Bear Paw Meanderings

In my jaded youth, my family and I had lots of fishing and hunting cabins. You know because you read about one or another several times a year.

One of the biggest drawbacks to our hunting camps was that usually they were one room log structures and had no insulation. I remember one cabin on Clear Creek that you could lay in bed and look up at the stars through the shingles on the roof. And yet, that roof never leaked. Amazing.

In our cabins we usually had a large black cook stove and included a hot water reservoir by the side. Heat the stove and oven and you had hot water as well.

By the time I looked for a cabin of my own, most of the old black cook stoves had been replaced by old time electric stoves. In one cabin I owned, I had a combination wood and electric stove that really worked well. On cold days, it would heat up the house just when cooking. No need for the fireplace or electric baseboard heaters at all.

But in the older cabins, not only was there the old range but there was always a wood burning pot belly stove as well that was called in various catalogues, a Parlor Stove.

My father and his brothers liked to be warm so whenever we were going to the hunting cabin for a long weekend or maybe two weekends in a row, we would always go out ahead of time and get a huge pile of wood lined up. We didn’t want to run out of wood!

I remember one cabin owner who always thought that the rest of us cabin owners were stealing her wood so she would mark her wood with lipstick on the ends and then look at the neighbors wood pile just to make sure they had not gotten away with her wood.

Meanwhile at our cabin, after cooking dinner on a day that was twenty or thirty above zero, and having the Parlor Stove on as well, it was so hot that people would be going around in their underwear and T shirts. When we went to bed, it was always laying on the sleeping bag, never in it.

That all changed about 2 a.m. Then, with no one getting up and feeding the Parlor stove its requirement of wood, the temperature would drop quickly in the cabin and most everyone was cold and trying to get into their sleeping bags very quickly. In the morning it was a waiting game. Stay in your sleeping bag until someone else gets up and gets a fire going. That was the rule of early morning. Sure enough, someone would want coffee bad enough to get up get dressed; get a couple of fires going and get the coffee on and the day had officially begun.

Those were the days my friend. We thought they would never end. But end they did and you know I miss a lot about those fishing and hunting cabins but I don’t miss having to get up and get a fire going. Not one bit!