Cabin Porn

It's interesting to see the changes that online usage fashions in the language. For instance, all of a sudden (or either I've been behind the times for much longer than I think) the word "money" has been freed from its former bonds of being a noun and has been given the freedom to wander off into being an adjective with meanings like "convincing," "good," or "genuine,"as in, "This is a money idea." And then there is "porn," which has been similarly emancipated from its confinement to the sexual area, and now it's being used to cover concentrations of anything that gives pleasure and delight.

Therefore there's a website called "Cabin Porn," where you won't find any shots of scarcely clothed women (unless they're concealed in the backgrounds somewhere), but you will find the below pic of an ultimate treehouse, supported on six trees and built over the space of 20 years by a guy named Horace Burgess. If I were a traveler, it would almost be worth a trip to Crossville, Tennessee, which was also once the home of a notable homesteading store that may still be there, to see this thing, and maybe even to take a chance on taking a few steps in one of its upper regions, before fear of heights got the best of me.



But there are pictures of many other interesting edifices as well -- actually I guess hundreds -- that the originators of this site are pleased to call "cabins," though that seems a bit of a stretch, since it includes, among other apparent deviations from the term, several ordinary abandoned frame houses standing lonely in Detroit.

But just for that great generosity of inclusion, besides the huge variety of the buildings themselves, Cabin Porn excited me, because of my own homemade "green oak" house. Till now I had never thought of it as being a "cabin," but I guess it qualifies as much as any of the structures shown in Cabin Porn. My house doesn't sit on six trees, but it does sit off the ground on as many as 15 stout short timbers, some of them recycled from the building of none other than the D.C. Metro subway line, a while ago. My now sadly deceased next door neighbor, Shaw, worked for D.C. Transit, and he got these posts when I started getting interested in building this house down in rural Virginia, and I lugged them down here from D.C. in the old blue Dodge pickup that I used to have. Here's a pic of the house, taken some years ago, the last chance there was to get a clear shot of the front before the trees and shrubs that I planted prevented it.



Cabin Porn shows "cabins" from all over the world, and they welcome submissions, so if I were more venturesome and ambitious, maybe I could get my little undertaking shown there.

I know one thing. If I had had access to "Cabin Porn" back in the early 1970's , I would have had the images of all several hundred of those buildings baked into my memory in a very short time. There isn't much that is more addictive than pictures of homemade little houses if you're seriously thinking of building one yourself, no matter how or of what they're made.

In fact, after I had gotten far enough in building my house all on my own (except the septic tank) and seeing that I could do it, even at the advanced age that I was then, I seriously thought about repeating the effort and building a different kind -- just to be doing it. A wooden yurt, a stone house, a steeply sided A-frame, or a real log cabin. I even bought tools for making the last-named -- a broadax head, a froe, a timber carrier, a peavey, but luckily, as with so much else, I never got around to any of those.

But I did build one genuine second "cabin." It used to be my "honey house," a "rigid frame-type" building made for extracting honey when I was a beekeeper, and for it I used plans for a Pacific Northwest vacation cabin. Like my house, I think it is is a great little building, and I now use it as my painting, stained glass, and computer shop, though my wife refers to it as just being a "man cave."