It was a dream come true–we had our own getaway in the New Hampshire woods. And all for only $150 a year. How could this be?
“You all have house karma,” a friend once told us. And apparently this was true; we had a great apartment in Greenwich Village and now a rustic wilderness retreat cottage. Or “camp,” as the New Hampshire natives called it.
Since the place had been built in the 1950s, used for awhile, and then abandoned, a few improvements had to be made before we could settle in. The exterior needed painting, so we chose a warm shade of red. There was no bathroom, so we built an outhouse and rigged up a port-a-potty for nighttime use. We hooked up the old propane refrigerator and stove.
But there was no running water. So at a yard sale we found a large tin urn with a spigot, set it next to the old metal sink, and then filled it with water from a nearby spring. This we used for washing. Bottled water supplied our drinking needs.
The road to Broken Oar was so rutted and bumpy that we couldn’t drive all the way there, so after going into the woods as far as we could, we parked the car and then carted in all our food, water, clothes, and books via a rickety old wheelbarrow we’d found under the porch. We usually had to make several trips, but this method worked.
Once settled in, we had perfect peace: no radio or television, no telephone (cell phones didn’t exist back then), no news or anything to disturb us. Just swimming, canoeing, reading (at night by oil lamp), and luxuriously relaxing. Our favorite place just to “be” was the screen porch overlooking the Meadows, the wild river dammed up over the years by beavers, that undulated through the 10,000 or so acres of wilderness surrounding us.
We were in our 30s, we were adventurous, and “roughing it” like this was not a chore, it was fun. The enormous contrast with life in lower Manhattan was exhilarating.
Because Buzz was a professor, we were able to spend nearly five months a year at our retreat: all summer long, most holidays, Christmas break and Jan term, which he never taught–having that free time was too precious.
This went on for 10 years. And then, during this period, we changed the name of the cottage/camp from Broken Oar Outpost to Mended Oar Outpost. Why and how that happened is the subject for next time.