Your Cabin in the Woods
A Compilation
of Cabin Plans and Philosophy for
Discovering Life in the
Great Out Doors
by
Conrad Meinecke
Forward
First of all, Conrad Meinecke's Cabin in the Woods is a cabin
not made with hands; it is eternal in the heaven of his mind. He
has roamed the Rockies, tramped the Balkans, lived in adobe, bedded down in the desert of restless sands, but always he comes back to his true love, a cabin in the woods. He as built thirty-five cabins and fireplaces in the Rockies and in Canada and now has six cabins scattered about in the Western Hemisphere. From his artist, linguistic father who at ninety-three could still do a hand-stand, and from his Scotch-Swiss mother who combined a practical, pioneering type of thinking with a high degree of spirituality, he inherited a something in his genes that defies imprisoning in words. He is a. lean, tough specimen illuminated by a quenchless inner fire of spirituality. His tireless energy, his buoyancy, and strange to say, his quietness of spirit, spring from his communion with forms, visible and invisible, of the great out-of- doors. At sometime, like his grand old father, he has had a draught from the fabled fountain of Immortal Youth. He is fortunate in his ancestry—the genes somehow "blended" just right. Then in his boyhood his Indian mentor, "Neck-tie Jim," taught him how to listen when on the other side of the world the "red gods" were calling him to help them make their "medecin." Curiously enough, with this idealism, this high spirituality, this understanding love of the inner meaning of life, he combines a Yankee, practical ingenuity. He is the best cook that ever concocted a meal for me in the wilderness. He "swings a mean skillet." If he says, "build your fireplace so and so," do it. And when you have done it, you can stretch your moccasined feet to the fire and have no smoke in your eyes. Build your cabin the way he tells you and you will have a joy forever, partly because you built it and partly because it "belongs" to the particular spot of its own earth, partly because it's as handy as a pocket in a shirt, and then, too, because it's easy on your income. This man tramps all over the earth and when he settles down, builds himself a "nest" on the end of a twig as practical and as intriguing as that of the Baltimore oriole. Somehow he has so much—maybe it is because he is always giving it away. From being a successful young man in business affairs, he turned to working with and for men and boys. Somehow he has in his spiritual heritage and in his ripening wisdom, the blessedness of sharing. From his "Cabin in the Woods," you can learn how to fashion your cabin, but more, you may become more fit to live in a "house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." Elbert R. Fretwell Chief Scout Executive Boy Scouts of America