Life in the Woods
Many folks ask, “What’s it like living in a one-room cabin in the woods? It must be so peaceful and beautiful!” Beautiful, yes! Surrounded by redwood trees, tanoaks, madrone, and fir.
Peaceful, often, but I’m still busy. Even tucked away in a forest, I’m connected via satellite and cellphone to a lifetime of beloved family and friends. The lives of others I cherish—or hear of on the news—are not always peaceful. Sorrows, challenges, and joys all abound.
Living off-grid also requires work, like regularly cutting back brush during the “fire season” from April through November. Winter means filling wheelbarrows with logs for my wood stove and hauling out buckets of ash and coals.
Also in the winter, my solar panels don’t get enough sunlight, so I often rely on candles, which at least are less smelly than the kerosene oil lamps I used to light.
Remembrance of Times Past
I was using those kerosene lamps years ago when I moved to this cabin. Back then, I’d begun reading Literary Industries, the 1890 autobiography of my great-great-grandfather, H.H. Bancroft, about his life creating what became The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.
Years later, I discovered the letters of Bancroft’s first wife, Emily Ketchum Bancroft, who delighted in writing to her family in 1863 about the new kerosene lamps that she and her husband were now using at night. Until the 1850s, evening light depended on candles or whale oil. Emily wrote, “You don’t know what a good light kerosene lamps give” (Apr. 4, 1863).
What an odd trip through time I experienced! Here I was relying on the same source of light that my ancestors had 150 years ago.
Connections: Past, Present, Future
With this piece, I’m launching a blog by reveling in my connections between the present, the past, and the future. I hope to hear from readers about how my journey strikes you and how your own efforts to connect to the past and the future unfold.
For now, I offer you two sources:
The first is my book just out, Writing Themselves into History: Emily and Matilda Bancroft in Journals and Letters (Heyday 2022). There I share the stories of two women writers, the wives of HH Bancroft, from the 1860s to the 1890s.
A second resource is my original blog, initiated when I left three decades of teaching behind and moved to this cabin in the woods in 2011. With tongue firmly in cheek, I wrote An Urban Woman’s Guide Back to the Land about joining the search for self-knowledge steeped in nature, like Henry David Thoreau at his cabin at Walden Pond. In my blog, I shared impressions of what it meant to take up life in a forest after spending most of my life in urban population jams.
I also chronicled how my relatively peaceful life revved up into a high pressure social cooker when I joined a local environmental movement as the Highway 101 Willits Bypass rammed its way through forests and wetlands.
Now over ten years later, I contemplate with others the means of protecting our stories for families and communities. Join me on this journey!
