I imagined it welling up inside his body like a bruise-colored summer thunderhead, the kind of storm that smells of dust long before it ever smells of rain. “I try not to attend to it,” he ’d say.īut this current sickness was greedy for his attention. So whenever he had a headache or a wound, he endeavored to overcome his pain mentally. If his life was aesthetically beautiful, woodsy, and romantic, it was seldom comfortable. He cut his own wood, fixed his own cars, brewed his own beer, and butchered his own game.
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He did his work by hand, preferring the manual to the automatic. Comfort rarely guided his decisions, anyway. If he was in pain, his face didn’t betray it. The only clue that something was amiss was the tiny aberration in his daily uniform-his collared shirt wasn’t tucked into his Levis. It was large enough, the story goes, that a kid once ran over it with a bicycle when Jerry was lying on his side on the school playground, inspecting a bug.Īs he walked across the porch, Jerry didn’t stoop or wince. His nose protruded from his face like a beak. He wore glasses and a bristly white moustache. At seventy-three years old, he was neither tall nor short, and his body was sinewy from a lifetime of walking and work. Jerry lived here for two-thirds of his life. When a hospice doctor visited, he stepped out of his car, swept his gaze over the house, the mossy rock gardens, and the corkscrew hazel out front, and said: “It looks like a hobbit lives here.” Whoever comes down here, whether a deliveryman or-once-the poet Allen Ginsberg, knows they are seeing something rare and beautiful, the fruits of an autonomous life.
The gutters are trimmed with gray, lichened wood. The cabin’s roof is shingled with hand-split cedar shakes, which are dusted with pine needles. Like a nest, it is built of the materials that surround it. His closest neighbors were the swaying ponderosas, junipers, and cottonwoods of the river-bottom forest. By the end of the summer, it became a home in this sylvan oasis. Using skills he learned from carpentry books and an eighth-grade shop class, he framed the windows, wired the outlets, plumbed the pipes, and built the cabinets. Jerry numbered the logs, loaded them onto a truck, and reassembled them here along the Jocko River with his first wife, Libby. He paid three hundred dollars for it and gathered some friends to help take it apart. In 1973 he found it for sale at the foot of the Mission Mountains just north of here. The cabin was older than he was, but solid. He elbowed open the front door and slowly crossed the porch. Steroids had swollen his face, rounding the usual angles of his jaw. Jerry McGahan was not well when he stepped out of his Montana cabin on a gusty mid-September afternoon in 2016. I began to see, however dimly, that one of my ambitions, perhaps my governing ambition, was to belong fully to this place, to belong as the thrushes and the herons and the muskrats belonged, to be altogether at home here.
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