Noah & Leah ❤︎ ☀︎
June 29th, 2024
The Cabin
Bend, Oregon
RSVP NOW!
June 29th, 2024
The Cabin
Bend, Oregon
RSVP NOW!
Back in the 1980s my parents came to Bend, OR looking for a place to rent. A few years earlier they had met as strangers on a ferry in Alaska, now they were a couple in their early 30s apartment hunting for their second place together.
They sat in some coffee shop or breakfast restaurant looking through the classified ads and saw a cabin, not for rent but for sale, near the edge of Deschutes National Forest. My dad knew the area. 10 years earlier, disillusioned with the prospect of spending another year with his high school friends in Salem, he cut his long hair and moved to Bend to get a job and learn how to ski.
My parents made the drive out Skyliner’s Road in my mom’s Datsun. The couple selling the cabin had bought it from the man who built it: a Los Angeles-area hairdresser who had driven into the woods with his girlfriend, the deed to a small plot of land, and a book on how to build a log cabin using trees on your property. Within a year the girlfriend was gone, but the cabin was completed. A handful of snow melts later my parents bought the place.
They got jobs. They cooked meals on a wood stove. In the winter they parked their cars at the bottom of the road and did the last quarter mile on cross country skis. My maternal grandparents came to visit from New York and told them they were living like Abraham Lincoln.
At some point they talked about having a wedding. On July 2nd, 1988 their friends and family came rolling in from across the country to see Mark and Susan married on the cabin’s front porch.
Leah and I feel extremely lucky to be marrying eachother under the same trees as my parents. We can’t wait to see you all there.