The Geddes Cabin
Across the water from our cabin, high up on the hill, are the remains of the Mork gold mines, my great grandfather's. They never produced much gold, but so the story goes, the miners would look across the water and wish they were here "on the sunny side."
Sunnyside has been peopled, sparsely, for a few generations now. All of the neighbors know each other, and the land tends to be sold back and forth within and between the same few families. The house where Rick grew up, now a ruin of a log cabin, is a walk down the beach. At ten, he would sometimes come here, to visit Bill Geddes, who was eighty by then. We think the house was floated across the water on a barge from the mine side.
The cabin has four rooms and an attic. The outside has faded red cedar shingles, and inside, the walls are papered with a pattern of old wooden ships. The white has gone yellow, and the floor buckles in.
Rick's brother John built a bigger house just forward of the cabin, and his sister Royda raised her two sons there. When I was one or two, Rick and Eileen brought me and Ryan here for some months. They rented it out to a neighbor, who lived in it and then quietly began to use it just to store fishing gear. And then for years, both houses sat empty.
The summer I turned seventeen, Rick and Eileen brought some dozen teenagers— us three kids and our friends— back…
