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bushbunkie
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# Posted: 18 Feb 2011 17:50
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Yes we are an eclectic bunch of cabin dreamers but our comments and conversations link us all to one thing..."The Cabin Experience"...personal and unique to each of us.
Cruising through a number of topics, folks have referred to authors now and again...and I've often chuckled because most of the time I've had that author's book on my shelf...which makes me wonder...has the cabin dream influenced what you read...or is it the other way around....hmmmmmm.
Growing up, while my sibs were reading contemporary books and novels, my nose was stuck in Farley Mowat, RD Lawrence (his book "Voyage Of The Stella" hit me hard for some reason) and James Harriot.
Last few years..."How to build your Dream Cabin In The woods", "Looking For Alaska" and my all time fav...Crusoe Of Lonesome Lake. This Cabin outdoor adventurer, Ralph Edwards, did it all. Even built a plane in the bush with his own hands while living at his cabin. Got his flying license at 65...remarkable and humble outdoorsman.
So, read anything that has resonated with the "Cabin Dreamer" inside you? What's on your bookshelf?
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Erins#1Mom
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# Posted: 18 Feb 2011 20:55
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I have been recently buying any cabin book i can find on amazon.com
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islandguy
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# Posted: 18 Feb 2011 21:26
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I enjoyed many of the same books. "Crusoe of Lonesome Lake" was a favorite, and I live in BC where Edwards did. I also enjoyed "Voyage of the Stella" about a boat journey taken by a man whose wife died.
Also try "Butter Down the Well" by Robert Collins, an autobiographical story of growing up on a Saskatchewan farm during the depression, "Rocket Boys" by Homer Hickam, about growing up in a coal mining town in WV, and finally "Mrs Mike" an account of a Canadian mounted policemans wife of their life in Northern Canada in the 20s. All fantastic reading, and a great way to pass some relaxing time at the cabin or home. If you cannot read all of these, Collins book remains as one of my all time surprise favorites. You will not be disappointed.
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bushbunkie
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# Posted: 19 Feb 2011 07:38
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island guy,
Excellent cabin reading referrals!
I believe I read Mrs. Mike as well...funny that!
Erins#1Mom,
Hope you'll find some good reads among some of these future posts.
We're keeping fingers crossed as you meet the challenges of supporting our daughter...and a good read about your future dream cabin (because it will happen for you) is a way to regenerate.
I agree with Island guy...re. Ralph Edwards Of Lonesome Lake...it's one of those stories you don't want to put down and your sad when it's over...my experience anyway.
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Gary O
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# Posted: 19 Feb 2011 08:57
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Quoting: bushbunkie ...or is it the other way around
Must be the other way around for me
Uris
Louis L'Amour
TC Boyle
Dean Koontz
Pat MacManus
talk about eclectic............
Quoting: bushbunkie one of those stories you don't want to put down and your sad when it's over..
Yeah, those are the best, and when you do pick up another, it takes about three chapters to wash out the really good ones.
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islandguy
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# Posted: 19 Feb 2011 10:18
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Forgot to mention Sid Marty's "Men for the Mountains" his memoirs of being a park ranger in Banff and Jasper National parks. Marty writes of the time one of the park rangers, fifty years earlier, shot and killed two outlaws in the park, then wired his superiors this message: shot 2 bandits." The employers wired back "need more details," so he wires back "shot 2 bandits. snowing like hell."
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bugs
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# Posted: 19 Feb 2011 11:45
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Couple of titles to add:
Angier, Bradford. We like it Wild. A Boston couple move to the Canadian mountains.
And maybe some didn't know that Robert Collins did a sequel to Butter down the Well called: The Long and the Short and the Tall: An Ordinary Airman's War about his WWII experiences. As an RCAF buff I really enjoy the book.
RD Lawrence has a great series of books. I love the episode, can't remember which book, where he goes into minute detail of the removal from his nether region of a tick which due to its location he can not see without the aid of a mirror. I was rolling on the floor.
Not books but a DVD: Robert Long: A year on forty acres. It is an interesting perspective on changes through the year in the aspen parkland. It really helped us to see our land from a more ecological perspective.
Every Christmas we watch the film adaptation of Mowat's Never Cry Wolf.
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hattie
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# Posted: 19 Feb 2011 12:06
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This is a GREAT thread. I'm making a list of some of these books to look for online. I tend to read historical books.
One I read recently was "Words West" by Ginger Waedsworth. I couldn't put it down. It is a collection of words written by young pioneers in their diaries and letters home as they were travelling west across the US. It also has a lot of really great photos. Another good book was "Faith of Fools" by William Shape. It was his journal of the Klondike gold rush. Pierre Burton's "Klondike" was excellent as well.
Here's a different type of movie to watch. If you haven't seen the 1924 Charlie Chaplan silent movie called "The Gold Rush" you can download it FREE here: http://www.archive.org/details/TheGoldRush_910 It amazes me how something without talking can be so good.
Hmmmm...I guess I have a gold rush theme going on in this post.
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Erins#1Mom
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# Posted: 20 Feb 2011 17:19
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Thanks much for all the suggestions....
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cabingal3
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# Posted: 20 Feb 2011 17:57
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one video we love and have is braving alaska by national geographic.its about several families living about 150 miles from the arctic circle.another book i love is america's final frontiersman.eustace conway.what a guy.he could throw a knife and pin a squirrel to a tree i think at like 7 yrs old.
then i always love carla emorys book...the encyclopedia of country living.i swear that book is a feast to sit and read.talk about learning.i guess i was recently shocked to find out she had passed away.
i love pioneer books and especially ones that made it thru on the Oregon trail.
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bugs
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# Posted: 21 Feb 2011 10:18 - Edited by: bugs
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A couple more titles: The "Letters From Wingfield Farm" series. Modern day stockbroker decides to move to a farm and use horses to farm the land. I think it comes in books, cd's, and dvd's. We often listen to it coming back from the shed.
Sorry not books but: The National Film Board of Canada has some great Canadian animated shorts: Blackfly and the Log driver. And maybe too Canadian for people below THE parallel who are into baseball, basketball and that strange 4 down football (lol) but "The 'ockey Sweater" is timeless.
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bushbunkie
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# Posted: 21 Feb 2011 14:30
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Wingfield Farm and Dan Needles...great stories and always a good laugh...I look forward to my monthly subscription to Harrowsmith just so I can read Dan's latest story on the last page.
Letters to Wingfield is on the shelf as well!
This morning I watched a 50 min. video via utube on "Ralph Edwards...Crusoe Of Lonesome Lake"....his kids followed in his footsteps with his daughter becoming quite the pioneer in her own right...building her own cabin and farm by hand...her and her dad single-handedly saved the trumpeter swan from extinction...worth the watch...just google it.
Pierre Berton's "Prisoners of The North....about five unique characters obsessed by the call of the north country...good read.
I was at my bunkie this weekend and thought I'd better build a bigger bookshelf! Thanks for the ideas so far, folks~!
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islandguy
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# Posted: 21 Feb 2011 20:35
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I don't know where you're from Bushbunkie, but the story of Trudy Edwards and the Trumpeter Swans was actually required reading across Canada in the sixties in elementary schools. It was a story I read in my reading textbook about 1966.
Cheers,
David
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bushbunkie
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# Posted: 21 Feb 2011 21:01
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island guy,
Good ol Ontario!
I must have just been behind you a few years in school and missed the required reading.
A friend brought it back from BC a few years ago...read it and it really struck a cord.
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bugs
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# Posted: 26 Feb 2011 10:06
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Forgot to mention. Altho not really cabin living per se but definitely has all the trimmings of a simpler time (?) and simpler life (?) (that many of us now aspire to) and hilarious as well: Max Braithwaite's: Never sleep three in a bed, Why shoot the teacher and The night we stole the mountie's car. Semiautobiographical sketch of growing up in 1920's and 1930's SK.
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lukabrazi
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# Posted: 27 Feb 2011 11:51
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One of my favorites is Alone in the Wilderness about Dick Proenneke.
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bugs
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# Posted: 4 Mar 2011 15:10 - Edited by: bugs
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This book, by Edwin Way Teale, A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm (1974), was one of the titles that I enjoyed when I was cooped up in the city that got me thinking about a farm, not of endless backbreaking labour, but the more natural side of living on a farm. It got me dreamin... "Maybe someday."
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Gary O
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# Posted: 4 Mar 2011 15:15
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Quoting: bugs the more natural side of living on a farm
Helen and Scott Nearing's works were a popular read/study back in the '70, and I'd think somewhat timeless, for that kind of reading.
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Anonymous
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# Posted: 4 Mar 2011 21:42
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How about the first book written about living in a cabin--Walden, by Henry David Thoreau?
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bugs
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# Posted: 11 Mar 2011 08:50
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I was cleaning out a pile of books and came across "Shut Up and Eat Your Snowshoes" by Jack Douglas. The book is about his move from Connecticut to living at a camp near Sudbury northern Ontario. Had to reread it. He does "paint" some wonderful word pictures related to cabin living.
Douglas will likely be remembered by the more elderly, cough, more mature forum members as a writer for Merv Griffin, Red Skeleton, Laugh In , Bob Hope, Jack Parr etc.
He wrote a few books that have the same humorous approach to life: My Brother Was an Only Child, The Neighbours Are Scaring My Wolf, and A Funny Thing Happened to Me on My Way to the Grave.
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hattie
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# Posted: 11 Mar 2011 12:24
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Quoting: bugs "Shut Up and Eat Your Snowshoes" by Jack Douglas. The book is about his move from Connecticut to living at a camp near Sudbury northern Ontario.
Okay, now THAT sounds like a good book. *ROTFL* I'm going to have to look for these books by Douglas. hmmmm.....may have to do some sneaky ordering though. I just ordered "Crusoe of Lonesome Lake" ($50?!?!?!?!), "Mrs. Mike" and "Butter Down the Well". *S* Sis gave me a $50 gift cert at Amazon and even using it, my order still cost me almost $40. *S*
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bushbunkie
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# Posted: 11 Mar 2011 12:50
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Hey Hattie...hope you enjoy "Crusoe".
Bugs...who was Merv Griffin, Red Skelton, Laugh-in and Bob Hope?
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MikeOnBike
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# Posted: 11 Mar 2011 16:51 - Edited by: MikeOnBike
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Favorite author content: From Jack London's 'The Heathen'
The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch whiskey, and proceeded to stay drunk. The theory was beautiful--namely, if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol, every smallpox germ that came into contact with us would immediately be scorched to a cinder. And the theory worked, though I must confess that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah Choon were attacked by the disease either. The Frenchman did not drink at all, while Ah Choon restricted himself to one drink daily.
It was a pretty time. The sun, going into northern declination, was straight overhead. There was no wind, except for frequent squalls, which blew fiercely for from five minutes to half an hour, and wound up by deluging us with rain. After each squall, the awful sun would come out, drawing clouds of steam from the soaked decks.
The steam was not nice. It was the vapor of death, freighted with millions and millions of germs. We always took another drink when we saw it going up from the dead and dying, and usually we took two or three more drinks, mixing them exceptionally stiff. Also, we made it a rule to take an additional several each time they hove the dead over to the sharks that swarmed about us.
We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as well, or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through what followed, as you will agree when I mention the little fact that only two men did pull through. The other man was the heathen--at least, that was what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became aware of the heathen's existence. But to come back.
It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the pearl buyers sober, that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in the cabin companionway. Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90, and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00, or even 30.05; but to see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was sufficient to sober the most drunken pearl buyer that ever incinerated smallpox microbes in Scotch whiskey.
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bugs
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# Posted: 11 Mar 2011 18:27 - Edited by: bugs
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bushbunkie (sorry for the hijack)
I feel sorry for you, and others, if you don't remember Red Skeleton or Laugh in. I have shed many a tear over them. Goldie Hawn got her start on Rowan and Martin's Laugh In as a gogo dancer. Lili Tomlins telephone operator.
GO: Remember Red's Klemm KiddleHopper and Junior the mean widdle Kid? What were the seagulls names? He had some funny skits. And much of it was done live too.
I don't think tv makes humour like that anymore....Or maybe I am just too old to understand modern humour. I read an interview with Carrol Burnett who said the tv industry couldn't afford to do her variety show now. Just too expensive. EUNICE!!! That show had a skit of THE family playing the game Sorry. Slllliiiiiiiiiide. Still makes me laugh just thinking about. And of course Tim Conway doing the dentist skit and the office skit with Mrs Hwiggins.
~~~~~~~~
Back on topic. Hattie you might have check out a second hand bookstore for those books or AbeBooks online. They are pretty old now. Maybe out of print. Still good humour is timeless.
bugs
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lukabrazi
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# Posted: 11 Mar 2011 19:19
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Not to rub it in your face but after hearing about Crusoe of Lonesome Lake from this post I got on ebay and bought a nice 1957 copy with the dust jacket for $9.
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Gary O
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# Posted: 11 Mar 2011 20:11
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Quoting: bugs What were the seagulls names?
Gertrude and Heathcliff?
Yeah, live TV was the greatest...both channels
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bushbunkie
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# Posted: 12 Mar 2011 14:25
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Quoting: bugs bushbunkie (sorry for the hijack) I feel sorry for you, and others, if you don't remember Red Skeleton or Laugh in. I have shed many a tear over them. Goldie Hawn got her start on Rowan and Martin's Laugh In as a gogo dancer. Lili Tomlins telephone operator.
Hey Bugs...I'm 50 and remember it all.....unfortunately you didn't see the smirk on my face when I wrote that comment! Just wanted to see if you were paying attention:)
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hattie
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# Posted: 29 Mar 2011 21:32
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Quoting: bushbunkie Hey Hattie...hope you enjoy "Crusoe".
I just finished it and it was an amazing book! Definitely one of those rare books that you can read over and over again. I googled to find out what happened to the family, but didn't have much success. I did read something about a fire in 2004 that destroyed the place. That was really sad to hear. I think both sons are dead but is the daughter still alive? How old were Edwards and his wife when they died? Were they still living on the homestead?
Now I'm starting in on "Butter Down the Well". *S*
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cabingal3
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# Posted: 29 Mar 2011 22:05
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i always loved reading about hellen and scot nearing.thats pretty good reading.
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bushbunkie
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# Posted: 29 Mar 2011 22:16
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Hi Hattie...great book, eh?
As far as I know, the daughter is still alive...oldest son didn't die too long ago. There are a few short video clips floating around out there .
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