A Cabin-Porn Star Bares All

CABIN: Off the Grid Adventures With a Clueless Craftsman, by Patrick Hutchison

“Man was made to do his daily work with his muscles; but see him now, like a fly on flypaper, seated for eight hours, motionless at a desk,” wrote Jacques Ellul, the 20th-century French philosopher whose idiosyncratic Christianity made him skeptical of the modern world.

I’m not sure that anything would have enticed Ellul to Snohomish County, Wash., but I suspect he would have approved of what Patrick Hutchison set out to do there, in the thick conifer forest, as he chronicles it in his funny and thoughtful new book, “Cabin.”

In 2012, as he initially related in a viral article in Outside magazine, Hutchison was working a dull copywriting job in Seattle, languishing instead of living. “All too often, an average evening at home would consist of little more than sitting on the couch, phone in hand, letting my attention lazily ping-pong between Twitter and Instagram and YouTube and whatever happened to be on TV,” he writes.

These were the glory days of the “cabin porn” trend, when social media users gazed yearningly at bespoke buildings in fashionably rural places, preferably northern Finland or the Hollywood Hills. Actual ownership was not generally the point; as the name implies, this was food for the imagination. There you were, warming yourself by the wood stove. Listening to birdsong, swimming in creeks untainted by microplastics.

But Hutchison went further. In 2013, he bought a cabin on Craigslist for $7,500 from a guy named Tony who “seemed about as concerned about the place as a dog is about climate change.” The cabin — appropriately, an “oversize doghouse” — was set in a rugged stretch of forest above the Skykomish River, close enough for weekend escape.