For a week or two at a time, I am a solo resident at a Pioneer Cabin at Kumbrabow State Forest, Huttonsville, West Virginia. The cabins were built in 1930, part of Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) work relief program. If you’re looking for luxury, look elsewhere as these log houses are decidedly primitive, equipped with propane lamps and refrigerators, wood cook stove, an outdoor water pump and no indoor toilet.
It is not truly pioneer living, as I bring in my own food and a small shed holds enough wood to build many fires well into the winter. Still, I leave the city life behind as well as the urban me prettied up in summer skirts, t-shirts, and sandals. Here in Pioneer Cabin 4 the rooms are dark and the single mirror, tiny. My days are spend exploring hollows, dirt roads and tiny villages, meeting and photographing the landscape and the locals. I wear the same blue jeans all week and abandon daily bathing. By day four in the wilderness, my hair is gnarled with sticks and spider webs. No problem. Mill Creek rushes by the front of my cabin. I kneel on a large stone, and dunk my head into the clear waters, scrub my scalp and face and ears—no soap—and come away with the glow of nature’s sweet waters on my skin.
Living in the forest, I leave the sanitized life behind. Toilets and free hot and cold running tap water are luxuries which I learn quickly to do without. I prefer taking a pee squatting beside the soft mossy forest floor while examining the diversity of tiny green plants just at my boot tip. Squatting as the bears do makes me feel one with nature and is far more satisfying than visiting the smelly, dank outhouse (available with Cabin 4) or using a modern flush toilet where the whole experience is, well, antiseptic.
Perhaps we are overly clean anyway. I read recently about an author who rallied against our obsession with cleanliness arguing that it has left us with bodies unaccustomed to fighting everyday exposure to bacteria. The writer had avoided showers for two weeks as an experiment to test the thesis that our urban, too-clean environments were making us sick. I am not sure if his thesis held up to a scientific review of experts. I do know that growing up in the countryside of Upstate New York, my brothers and I were encouraged to walk barefoot, swim in local swimming holes, and camp out in the open fields with friends. Childhood maladies were not frequent visitors to our house.