We brought along the essentials - books, magazines, coffee, wine, the dog.
Facebook stayed home. We had no internet, no TV and cell phone connection was spotty.

It’s good to find out you can still function without all your stuff. For our vacationing pleasure we had a river, a mountain, giant trees and a Sierra cabin, borrowed from a friend, built in the 1930s on the American River.

To move into such a place requires little – open the door, turn on the water, flip the switch to the hot water heater. Make sun tea and locate your first favorite reading site. The lumpy rocker in the living room. A flat rock in the river. A chair on the deck with a railing for your feet.

Then check in with the senses. There’s that toasty summer smell of the Sierra and spicy warm pines. Then the noise of white water rapids dominating all sounds and delivering memories of childhood creeks, although none so clear and cool as this river that begins at the top of a gray-faced mountain, a tower of granite that moves over in the morning to let the sun come around and reaches up to turn on the stars at night.

Here is a place where writers strain to come up with inadequate poetic images when really all you need to say is trees, river, mountains, summer. Reliable, constant, dramatic. No agendas.

The place stands in the middle of now and then.

Sylvia Boorstein who writes simple profound books on meditation, which one day I vow to follow, says a good way to focus is to just listen. There’s highway noise on one side of the cabin from a road that began as a Pony Express route and is now the major shot up and over Echo Summit to Lake Tahoe’s South Shore. On the other side of the cabin, river and wind sounds. From inside, hiking boots on a creaking wood floor, a screen door slamming and Sylvia Poggioli in Rome. Roughing it is one thing. Honoring your addictions is another. We brought along a radio and NPR.

The cabin is soft and worn, vintage rustic, pre-Pottery Barn with serviceable furniture, unmatched curtains, a piano, original roof and a wood stove in the kitchen, no longer used but a monument to the cabin’s Depression-era beginnings. Looking for something to put on my husband’s arm that he cut while rescuing the dog who flew over the river bank after a ball and which might have ended the vacation before dinner, I found a bottle of mercurochrome in the bathroom cabinet. Another antique, with a 35 cent price tag

The cabin stands in the middle of now and then. Best of all, it came with old guest books, begun in 1940, rich with stories, milestone dates and ghosts. Vacation memories of five generations of family and friends from Berkeley and Davis, Indianapolis and Kansas, some written in pencil and all in neat and clear handwriting, recording favorite hiking trails and fishing holes. There was an entry about berry picking in August, 1940 and the last April snow in 1941. In June 1944 someone called the cabin “the castle on the river.” A group celebrated VJ Day with beer and steaks.

In the mountains some people work very hard to have fun. For one late afternoon’s entertainment we sat on the deck and watched climbers scaling Hogback mountain. They crawled and stopped, the shadows climbing faster than they could. Finally in the last piece of light they reached the top and high-fived each other.

We stood and applauded, lit a candle and went back to our books.