I Went to the Woods: The weight of waiting

Published 4:30 am Thursday, May 28, 2026

I had arrived at the moment of fleeting clarity. The boat ramp ended where the bottom flattened and with 160 pounds of concrete, my skiff would not float clear of the trailer. I pushed to no avail. Do I back out, cut my losses and wait for the tide to continue to drop, pause, then rise? That would be two more hours. I was ready to get out to our lot and start some real construction on our remote cabin.

At school the previous day, I showed students footage of Dick Proenneke carving the hinges for the front door of his cabin at Twin lakes in 1968. His steady, expert hands built a cabin that is visited by over a thousand people every summer. A thousand doesn’t sound like much, but the cabin is on the north side of the Alaska Range, 90 miles from Kenai as the crow flies. That means visiting necessitates an air charter, which is not cheap.

It’s worth it for many who find the retreat inspiring. Not in the literary, transcendentalist way, but in the rugged, simple, permanent way of many Alaskans who didn’t think they would miss much by skipping out on humanity’s progress. People who didn’t think they were running away, instead they were running toward.

Anyway, cabin builders are not limited to Proenneke and in order to get to that level of skill, one has to suffer the consequences of growth. In his book Deep Survival, Lawrence Gonzalez writes about memories of the future and how we create models for efficiency, which can set us up for disaster. We do something one way, it works, so we do it again. But if a variable changes our system collapses. In my case, launching my skiff in a -2-foot tide is not a problem, but I had not accounted for the changing variable, the critical variable of the extra weight.

My typical reference is water just touching the rubber of my tire. In my frantic quest to get the skiff off the trailer, nearly half the tire was submerged.

That was the clarity. This isn’t working. Just wait. Nothing about this is good.

But a little voice in my head reasoned, “What’s done is done, just finish the job.” I pulled up the ramp, removed two bags of concrete, backed down, set the break, hopped out and ran around my truck. I didn’t even take a second to wonder if anybody was watching, I was beyond that now. Plus, the tide was headed toward -3. Only idiots would try to launch now and tour vans didn’t show tourists eagles until mid morning. No witnesses, but I didn’t even have the common sense to be embarrassed. I had the singular focus, skiff off trailer…skiff off trailer.

It floated free. My tires spun on the slick ramp that’s not a ramp, it’s a series of concrete rectangles that have been worn away from neat strips to what amount to speed bumps. The trailer bounced as I climbed toward the lot. I parked, hustled down, loaded the concrete and was off.

Well, not quite. The water was too low for me to drop the motor so I poled, against the wind, until I could drop enough of the prop to safely run it, but also not incur damage to my transducer when the stern squatted.

As I opened the throttle and turned the corner toward the cabin site, I thought about how many times Proenneke called himself a bonehead, even while constructing his masterpiece. It takes errors. Lots of errors. Those are the terms. I don’t know if that’s comforting or not.

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.