The Cabin I Never Built

August 2026

I started writing a second book this week. The working title has been sitting with me for years before I finally put it down on paper: The Cabin I Never Built. There's a reason for that title, and it goes back further than the log walls I actually did raise.

There was a small section of land on the outskirts of town that I used to explore with my dog when I was a kid. The air always smelled of pine needles and damp earth after a rain. It sat on a gentle slope with old pines and a little creek that sang in the spring. In my mind I had already cleared a spot, raised the walls with my own hands, and built a fireplace that would keep a family warm through a cold Ontario winter. I could see the garden out front, the smoke curling from the chimney at dusk, the quiet evenings with nothing but the sound of wind in the trees after a day spent wandering the countryside. I yearned so badly to build that cabin that I started disassembling the neighboring farmer's wooden fence, hoisting the cedar rails onto my shoulders and carrying them over to that clearing. I made a pile of building materials and planned to return when school let out that summer.

I never built that cabin. Life had other plans. I grew up, and for years I chased the version of success I thought I was supposed to want. Long hours, bigger responsibilities, a house in town, the kind of life that looked good on paper. I built a commercial roofing and sheet metal company from nothing, nineteen years in that industry, the last several of them running a crew of ninety men across job sites I could no longer visit personally in any given week. The daily commute, the fluorescent lights, the constant pressure of deadlines and notifications, all of it slowly raising my cortisol and keeping my nervous system in a low grade state of alarm. Successful on paper, but quietly unraveling underneath it.

Somewhere in the middle of those years, on a slow afternoon at the shop between job sites, I sketched a version of that same childhood cabin on a napkin. A fireplace, a porch, penciled in and filed away as a retirement dream, some distant future I assumed the business would fund once it had grown large enough. I never built that cabin either. It sat folded in a drawer for years, one more version of the same unrealized plan, waiting on a version of me that never quite arrived on schedule.

Then the house of cards collapsed. The business, the savings, the illusion of security, all of it. In the aftermath I stood in the ruins with nothing left but a choice: keep going the way I had been, or finally build something real.

So I did. I left the city behind, moved to the land, and started over with hand tools, a golden retriever named Cali, and a willingness to learn the hard way. I built a log cabin, not because I had to, but because I needed to remember what it felt like to make something with my own hands again. Most of what filled the years in between, I taught myself out of library books and a willingness to fail at something a dozen times before it finally worked, though I leaned more than once on people who had already earned real knowledge of their own. My father's hands on sheet metal and small repairs. My sister's patience with a garden and a canner. An old farmer named Orville who taught me how to buy livestock at auction and see it through to the table.

I only had to unplug, unwind, and reconnect with what actually mattered, and trust that the capability I needed was already in my own two hands. Modern life has taken care of our foundational needs. Food, shelter, and safety are largely handled by the system around us, and in handing those responsibilities over, it has quietly stripped away the satisfaction of meeting them ourselves. We no longer hunt, grow, or build much of what sustains us. The lower needs are met, yet the higher ones, a sense of competence, of having actually done something with your own hands, stay chronically unsatisfied. The result is a strange kind of emptiness, and I think a lot of us are paying for it without quite knowing why.

I didn't arrive at any of this quickly, and I don't expect anyone else to either. The version of this life I eventually built looks almost nothing like the polished plan I once imagined it would. There's no dramatic reveal, no single triumphant chapter where everything clicks into place. What actually happened was thousands of small, undramatic choices that only reveal their shape once you've stopped, the way I eventually did, to look back at the whole distance covered. This is the book I wish I'd had when I was still dreaming about that cabin on the hill, the one I never built, and the second one after it that I never built either, before I finally learned how to build one for real, and to live in it gratefully ever since.

There's a piece of land I haven't walked in nearly fifty years that's still sitting undeveloped on the edge of that same town. I'm going to go find it this week, while I'm back visiting my parents. Part of me wonders if there's still a pile of cedar rails out there somewhere, waiting for a kid who never came back for them.

Around here otherwise: the sugar shack is close, I want it finished before the end of summer, and there are two more projects I need done before winter sets in in earnest, including getting the last of these logs stacked and properly dried. Back at it full time now, after a stretch spent mostly on writing and website work. It was worth it. I'm glad to be back outside.

Welcome to the cabin. I'm glad you're here.

— Shawn