Patrick Hutchison builds ‘Cabin’ off nostalgia, hard labor

Patrick Hutchison’s friends were making confusing (for him) decisions: getting married, buying houses, going to graduate school. He earned a decent wage as a copywriter for a Seattle tech company, but his life could be divided into his commute to work, eight hours under fluorescent lighting, and then back home.

He was searching Craiglist for a place to get away and found a small cabin in Index, Washington, that needed major repairs. With almost no formal skills in handyman labor, he made the purchase under the guise that he was making his own adult decision.

“What ended up happening was everyone became adults,” Hutchison said. “I’ll get a place and lure them there until they stop being adults, because I think that’s what I want in the end, is for people to stop doing what they’re doing.”

On Thursday, Northwest Passages will feature Hutchison, author of “Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman,” a memoir he wrote about that period, in conversation with The Spokesman-Review Outdoors columnist Ammi Midstokke. “The Cottage” is his first book.

Electricity and plumbing have not reached the cabin, and the book sees Hutchison and his recruits—friends most happy to escape modern conveniences for weekends or weeks at a time—encountering one problem after another. Hutchison writes about these cases with humor, his voice serious and big-hearted.

“I’ve only used a drill once before,” Hutchison wrote. “The goal was to make a small hole in some drywall for a modest hook, but I underestimated the power of the drill by a factor of 6 or 7 million. The drill bit and then the drill itself went through the wall like a Kool-Aid fellow leaning into a room.

Hutchison began writing his memoirs almost immediately after purchasing the cabin, but the book gained momentum because he and his friend, Brian Schatz, were in a similar place in their careers, while both living unconventionally. Schatz was living on a houseboat at a marina in Oakland, California, while writing for Mother Jones.

“I think our careers have kind of gradually progressed until it’s like we’re in the office most of the time wondering if it’s too early to go get another coffee so we can get up and walk around,” Hutchison said. “We didn’t like the environment and we didn’t really like the work we were doing.”

They started on Tuesday, when they each had to present the pages they had written to each other every Tuesday, to hold each other accountable.

In the book, we see how the more time Hutchison spends working in the cubicle, the more difficult office life becomes. Now, Hutchison works at Wild Tree Woodworks in Seattle, where he builds treehouses full time.

“I think if I had to do it with people I didn’t like being around, it would 100 percent erase the value of it to me,” Hutchison said. “I knew that, first of all, I just wanted to have those good relationships with whoever I was working with, and then secondly, I wanted to build spaces that felt kind of true to my passion, and (Wild Tree Woodworks) really ticked both of those boxes.” You know, small, intimate spaces where people intentionally go to spend private moments.

For Hutchison, the value of the cabin was that it was small, isolated from electricity and cell reception. A place where he and his friends could play in the wet and snow, then return from the cold to the warmth of the cabin safe and protected.

“The cabin is also intrinsically tied to a particular time in my life and the lives of my friends,” Hutchison said. “No one had kids. We all had a lot of free time. A lot of us lived together. I think what I missed most was just being able to get away with close friends at regular intervals and be in those places and, you know, have that time and have Those connections…it was very difficult, when writing the book, to be immersed in that time and have to lean into that nostalgia. It wouldn’t be possible to go back to that no matter how many cabins you built.