I have wanted a log cabin on our property for as long as I can remember.

I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted it, and a picture-perfect idea of what I thought it ought to look like. I first saw it in a Cabela’s catalog while waiting for a haircut in ol’ Johnny’s barbershop. I might have been eight or nine years old, just the right age when young boys begin to feel the pull of the woods and the draw of the mystery they carry.

There it was in those glossy pages: a grand, mansion-like log cabin with ten bedrooms or more, five or more baths, rounded stone fireplaces, antler chandeliers, and a modern kitchen. It had everything. I wanted it. I wanted the adventure of it. I wanted the life I imagined came with it.

Dad would not let me cut the trees to build one.

I had all the boyish imagination any family could stand, but not yet the strength, skill, or follow-through to bring such a plan to life. He knew that if I cut them down, they’d have rotted where they fell.  Besides, the trees were part of a tree farm. They were grown for harvest, which made them untouchable. So the dream remained what many early dreams are: bright, impossible, and held somewhere deep in the chest.

But it never left me.

Many years later, older and fuller in stature, seasoned some by time and life, I still carried that dream. The thought of having a cabin along the raw edge of the wild frontier still fascinated me. It stayed with me quietly, like a small ember buried under ash, waiting for the right wind.

That wind came in 2020.

In March of that year, we had a section of our property logged. By June, Gabriel and I went out into the cutover one hot afternoon to cut firewood from trees the loggers had discarded and left behind to rot. It was one of those blistering summer days when the heat sits on your shoulders and turns every task into a test of will. Temperatures were in the upper nineties, and anything we cut, we knew we had to carry by hand across roughly three hundred yards of cutover debris.

So we worked.

For half a day, we cut, split, hauled, and loaded oak into the truck. Then we went back for more. By late afternoon, with both of us dragging and me joking that I had already died three times that day (I literally had to stop and lie down in the shade under the tailgate of the truck several times), I came across a pile of pine logs left behind in the cutover.

I pointed at them and said to Gabriel, half joking, “Here’s our log cabin.”

He looked at me. Then he looked at the logs. Then he looked toward the truck as if measuring the distance in his head. He narrowed his eyes and said, “Let’s do it. It’s not that far. We can move them.”

There was no way we were going to move those logs by hand.  We tested the trek with a smaller log and stopped halfway to take that picture.

I laughed. 

But in that moment, the ember burst into flame.

I called my dad to make sure the logging crew had truly been gone for months and had no plans to return. He confirmed they were done. He seemed a little puzzled as to what exactly we planned to do with such a small pile of logs, but he gave me the blessing I was after. Later, I even asked a couple of loggers from church why that pile might have been left behind. Nobody knew for sure. The best guess was simple enough: there probably was not enough there to make a full load, and the job had already been considered complete.

That was good enough for me.

From then on, it was all we could talk about.

A cabin.

Not a mansion from a catalog. Not some grand lodge with antler chandeliers and giant fireplaces. Just a cabin. Ours. Built with our own hands, if we could figure out how.

It would eventually become something far better than anything I could have bought from a catalog. Not because it was bigger, finer, or more expensive, but because my son and I built it together. The lessons, the hard work, the trial and error, the physical limits, the new skills, and the memories forged between father and son cannot be purchased.

But at that point, all we had was a dream, a pile of logs, and a willingness to begin.

We talked. We planned. We talked more.

Then on a warm day in November of 2020, we went back into the cutover to collect the logs.

What followed was some of the hardest work of the entire build, though we did not know it then.

We used a long rope and wrapped it around each log multiple times to create a high-friction rolling system. It was simple, but it worked. We laid the rope under the log, brought it over, and wrapped it several times so that when we pulled the long end, the log would rotate and roll forward like a crude spool. There was nothing fancy about it. Just a rope, rough ground, stubbornness, and the determination to keep moving.

So that is what we did.

We cut. We wrapped. We pulled.

A truck stopped on the road, and the driver watched us for a minute or two, perhaps trying to figure out what it was we were wrestling with. He rolled down his window and yelled, “Y’all need a team of mules!” Then he laughed and drove on. He was right. We could have had a tractor come drag the logs out. But no, we always seem to choose the hardest way to do the work set before us. And that is the way we stick with.

We rolled every log we found suitable across the cutover toward the truck. By then, I was joking that I had died eight times that day. Gabriel, stronger than any man has a right to be when he sets his mind to something, hitched the rope to one end of each log, picked it up, and dragged it into the truck bed. Once a log was in, he lifted the loose end and shoved it as far forward as he could.

Load by load, under the fading light, we moved every one of them.

When we reached the place I had chosen for the cabin, we wrapped a heavy chain around each log and pulled them off the truck one by one. Then we left them there in a pile, on the very ground where that old dream would one day take shape.

We drove away that evening tired, sore, dirty, and completely unaware that we had already accomplished the hardest part of our cabin build.

What is the hardest part, you might ask?

Starting.

And though we did not know it yet, this was the beginning of what would become The Oak & Thorn.

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