15 Years Later

This was our property on the first day we saw it.  We had been looking for a retreat to buy together for a few months, and our realtor called us about this “rustic, remote… really remote place… and well she just didn’t want to not tell us about it… it might be a long shot.”  I was getting ready to go to an intensive continuing education course at Columbia University, and we didn’t think we had the time to drive the 4+ hours just to see this long-shot wilderness tract.  I called my brother, Mark.  He lives on the North Shore, and drives highway 61 frequently for work (shout out to North Shore Federal Credit Union!).  So I asked him if he had any interest in stopping by this property sometime in the next couple weeks to check it out for us.  He did.  That day.  And he called us.  His words were something like, “I think you better come up here.”

We bought it.  We’ve loved it ever since.

Some people think we’re crazy.  Some wonder with amazement how it is (and WHY it is) that we hang out up there with no running water, no electricity, no cell phone coverage.  The first day we looked at the property, we never even stepped foot into the rustic hunting shack at the end of the 1 mile driveway – I suppose we thought it was a tear down, so why bother. It’s the lake and the woods that grabbed our hearts immediately.  That first day, I stood on one piece of the 20 acres and said, “this is the cabin site.” And you know what?  It is indeed where we are building our cabin 15+ years later.

Perhaps over the course of following us on this journey of building our cabin you’ll glimpse the how and the why behind this heaven-on-earth place.  It’s definitely not that for everyone, but it is for us.  Pancore is beautiful no matter the season.  It’s peaceful. It fills me with a sense of awe about God and the wonder of God’s creation. It forces me to unplug. Mark and I are so good at just "being" together, and we do it best there. There are old growth white pine on the property that make me dizzy when I crane my neck to see the top of the canopy they provide.  There’s one down by our dock that on the kids' first trip up, they couldn’t get their 8 arms around. I wish I had a picture of that, but it’s firmly planted in my memory, always recalling itself when I walk by that big old tree.

That rustic hunting shack?  You can see a picture of it in the previous blog post Mark wrote. And it has provided us with 15 years of quaint shelter (there’s both a wood stove for heat, and an old porcelain stove/oven for cooking).  Room for 6 to sleep and play games and just be together. We have no plans to tear it down.  It wouldn’t be the same without it.

So we’re still waiting for the land to dry out enough to get the heavy equipment in to excavate (we got inches of rain there last week).  But soon the adventure will begin.