Before leaving Idyllwild, we wanted to take a look at the cabin my brother owns and show Tony some of the places where I and later, Tetsu, Takumi and Leiya had made some good memories.
My parents bought the cabin, within walking distance of the little mountain of Idyllwild, when I was 11 years old. Already, when they bought it, it was 80 years old so it is over 130 years old now... My father named it Nepenthe after some Indian warrior or princess or someone...
The cabin looks pretty good from the outside and it looks like someone has given it a paint job in recent years. When I was a child, that chimney was a huge stone one but it and the inside fireplace crumbled during an earthquake... (maybe in the 80's?) and it all had to be rebuilt with a simpler, less dangerous chimney on the outside and a smaller fireplace on the inside. I think the roof has been redone a couple of times also.
The keys to the cabin are hidden away and I was happy to see that they are now under a password lock, better than behind a can that was the security system that my mother used to have. Even so, the main key is a skeleton key that has always been tricky to use in the ancient doors. After numerous attempts to get into the cabin with the skeleton key we gave up and managed to use the extra key to unlock the backdoor padlock...
When I was a child, we actually used this fire burning stove a few times, once to make a Thanksgiving dinner (which my parents always said was the most delicious turkey they'd ever had).
But building up and maintaining a fire in a wood burning stove was challenging and later my parents found this propane stove at a mountain garage sale and had it installed. I've always been scared of using this stove which needs to have the gas flowing and then is lit with a whoosh of a match.
The old fireplace mantle was rebuilt with the original stones...
There is an oil painting on the shelf that either my grandfather or my father painted...
A clawed foot bathtub. No hot water. Water had to be boiled on the stove and dumped into the tub to a few inches depth.
Besides the room with the fireplace (the only way to heat the cabin) and the kitchen, there is a bedroom and a wind-around enclosed porch that houses blanket boxes and extra beds. Actually there is so much stuff now in this cabin because when anyone has an extra chair or table or do-dad that they don't need at home, it gets brought up to the cabin and left.
There is an ancient refrigerator on the porch that works in a pinch but I remember buying ice from the local market and filling a coffin size icbox in the pantry when I was a child.
On the large piece of property there are two small buildings, one for firewood and tools and the other one for housing a chauffeur! It seems that the original owners had had a chaffeur who drove them up the mountain a hundred or so years ago and he was relegated to this one room building that does have a toilet and sink in it.
You can see why Takumi and Julieta didn't think it would be a good place to bring a baby.
We didn't let Luka out of our arms!
Basically the cabin is a slight level up from camping outdoors. The mice have the run of the place and humans only get up to inhabit it for a couple of days at a time three or four times a year. Some visitors LOVE the rusticity (my brother's family and Takumi and Julieta, a couple of their friends) and some people absolutely refuse to ever come back.
The property is quite large and is filled with pines and oak trees and manzanita.
I have memories of spending summers here while my brother and I went to an art and nature came nearby and we would once a year hike to Taquitz peak and earn our "squirrel cards" from the rangers who lived in the fire tower. My children had the same experience and remember hiking alone along a shallow creek and visiting Indian rocks where there is still Indian artwork on the boulders.
I'm glad we got to show Tony the area and I'm glad that Takumi lives near enough that he can still come up the mountain regularly.
The drive up and down is a nice one!
