{"id":235,"date":"2015-11-07T09:22:16","date_gmt":"2015-11-07T14:22:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/?p=235"},"modified":"2015-11-07T09:22:16","modified_gmt":"2015-11-07T14:22:16","slug":"little-cabin-in-the-woods","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/?p=235","title":{"rendered":"LITTLE CABIN IN THE WOODS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"IMG_0023\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Faye holding her latest book HALLEY\u00a0 and wearing the Moonbeam Silver Medal for Young Adult Fiction.<\/p>\n

My latest book, HALLEY, awarded 2015 Jefferson Cup Honor for Historical Fiction. Awarded the Moonbeam Silver Medal for Young Adult Fiction. \u00a0 (see the following web address for more information)\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0 http:\/\/www.newsouthbooks.com\/pages\/2015\/10\/20\/halley-wins-moonbeam-awards-silver-medal\/\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Available at: NewSouth Books:\u00a0www.newsouthbooks.com\/halley and Amazon<\/p>\n

When my husband and I visited Utah\u2019s Zion Canyon this year, we knew we
\nwanted to do more hiking than we had done on our previous visit.
\nExcept for getting down into the canyon and out again on the return,
\nour first hike wasn\u2019t strenuous at all, but it was fairly long.
\n\u201cAbout eight miles, round trip,\u201d Benjamin said as if describing an
\neasy jaunt.\u00a0 We started out.<\/p>\n

Halfway down, Benjamin suddenly realized his hat was in the car.\u00a0 The
\ntrail was deeply shaded on the switchbacks, due to abundant trees, but
\nwe knew we couldn\u2019t count on shade the entire hike, and neither of us
\nwanted a sunburn.\u00a0 While he made the trek back up to the parking lot,
\nI sat down on a rock and enjoyed the luxury of silence.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t
\nreally silent, of course.\u00a0 There was the splash of water tumbling over
\nand around rocks far below, the rustle of wind through the leaves and
\nneedles overhead, and the faint hum of traffic on the highway.<\/p>\n

Benjamin was soon back, wearing his hat.\u00a0 His pack clunked with each
\nstep.\u00a0 It was stuffed with water bottles, camera equipment, a Utah
\ntrail guide, field glasses, and on top of all else, our lunch.<\/p>\n

Like most streams in the west, the creek our trail bordered most of
\nits length wasn\u2019t too wide, so it was easy to cross.\u00a0 But the creek
\nbanks were high enough to prove that it was a much different stream
\nwhen swollen by rain. We stopped to examine rocks filled with fossil
\nshells.\u00a0 Too large to gather, even had they been legal, we admired and
\nmoved on.<\/p>\n

About an hour into the hike a detour left the stream and meandered
\nthrough the forest to a log cabin remaining from pre-park days.
\nAccording to our trail information, it was vacated in 1933.\u00a0 It looked
\nmuch like the main room of my grandmother Long\u2019s house in the Georgia
\nmountains, which had also been constructed of logs.\u00a0 Since my
\ngrandmother\u2019s house had been built decades before the Civil War, the
\ntwo might be contemporaries.<\/p>\n

\u201cBet that was for the water bucket and the wash pan,\u201d I said, pointing
\nto a shelf just inside.\u00a0 \u201cThey couldn\u2019t have had a large family in
\nthis one room.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe they once had other rooms.\u00a0 Maybe a sleeping attic too,\u201d
\nBenjamin suggested.<\/p>\n

I agreed.\u00a0 \u201cLike my grandmother\u2019s house.\u00a0 But how did they survive?
\nThis land is too rocky and steep for a garden.\u201d\u00a0 As we speculated, we
\nrealized the people living here probably made a living off raising
\ncattle and hunting. Surely they had a milk cow and maybe a few
\nchickens. Maybe they fished too, though we so far had not even seen
\nminnows in the creek. However those people did it, it would have been
\na hardscrabble existence.\u00a0 Then I recalled that I had lived life
\nalmost that hard during the time that my parents were separated and
\nMama had taken us kids to live off the land in the mountains near my
\nGrandmother Long.\u00a0 So I could imagine how cold this cabin would have
\nbeen in winter,\u00a0 how hard to haul water from the creek, and how
\ndifficult it would have been to fight off the predators that killed
\nchickens and attacked the cow, the hogs, and mules on a regular basis.<\/p>\n

Back at the creek, we found more fossil rocks.\u00a0 One even had a small
\nfish etched into its surface.\u00a0 So millions of years ago, there had
\nbeen fish–why not now?\u00a0 The trail ended at the beginning of what
\nwould one day be a huge natural bridge.\u00a0 Now it was just an arched
\nindentation in the stone side of a mountain.\u00a0 We ate our lunch before
\nheading back and talked to a young couple and and then a family with
\nthree kids who showed up while we ate.\u00a0 The kids were talking about
\nthe cabin and how cool it must have been to live there.<\/p>\n

\u201cEspecially in January,\u201d I murmured.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to romanticize what
\nyou haven\u2019t actually experienced.<\/p>\n

On our return trip we did not detour by the cabin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Faye holding her latest book HALLEY\u00a0 and wearing the Moonbeam Silver Medal for Young Adult Fiction. My latest book, HALLEY, awarded 2015 Jefferson Cup Honor for Historical Fiction. Awarded the Moonbeam Silver Medal for Young Adult Fiction. \u00a0 (see the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions\/238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.fayegibbons.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}