I went to the woods: Family, fishing and fabricating

Published 5:30 am Saturday, July 11, 2026

This summer I’ve settled into a tidy rotation of cabin building, fishing, and family. There’s not much beyond that because any of those three could be a rotation in itself.

I pore over details and ask the Internet about methods or sequences that best serve building. Square. Bracing. Load.

Then I think about silvers showing up in my favorite little coves where I can anchor and cast off the bow of my boat. Flies. Sink rates. Strip pace.

Then it’s time to pick up my daughter from daycare, which my wife and I call school hoping to make the connection that school is fun and that she should always go.

“Big BOAT.” “Pet deeo.” “Daddy, gas.”

The one that is taking the most bandwidth, of course, is the remote cabin build. I was again confronted with errors and flaws and am starting to distinguish the two. Errors should be fixed, flaws can’t necessarily be fixed. Flaws can be unseen but devastating. That’s what I’m afraid of.

The string running from the front corner to the back was off by two inches because it got kicked or I wrapped it to the side of the concrete footing and forgot to check before setting anchor bolts in wet concrete. From that line everything else was off to a degree that couldn’t be saved with creative adjustment. I thought about elaborate adaptations to turn the mistake into something meaningful. My buddy, Rob the contractor, liked that approach. “It’s not a mistake, it’s an intentional upgrade,” was his response, though he hadn’t actually seen the extent of the problem.

The truth is the error went beyond even my threshold for a mistake, so I bought the necessary bits and a blade to sever the anchor bolt and fix the problem with the help of YouTube, though there is no service at the site.

I am a little curious about the long-term retention of what I am searching on the Internet to assist me. Studies have revealed the modern habit of our brains to not retain information we can find online. There is no necessity to store it because the brain recognizes the shortcut. It’s called the “Google Effect.”

I would argue that a not insignificant percentage of the students who say they are not good at taking tests are instead suffering the consequences of modern society turning our brains from sponges into etch-a-sketches. Of course an assessment will be difficult after skimming Google summaries and submitting AI-enhanced compositions. Shake. Shake. Shake.

There is evidence that since I am researching information, then applying it, I will retain that information. For well after the build, I will know more uses for a speed square than someone who did a biography on a construction tool for a CTE assignment. I’ll recall that the earliest iterations of many contemporary construction tools date back to the 1920s. A battery powered nailer can sink somewhere 500 or more nails on a single charge. But the most critical fact about nailers is that I don’t own one.

My favorite tech is old tech. The speed square has been around for a hundred years but its simplicity and practicality is perfect. I’m using it to draw lines, make straight cuts and find angles.

I think for my daughter’s second birthday she’ll get her very own speed square. Too young for a new fly rod.

Jeff Lund is a freelance writer based in Ketchikan. His book, “A Miserable Paradise: Life in Southeast Alaska,” is available in local bookstores and at Amazon.com. “I Went to the Woods” appears twice per month in the Juneau Empire.