Babe in the Woods: Path of Totality

By Yvonne Wakefield

At age eighteen in 1974, Yvonne Pepin set out to build a home from trees on eighty acres she bought on an Oregon mountainside. Almost five decades later, the cabin and Yvonne have weathered the years, and both continue to stand seasoned and proud. Babe in the Wood: Path of Totality is the third in a three-book series about her life in this wilderness cabin.

Between making and marketing art and piecing together a living as a freelance writer and arts educator, Yvonne spends weeks and months alone at the log cabin. She leaves behind overpopulated landscapes branching out of glass, metal, and electricity. Here time is measured by the juniper's lengthening shadows, the ever-rushing creek, the changing seasons, and finding the prize of one's self between the spaces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781737459149

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Babe in the Woods: Path of Totality

Copyright © 2023 by Yvonne Pepin-Wakefield

Published by Pepin Enterprises

ISBN: 978-1-7374591-4-9

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except for brief passages excerpted for review or critical purposes, without the explicit prior written permission of the publisher.

Permission to quote from the introduction of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962; repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994) granted by Ron Hussey, [e-mail].

The events told in this book are from the author’s recollections and journals. Except where permission was given, all names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Published by Pepin Enterprises, LLC

The Dalles, Oregon

www.YvonnePepinWakefield.com

Edited by Anaik Alcasas

Cover Design by Eric Labacz www.LabaczDesign.com

Interior Design by Tamara Cribley www.deliberatepage.com

Also by the Author:

Suitcase Filled with Nails: Lessons Learned from Teaching Art in Kuwait

Babe in the Woods: Building a Life One Log at a Time

Babe in the Woods: Self Portrait

For Lamona and Wes

Contents

Prologue

PART 1: Early Entries

The Journals

Whose Fault

Bear Trap

Fore

Tisk Tasks

First Fire

Overhead Costs

Making Do

Musing Around

Freedom

Hidden Spaces

PART 2: Latter Entries

Dam It!

Frontier Justice

Second Fire

Phoenix

Riding the Miscarriage of Justice

Potpourri

Totality

Four Strokes and a Breath

Oh Brother

Burning Brush

Pen Pals

Pain in the Neck

New Year

Seasons’ Changes

Bonus Daughter

Prologue

Banded with a final row of orthodontic braces, at age eighteen, I bought eighty acres in the Oregon wilderness. On that vanilla-smelling ponderosa pine incline, I sawed trees to rebuild the home I lost at age fourteen, when daughter became orphan.

Now eligible for senior citizen discounts, this cabin laid up one log at a time has weathered life along with me. Although my primary residence is a riverside state-of-the-art home and studio with a push-button fireplace, charging outlets, and toggles galore, the mile-high cabin without electricity or cell reception remains my primal residence.

This log cabin stands two stories at the end of a forest road and has all the comfort of no modern conveniences. Ax, maul, and a splitting wedge for firewood supply heat. Buckets provide running water from the creek. Kerosene lamps shine reading and writing light. An eclectic library accessed by climbing a hand-hewn tamarack loft ladder is the closest it gets to Googling information.

The nearest notable population can be found in two small towns thirteen miles away. The last few miles leading to the cabin are travailed on a barely passable seasonal road. I go there to be alone as often as possible, to paint, to write, and to work in this place of peace and quiet, beauty and repose beside a mountain stream.

Since notching those walls together, I’ve lived many lives and lived in as many states, both physical and psychological. No matter the station or mindset; sweaty and parched while bicycling in a Middle East desert, or professionally slick behind a polished podium at a research conference, or slack-jaw astounded under the Sistine Chapel, just recalling the ardent simplicity of my woodsy life sets me right in the moment even if righteousness was lacking in the moment.

One June, I returned to the cabin, still shaken by the entitled, grandiose, small-minded sets I’d outwitted but who had whittled me down over six years working as a university art professor in Kuwait. Any sense of righteousness or refuge I believed I would reclaim on this mountainside imploded as I rounded the last bend of a rutted road with stretches named The Eliminator and Shit and Slide after disasters at those places. Smack in the easement sat a derelict slide-in camper shell deliberately left there by people who would never earn the name good neighbors.

I’d only been back a couple of weeks after working in a monarchy, tribal-ruled country where dishdasha-draped misogynistic megalomaniacs get their way because no one stops them. Now, I was safely away from them, I believed, on US soil, until a red, white and blue version of the antagonists I thought I’d left in the desert sands bared their denim-jeaned frontier-fortified asses in the forest. That signaled the demise of this turn-the-other-cheek inculpable neophyte who once pranced around the cabin’s hills and hollows wearing only moccasins and the birth of a fuming, gun-toting, litigious middle-aged woman with the first of two titanium hips.

Before the term was popularized, my cabin was built off the grid, in 1975, at a cost of $2,000. In 2015 when passage to this place was blocked, I spent four times this amount to protect my right to freely come and go there.

Fighting to retain an ingress and egress reminded me of an axiom first heard when I dipped a toe-hold in a corner of this rural country: You can get away with murder around here. Years later, that cliché would illustrate my experience in the local’s court, where I learned that injustice is not limited to courtrooms or county lines.

In suburban Florida, a white man goes free after shooting and killing an unarmed, seventeen-year-old Black kid clutching a bag of Skittles. In Hollywood, an orange-haired man who brags about grabbing women by their pussies is elected as a US president and fuels a deadly insurrection. In that same capital city, a male judge testifies in contradiction of a woman doctor accusing him of sexual assault. The accuser vilified, the defendant (protected by white collar privilege) is appointed to the Supreme Court—the same one which will, in a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal decision, rule that a woman’s uterus is chattel.

In a corner of Oregon, a person shoots a dog within city limits (where the discharge of firearms is banned), threaten the lives of law enforcement agents and neighbors, and blocks the easement to my property. The only pussy that got grabbed in this case was his outdoor cat, clamped in one of the coil-spring traps set like land mines around the property where I once ran freely in a bygone era when neighbors could be relied on and not feared.

After I paid off the legal bills to maintain my property rights (and I learned the hard and expensive way how it feels to be exploited by a nepotistic judicial system), I’m not in my log cabin tuned in to the flaming fireplace but in my new HardiePlank-sided house on the Columbia River, watching Netflix on a flat-screen television. In Primal Fear, Richard Gere, playing a ballsy, high-powered attorney, opens the movie with, If you want justice, go to a whorehouse. If you want to get fucked, go to court.

PART 1: Early Entries

The Journals

Since building my log cabin in the shadow of a mountainside named after a blushing berry, I have written three books about my alone time there. Each book is assembled around journal material and is a stand-alone story. Read as a series, the three chart a line of human and literary development from late adolescence to young adulthood to adulthood. One book does not a memoir make… it takes all three. Maybe more.

The first book, Babe in the Woods: Building a Life One Log at a Time, chronicles my building the cabin and living in it. The second book, Babe in the Woods: Self Portrait, takes off from there and spans my mid- to late-twenties. This book, Babe in the Woods: Path of Totality, straddles an era and includes experiences with devices unheard of when the young author was still sporting orthodontic braces.

Path of Totality is broken into sections of stories that span forty years, with the log cabin as a core. They begin when I am scraping by in my twenties and not old enough to buy cheap, sweet, Cold Duck champagne, and I tattle away until I am sixty and can afford to savor Islay-style smoky, peaty scotch whiskey.

Each book was transcribed from journals written in jet-blue or black Bic ballpoint ink. Attempted proper penmanship is revealed in slanted cursive in lined notebooks, in the belly of every Bb and Dd, in the compound curves of Mm, Ss, and the linear Xx, Yy and Zz’s. Still, the script is not worthy of a Palmer Method blue ribbon.

As I practiced no other form of worship, my congregation at the cabin never extended beyond pint-sized domestic animals, bugs, birds, thieving rodents, and mountain airs. Nor did my time there include the erudite breeze of a critiquing literate society. Letters leaked from a pen or tapped through a typewriter ribbon complemented my conversable core.

The cabin journals are slapdash, notes of events and the people who played into my placement on the mountain. Some entries were fleshed out into vignettes in this book and would have been forgotten if their skeleton had not been set down. Rifling through the journals reminded me of how much I wrote at the cabin and how badly I could write. Still, writing was a way to communicate.

The purchase of a used manual typewriter at a garage sale provided the cabin pens a respite. Alternating handwriting with typewriting transformed cursive into crisp fonts imprinted upon the backsides of expired stationery or old manuscripts or, when absolutely necessary, fresh sheets of paper. The typewriter allowed for speedier thought transmission and perhaps the accelerated frontal lobe transfer, but fingers unable to sustain an equal pace meant more misspellings, typos, and run-on sentences. Whether penned or typed, the journal entries were written without the diapering of spell check. Every entry contains cross-outs, scrawled-in edits, and misspellings galore, as the following typed excerpt reveals.

Journal Entry

Breaking myself of response patterns means coming to the full acceptance that I zam alone—at the end of the line. The last call. for what the price of freedom but the dues I pay accepting hardship and ectasy as part of the balance of maintaining falling to the wayside of the tightrope stretched, the only foot hold stretched between where there are no cars, no phones, no calling but my own. And in this calling I return to the unspoken, the underlying communication adhering matter; it is the space between the atmosphere not seen, not even with the highest power laser optics. This matter I zam talking about is the common form of mystics and saints and common people who transcend the material forms of xmtmxmm matter, and a matter of consciousness and ego. Switching Shifting to the highpower of universal adherence I see that there is right in wrong, corruption in righteousness, joy in pain, pain and joy in rigetous living.

After a blind man named Tony sold me a word processor, I began transcribing the journals into a Kaypro, a computer the size of a Volkswagen and just as quirky to drive. Despite losing his eyes in the Vietnam War, Tony’s skills were intact enough to teach me how to operate it. I used the Kaypro when I was living off the mountain. Like the cabin, I am not hardwired, and my relationship with technology in a box shorted out—a lot.

Sometimes Tony could troubleshoot over a phone call when I got in a jam. When he could not, I unplugged the Kaypro and bear-hugged it, stopping only to rest my arms on a curbside trash bin as I walked two blocks to his computer store. Eventually, I trained myself to insert program and data disks into the correct drives… overcoming an occasional dyslexic disk maneuver that erased hours, weeks, or in the case of my doctoral dissertation, months of work.

Off the mountain, when I wasn’t piecing together an extremely frugal living as an artist and writer, I copied pertinent parts of the spiral-bound journals into the Kaypro, turning penned or typed words into neon green fonts on a television-sized screen. With a few keystrokes, ethereal words drained onto an unperforated burr of paper spit out by a dot-matrix printer. The original journals and their typed transcriptions were stored inside half a dozen plastic milk crates. After one wildfire threat too many, I removed most of them from the cabin along with some family heirlooms. The rocking chair, silver service, oriental carpets, and those crates went with me wherever I moved.

Twenty-five years was the longest these prized possessions all stayed together under one roof. Moving from that house involved a massive purge and the discovery that mud daubers had built rock-hard nests in some of the crates’ lattice sides or between journals themselves and had to be sprayed with insecticide before being chipped away.

Safe from stinging wasps, I paged through the contents of each 8×10½ inch notebook, loose sheets, and unperforated printouts to determine if there was anything worth salvaging. Thumbing through this literary nest jogged me into recalling an incident, year, season, exchange, or observation. Rereading rambling entries verbatim put a finger on how bad living alone at the cabin could be.

Preserved in these journals are accounts of incidents and people that, over time, if not written down, would have been forgotten. Like the mud dauber nests chipped away, all that is left of them are outlines on pages.

Whose Fault

After building my log cabin in 1975, I split six consecutive summers living there alone after first living