I grunted and took a few hesitant steps towards the building as memory upon memory assaulted me, making my steps falter and unsteady. “I’m not. My dad bought this land and a few surrounding acres when he was about your age. He and my mom had a dream of being modern day homesteaders, of living off the land and off the grid. But even when you live strictly off the land, you still have to pay the government for that privilege. My folks owed thousands and thousands of dollars in back taxes on the property. When I got out of the army, I found out that they had pulled up stakes and moved with my brother to some godforsaken part of Alaska, to live on a lake in a roughly constructed houseboat. It sounds like a made-up story, but it’s one hundred percent true. They are as off grid as anyone can get, in a place it takes dogsleds and snowmobiles to get to. I haven’t spoken to them or my little brother in years. I don’t even know if they know about my divorce.”
She blinked at me as she tried to process all the information I was giving to her.
“They’re like those people on that show Ice Lake Rebels?”
I snorted out a surprised laugh that she even kind of knew what I was talking about. “Yeah, something like that.”
“You’re right, that doesn’t sound like a real story, but it also sounds … sad? Don’t you miss them? How can they not miss you?” She sounded worried as I tugged on her hand and pulled her towards the rustic, wooden structure. “And if they’re in Alaska, doesn’t that mean we’re trespassing right now? I probably shouldn’t get arrested again now that I’m finally figuring out how to do the right thing once in a while.”
“We’re not trespassing. After I started working for the firm, I contacted the man that purchased the land at auction. He was using the cabin as a hunting lodge. I offered him a deal he couldn’t refuse and told him he could continue to use the property during hunting season, so he sold it back to me.” I cut her a sideways look. “I think I thought my folks would move back if they knew they could have the land with no governmental strings attached to it, but they never did. They like their life the way it is too much to come back, and I think they wrote me off the minute I told them I was joining the military. They never understood why I wanted out, or why I wanted more than the land could provide for me. I haven’t been here since the day I left for boot camp.”
She whistled softly and squeezed the hand that was still gripping hers. “That has to sting.”
I pushed the door open and froze in place at the sight of the barren walls and dusty floorboards. It looked so much like it had when I was growing up. Four walls dotted with cracked windows, a minimal kitchen, a loft with a thin mattress and another one on a cot in the corner. There was a threadbare couch in front of an old wood burning stove and a table made from one of the pines that surrounded the cabin. There wasn’t even a bathroom in the cabin. That meant every night I would sprint across the forest floor to the makeshift house that was nothing more than some plywood and a hole in the ground, taking care of business while wondering if I was going to run across a bear or a mountain lion.
“It did sting. It still does when I allow myself to think about it now. When I first shipped out and I had no clue what to expect, no idea where I would end up or if the risk I took in enlisting would pay off or end up getting me killed, it sucked that I didn’t have their support or encouragement. My girlfriend at the time, who is now my ex-wife, really seemed like the only person I had in the world. I think that’s why I was so oblivious when our marriage started to fall apart. She was my only tie to this life, and she was the only one that didn’t leave me when I was my most uncertain. It was all an act, but it was an act that kept me going when I was a terrified and lonely kid headed to war.”
The cabin was empty, modest, and bucolic. This was what having only what you needed to survive was all about, and it was so different from the way I lived now I had no idea how either man lived within the same body.
I looked at the girl that had brought me back here, the girl that had made it impossible to pretend anymore. I wanted her to see that we weren’t as different as she thought we were, that we didn’t come from the same place, but that was because the place I came from was this vacant, humble existence. I came from nothing, and she didn’t.
“This” —I gestured with my hand to indicate the sad space around us— “is why I have two thousand dollar sheets and ugly but expensive artwork on the walls. When you have nothing your entire childhood, when you don’t get to eat unless you can kill dinner, and when you don’t get to be warm unless you’ve chopped a stack of firewood as tall as you were, you want things. You want comfort and ease. You want luxury and extravagance. You want to be the kid that doesn’t get made fun of for being dirt poor. You want to be the guy that gets the girl you should never be able to get. You want to be the kid that gets to see a doctor when you slice your side open chopping wood, not sewn together on the kitchen table and told to toughen up because you cried each time the needle dug into your skin. You want so many things when this is how you live. You want everything, and even that’s not enough, because there is always more. So you work your ass off to get those things, and even though you realize that it’ll never be enough, you keep working and you keep acquiring. My entire adult life has been about getting enough things to cover all of this up and to show my parents that I made the right choice by leaving and getting out, even though they’ve never seen and wouldn’t appreciate anything about the man I am now.”