Cabin Lessons by Spike Carlsen

Author:Spike Carlsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cabin;cottage;dream cottage;Lake Superior;family;blended family;carpenter;oma tupa oma lupa;eroding cliff;cabin design;small cabin;Minnesota;foundation;step family;biography;memoir;floor plan;building;building a cabin
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Published: 2015-05-03T16:58:23+00:00

We even import some materials. While vacationing in Maui, we fall in love with a porcelain bathroom sink, decorated with frolicking fish and dolphins in primary colors. We buy a hammered metal mermaid with copper-wire hair and two fish with Marilyn Monroe lips at the same time. The fish and mermaid we ship, but since we haven’t reached our luggage quota for the return trip home, we decide to save the hundred-dollar shipping charge and check the seventy-pound sink like normal baggage. Along with a case of pineapple.

Depending on the story you choose to believe, an hour over the Pacific the left engine of our plane is either (a) hit by lightning or (b) receives a jolt of static electricity that had built up around the nose of the plane. Either way, the engine fries. With a third of our horsepower in cardiac arrest, the pilot turns back for Honolulu. The worst part isn’t dumping thousands of gallons of jet fuel into the Pacific to lighten the plane for landing. It isn’t the roller-coaster ride back. It isn’t landing on a runway lined with fire trucks and ambulances. It isn’t even the claw marks Kat leaves on my thigh. The worst part is lugging the damn seventy-pound sink, the case of pineapple, and our luggage around for the next thirty-six hours.

We haul the sink from the luggage conveyer belt to the bus that drives us to the hotel where the airline puts us up for the night. We haul it up the thirty concrete stairs to the hotel entrance, into our room, back down the stairs a few hours later to the taxi that takes us to the airport, back to the luggage check-in. That airplane is three hours late in taking off, and when a passenger who’d been on the aborted flight the night before goes into hysterics over the probability of another mishap, there’s another delay while the plane taxies back to the terminal to deposit her. We miss our connecting flight in LA, so we lug seventy pounds’ worth of sink along with our luggage and case of pineapple around for another night of cab rides, hotels, and check-ins.

The irony is the artist who made the sink had painted it in Oregon and shipped it to Hawaii. It’s the best damn traveled bathroom sink in the annals of aviation or building history. But it’s ensconced in the bathroom at Oma Tupa, Oma Lupa, unbroken and rich in history. The pineapple didn’t fare as well.

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