility. There are few qualifications. It must be a place you consider your own even though hundreds of others may claim the same. The thought of going there must make your heart rate increase by twenty-five beats per minute. Blindfolded, youd know you were there simply by the smell and sound. Cozumel, the resort sixty miles up the road, Central Park, a log on the banks of the St. Croix River any place is fair game.

For Kat and me this place is the North Shore of Lake Superior. We stole away to dumpy little resorts along its fringes when we first met, kayaked across it on our honeymoon, were freeze-dried by it as we skied with our kids, screamed together as we locked arms with friends and plunged into its 40-degree waters, used its waves to soothe us when life was smothering us. So slowly, inevitably, the urge to buy land crept into our bones.