Way back in the days of yore my friends Gary and Donna lived on the side of a mountain in Virginia. Somewhere in the Blue ridge mountains they eked out an existence caretaking a hunting cabin/lodge for a rich family who owned 1/2 of the mountain. Their cabin had all of the amenities, water electricity, and gas while Gary and Donna’s place had nothing, just a log cabin in the woods. When ever we came we brought lots of booze and pot because they were scarce in the wild. Donna was fond of red wine while Gary like Pusser’s Rum. We also brought a lot of food with us to sustain us for the weekends.

My girlfriend and I used to visit once in a while and on one such visit while hunting for small game for a stew Gary and I came across an old foundation. It was very old and over grown, but was much larger than their 225 square foot cabin, measuring 22×24 528 sq feet. An odd idea came to Gary then. Why not build a new and larger log cabin, I mean, how much work could it be (lol).

The next weekend we brought up another couple with us to mull over the idea. We didn’t think it was out of our realm and so we decided to try it. We cleared away all of the under growth and got a good look at the old foundation. A few cracks but over all sound. A plan was formed, every free weekend we had we would head off to the wilds of the blue ridge mountains to help Gary and Donna build their dream cabin. And so it began.

The first few weekend were cold and damp and camping was wet and miserable, but with spring approaching it soon became very pleasant. Gary would cut down trees all week and when we got there we would strip them and haul them to the site. Soon more of our friends found out where we went every weekend and started to join us in the mountains. Some weekends we would have 10-12 friend all camping out and helping with the work.

I won’t go through all of the construction detail, but of few are quite interesting. Like the weekend these two gay guys showed up that noone seemed to know. They had a nice little tent for them selvses and the just kinda hung out and looked around and paid a lot of attention to the mountain spring that passed about 15 feet from the cabin. And then we didn’t see them again for 3 weeks.

Then they showed up with a bunch of pvc piping and went to work tapping into the spring and running fresh mountain water to the cabin. It took them two weekends. By the second weekend they were like old friends It turns out they were engineers and heard about us from one of my friends downtown. Then there was the week that our friend Bubby and 3 of his friends hauled a little bobcat up and built a small lake using that same spring. When we got there thry were halfway done , and finished it in one weekend.

So Gary measured and notched all of the stripped logs and in two weekend we had the whole cabin erected. Old clothing doated by the crew to make batting for between the logs(filling in the gaps) held in by random branches and we were almost done. Some old barn tin made up the roof, and widows we found at the goodwill made up the finishing touches.

Getting the fireplace bricked in was a bit tricky but we somehow managed it. Gary and Donna had a brand new cabin to live in by the first of September. My guess is that they still live there even though I lost touch with them by 79. It was a very good summer and a very good year. All told thirty one friends helped with the construction. Some only came for moral support, but most of us worked our asses off.