Near the Lake of The Woods
The cabin was set back up into the tree line just enough so it couldn’t be seen with a casual glance from most vantage points, especially from anywhere out on the water. The man had taken great care to build it carefully within what cover and concealment already existed — trees and smaller saplings mainly — making as minimal a change in the terrain as possible. No one had yet pulled into this particular cove off the great lake; there wasn’t any reason to do so. One would have to be on foot and get lost to somehow stumble upon it. And that’s the way the man wanted it.
He had started the process by first finding the plot of land. It hadn’t been easy. Most of the last, great swaths of isolated territory in the lower forty-eight states were in public hands now; the government couldn’t seem to get enough of “protecting” things and creating new parks.
While the man knew this was more preferred than allowing big developers to ruin every last vestige of the American wilderness, it had its own brand of problems, chief of which was the massive regulation that fell down upon anyone wanting to use the land for any conceivable reason: fishing, camping, boating, even hiking into the back country required some sort of license or fee payment. Hunting was prohibited on almost all public lands, as was the possession of firearms of any kind. Break any of these rules and you’d end up in court. The man couldn’t have that.
But at first, he’d thought this was the way to go; find some piece of property within the borders of public land — some land that was grandfathered in — meaning it was private property before the area became park land and would remain private until the owner passed away and did not leave it to someone or the government bought them out.
Most people didn’t know that there still existed little pockets of privately owned acreage in places like Glacier, Yellowstone, Teton, and Yosemite, just to name a few. They were all over the Everglades. His initial view was if he could just get his hands on something like that, he’d have no neighbors or businesses around; it would be the isolation he was seeking. And inside the parks, the rangers were spread around so thinly they’d probably never come around, and they’d never suspect anything.
But in the end, the same thing that made that prospect attractive made it problematic; he would be surrounded by public land, which meant any knucklehead who fancied himself some kind of back country aficionado might waltz right onto his property, not knowing any better. And he wanted and needed to avoid any contact and certainly any confrontation.
Plus, the park service was always on a kick to buy up the rest of the private parcels in any given park, and he didn’t like the prospect of his land being targeted for what was called “eminent domain” on some government master list. That was just asking for trouble. The government bureaucrats might eventually put two and two together and the gig would be up. Although the law required the government to pay fair-market value for the private land, they could take that land once they made the offer. The landowner almost never had any choice whether he wanted to sell or not; that just didn’t matter.
No, he had determined he needed to find something in private hands well away from public land and off the beaten path; something that had been in the same person’s hands for a long time, preferably that some family wanted to dump at an estate sale. Something they wanted to get rid of and never look back at. A piece of land someone had forgotten about completely and not seen in many years, preferably in the middle of a forested wilderness.
That’s what he needed.
This proved to be a lot more difficult than he had imagined. People seemed to ask too many questions. Or the land being offered was too small for what he needed, or it was right next to something people lived on. He didn’t want any neighbors close by.
And finally, after he had about given up on the quest, he’d suddenly found it. It was perfect really, and he couldn’t believe how lucky he’d been. It was in one of the last remaining remote and undeveloped regions in the country, on a glacial lake on the northern border. It was about 60 acres that the prior owner had purchased two decades prior in hopes the land would eventually be developed, but those hopes had never come to any meaningful fruition. It was just too far from the nearest paved road.
Indeed, when he did the title search he discovered just what he was looking for; the land had changed hands over and over again in the middle of the twentieth century, as people speculated about development around the lake, then either sold it or lost it in a foreclosure, after which it was auctioned off and the whole cycle repeated itself. This had gone on for decades until the one last owner held onto it for the past 21 years.
This told him several important things about the location. It wasn’t going to be developed. Nobody was coming in any time soon. If anything, people were leaving the area. The last three censuses showed the population of the closest town to have consistently dwindled. This was more good news.
He dug still deeper to confirm his preliminary conclusions. The terrain was simply too difficult to build on large-scale, and access was nearly non-existent; roads in and out of the area were very scarce. Not to mention, it was so far north that the lake was socked in every winter with a thick sheet of snow or ice, and although the summers were mild, the place was said to be infested with insects; the mosquitoes were claimed to be man-eaters.
Campers avoided the area like the plague. He reviewed the maps in minute detail and noted the closest trail head of any kind anywhere near his property was 12 miles; someone would have to be way off-course to run into him. If that happened, he’d deal with it. He wasn’t bothered by the threat of arctic conditions, nor any swarm of insects — no matter how aggressive they might be, nor any other extreme weather condition or predator; after all, he had experienced so much worse in Iraq, Afghanistan, and central Asia.
He quietly made the purchase through a front corporation he had set up solely for the purpose; if anyone came looking, it would just appear on paper to be yet another nameless speculator hoping to turn a quick profit in the event some huge developer came calling; another sucker like all the others who had come before.
Before he started construction, he had camped out for a few weeks just to note what activity in the area was like. It was nearly nothing. During the day he heard a few boats in the distance and looked, but they were so far away out on the main body of the lake he had to use binoculars or a rifle scope to see them. They were fast-moving sports boats, somebody moving at a high rate of speed from one end of the lake to another. No one had ever come up into the cove. And that was good.
He then commenced methodically building the cabin alone with his own tools and hands over the course of several months. It would not be some ramshackle thing made of plywood. It needed to be able to withstand the harsh, northern border lake winters, yet blend into the terrain enough to avoid obvious detection. Once he had it finished, he would soften the corners with vegetative screens to break up the outlines, just as one might use cammo-paint to mask the hard edges of his face — the tip of his nose, highest part of the cheekbones, and chin — before going on a night mission.
It wasn’t easy by any means. The nearest point of ingress was an old logging trail — long ago abandoned — that passed by the southern boundary of his property. He barely found it one day while reconnoitering the lines on the plat. It was almost completely overgrown, but a trained eye could see it. He followed it out before dawn early one morning to the nearest paved road.
Further investigation revealed the road connected up with state highway 12, which, in turn, connected him with the rest of civilization, over land. This, by default, would have to be his one point of vehicular entry and egress, and he’d have to make it a rare occurrence. There wasn’t much traffic in the area, but he needed to be as nondescript as possible.
He slowly accumulated the materials he needed, hauling them in darkness over several nights along the old logging trail until he got down to the construction site. Each time, he offloaded everything by hand and staged it where he needed it to be. The entire endeavor required painstaking patience.
Once the floor, outside and inside frames, walls and ceiling were in place, he went about crafting a roof that had enough pitch to slough off the heavy summer thunderstorms and winter blizzards. He installed windows for observation on all four sides, applied anti-glare shading, and then put up portable light-proof screening that could be retracted during daylight hours.
When the structure was essentially done, he then went about installing what creature comforts he deemed necessary, a wood-burning stove that he could use for cooking and heating, a water filtration system that would purify water from the lake, and a cramped shower stall to be fed by the filtration system and which would empty through a hose that ran from underneath the cabin to outside.
He would need electricity to power a few lights, a small refrigerator and freezer, and to power and recharge some other small devices. A loud generator was out of the question, so he installed a few solar panels and, like the windows, coated them with anti-glare screening so they wouldn’t cast any reflection that would arouse the curiosity of someone in the vicinity.
There would be trial and error in all of this, but he knew he would eventually get everything dialed in, perfectly.
The cabin’s position gave him perfect points of observation in every direction and clear fields of fire if it ever became necessary. For a person who needed to stay as far off the grid as possible, it was an almost perfect place to keep out of sight. But each new day could bring anything. And he resolved to be ready.
Glen Hines is the author of six books, including the recently published Welcome to the Machine, all available at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. His writing on sports, the outdoors, military service, and the bright and dark sides of American culture has been featured in Sports Illustrated, The Concussion Legacy Foundation, Task and Purpose, The Human Development Project, Kirkus Book Reviews, and elsewhere. Kirkus Reviews recently called Welcome to the Machine “An often-compelling examination of a sport’s sins from a man with an insider’s view.” He was inducted into the Authors Guild in 2022.
