Cabin Fever Art

I built a log cabin by hand with my husband Bill Sullivan in the wilds of Oregon's Coast Range, starting in 1977. Bill was writing for the "Mother Earth News" at the time, and it seemed that everyone wanted to go back to nature and live off the land. We dared to do this because Bill's parents had purchased a remote homestead cheaply, partly because the only access was by hiking in a mile and a half, and partly (as we learned later) because the previous homesteader had been murdered there. The property had a ghost story, and nobody wanted to buy the place.

We decided, while we were building a log cabin by hand on the property, that we would interview the neighbors and try to guess which one of them had killed the old homesteader. As it turned out, there were only half a dozen families in the valley, and all of them had a motive. After twenty years we finally found a missing witness and realized who did it.

But the book is not primarily about the murder mystery. Instead it is about building a cabin and raising a family. We didn't feel that photographs were appropriate for our lifestyle, so instead I documented our story with pen-and-ink line drawings.We still live at our log cabin in summers. We still have to hike in a mile and a half. Bill works on his books with a typewriter, and I paint with watercolors.

The four images on this page are available as color prints, where I've added watercolor to the line drawings. At the top is our original one-room cabin, completed after two summers of work. Next is an oblique view of the cabin as it appears today, after we built a two-story addition onto the front of the original cabin. The third illustration shows our kitchen, with wood stove, kerosene lamp, and handmade furniture. Last is a view across the pasture from our kitchen table.