A Tale of Two Cabins
by John Irving Clapp
Levellers Press, Amherst; $17
Available for purchase online
and at Collective Copies in Amherst and Northampton
Henry David Thoreau was a thoughtful, curious citizen, but “my greatest skill in life,” he wrote, “has been to want but little.”
That’s from Walden; or, Life in the Woods, his 1854 memoir about simple living in the woods near Walden Pond in Concord, MA. The cottage he erected there — 150 square feet of space, built for 28 dollars and 12½ cents — gave him shelter for two years, which he dedicated mainly to writing and reflection.
In periods of calm, perceptions shift. Just as one can see deeper into water smoothed of ripples, so can a quiet life bring introspection and revelation.
John Irving Clapp knows this story well. It’s why he built a recreation of Thoreau’s cabin in the woods behind his house on Chesterfield Road in Northampton. After two years of part-time construction, the cottage is nearly finished, and Clapp’s first book — A Tale of Two Cabins: Comparative Stories of Thoreau’s Cabin, Nature, and Life — is now available through Amherst-based Levellers Press.
It’s a sleek volume, composed of 22 short chapters with titles like “The Story of a Door,” “Encounters in the Wild,” and “A Thoreauvian Father’s Day.” It’s full of images as well: landscape shots, archival photos, and a side-by-side cost breakdown of the cabins (Clapp’s cost $1,772.78, while Thoreau spent about $800, adjusted for inflation).
“I’m an unlikely writer,” Clapp told me. “I flunked English in trade school. I’m a terrible printer — you can’t read my writing. And I’m a terrible speller. But I had a blast writing it — an absolute blast.”
Clapp’s passion shines through in these essays, which weave history, natural science, autobiography, and philosophy into warm, workmanlike prose. Much of the time he writes from memory about the process of building the cabin, but he is just as comfortable expounding on his research into the Clapp family’s long history in Northampton, which reaches back to 1670.
Some passages read in perfectly linear fashion, especially when it comes to the hammer-and-nails reality of a lifelong career in carpentry. But at its heart, A Tale of Two Cabins is deeply lyrical and richly digressive, a product of many hours spent in quiet contemplation at the new cabin (Clapp’s home, which he and his wife Dee run as an off-grid solar-powered bed and breakfast called the Starlight Llama, is a ten-minute walk away).
In “The Trickster,” Clapp’s watches a coyote saunter past the window of the cabin, which prompts not only an explanation of the migration and breeding habits of the species, but also a series of memories formed by Clapp as a boy, growing up on this property and working on the farm founded by his great-great-grandfather in 1828.
Such easy pivots in era and age allow Clapp to reflect and look forward at the same time. A self-professed hippie, Clapp remembers Walden as a “handbook” for his generation, and writes of how this ethos manifested in a 1979 anti-nuclear protest in New Hampshire, where he wore a headband and gas mask, linking arms with new friends. Thoughts on the design of the cabin’s door take us back to the bloody raid on Deerfield in 1704. In one particularly touching chapter, he tells us of an old high school friend, and offers that bond as a study of young idealism, counter-culture, and escape.
It is lovely to climb inside Clapp’s head, perched as he is in a quiet, scenic retirement. This little cabin of hemlock and pine — stained russet-gold, with a small solar panel on the roof and a hilltop view of nearby Mount Tom — is his Walden. The space is a refuge for Clapp, but it also remains, in a small way, with each reader that passes through it.•
