On June 9, 1991, at age thirty-nine, I placed a one-time ad in the Sunday Singles section of the Anchorage Daily News. As I would later come to learn, taking that step changed my life in several important ways.
Of the eighteen responses I received, one sent by a man named John stood out from the rest. We enjoyed many things in common. Unlike many of the other respondents, he did not appear to be desperate for a relationship, which I considered a plus.
Calling the number provided in his letter, we agreed to meet for lunch a few days later at Sacks Café in Anchorage. At the time, I was the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Regional Environmental Assistant for Alaska, based in Anchorage; John was the Director of Planning at the Matanuska-Susitna Borough (Borough) in Palmer forty-five miles away.
Our lunch meeting went well. We both expressed interest in seeing each other again. However, as a result of a miscommunication—I thought he would call me and he thought I would call him—neither of us called. Not one to sit around and fret, I pulled out the folder with the responses to my ad, re-read them, and then phoned my second choice. I didn’t give John another thought. I mistakenly assumed he had changed his mind and decided he was not interested in seeing me again.
Two weeks later, fate intervened. After a Saturday morning shopping run to Anchorage, John headed back to his house near Hatcher Pass. Along the way, he decided to take advantage of a beautiful, sunny afternoon and detoured to Eklutna Lake to ride his mountain bike to Eklutna Glacier. He had no way of knowing I would be walking on the same trail the same afternoon with another man, who had also responded to my ad. I thought I recognized John when he rode past on his way to the glacier. As he passed us a second time on his way back, I called out his name. He stopped momentarily and asked who I was. I responded, “Pamela Bergmann.” He said “Hi,” and then took off down the trail. Relaying the story to friends at work the following Monday, they encouraged him to call me, which he did.
John and I ended up planning a three-day mountain bike trip on the thirty-eight-mile Resurrection Pass trail during the upcoming Fourth of July holiday. This would involve using bike paniers to carry necessary food, clothing, and gear. While I was an experienced backpacker, this would be my first combination mountain biking and camping trip. At my invitation, John joined me, the weekend prior to our Fourth of July 4 outing, for what ended up being our first date. We rode our mountain bikes, complete with loaded paniers to the end of the thirteen-mile Eklutna Lake Trail, camped overnight, and rode back. Our trip was successful, and I was now confident I could manage my bike, loaded with necessary camping gear, food, and clothes, on a longer and more challenging trail.
As with our ride at Eklutna Lake, during our three-day trip on the Resurrection Pass Trail, we enjoyed both glorious weather and each other’s company. The adventure ended with an unanticipated visit to an emergency room in Anchorage after John sliced a deep gash below his left knee on a sharp rock. Nonetheless, even with that turn of events, we had already begun falling in love. Then, just three short weeks after our first date, we made our lifetime commitment to each other. At long last, in our late thirties, we had both found our respective soulmate.
When I placed the ad in the Anchorage Daily News, it never crossed my mind that I would receive responses from men who lived outside Anchorage. Now, not only had I met a man who lived near Hatcher Pass and worked in Palmer, the two of us had fallen in love and planned to spend the rest of our lives together. We were now faced with the challenge of where we would live.
When we met, I owned a condominium on the east side of Anchorage; John owned a house about fifty miles away. Since living apart was not an option, we were left with three primary choices, which included moving in together at John’s house, moving in together at my condo, or selling both places and buying or building something in between. After methodically considering the pros and cons of each option, we decided it made the most sense for John to sell his place and move in with me, and then find some land in the Borough on which to build a cabin.
After moving in together and selling John’s house, we tackled part three of our plan; namely, finding land for a cabin. After first developing a list of criteria for what we would like in a piece of property, we spent more than a year researching available Borough parcels and then driving to see them in person. The search took us along the Glenn Highway as far as Sheep Mountain Lodge, up Buffalo Mine Road near Sutton, near the Little Susitna River close to Hatcher Pass, and lastly, north of Wasilla.
We finally found twenty-acres that met almost all of our criteria. Located north of the Little Susitna River, the undeveloped, but forested parcel had views of the nearby Talkeetna Mountains, was close to Hatcher Pass, and was only fifty-five miles from Anchorage. The next step was placing a bid on the property. Because of John’s position as the Borough’s Director of Planning and because we wanted to ensure the process was totally transparent and ethical, it took close to a year for the purchase to be completed.
In the meantime, we asked an engineering friend to design a simple, three-story cabin that would withstand a sizable earthquake on the nearby Castle Mountain Fault. The first floor would be twenty-four by twenty-four feet, not counting an Arctic entryway. The second floor would consist of a twenty-four by twelve-foot loft on the north (Talkeetna Mountain) side of the cabin. The third floor would be a twelve-by-twelve-foot cupola, which would give us additional views of the Talkeetna Mountains. In addition, we hoped the cupola would be high enough so we could also see the tall peaks of the Chugach Mountains to the south. Each floor would include windows on every side for views of the surrounding birch and spruce forest and mountains to the north. Last, but not least, the cupola would include a skylight for viewing the northern lights.
It was a happy day when we finally received the title to the property on October 24, 1995. By the next summer, we were ready to dedicate every weekend along with vacation time to build the cabin. The first order of business was having the boundaries of our parcel surveyed in May 1996. Heaven forbid, we would guess at the boundaries and build on land that was not ours. Next came felling and clearing birch and spruce trees for our driveway and cabin site. Having grown up on a farm in Nebraska, I loved working on our land. It felt like I was going back to my farm girl roots.
Ideally, we would have begun construction of the cabin in early June when the snow was gone, the ground was dry, the days were long, and the weather was typically sunnier and drier. However, we still had several more tasks that needed to be completed before John and I could begin the actual task of building.
Much to everyone’s dismay, on June 2, one of southcentral Alaska’s most destructive urban-interface wildland fires began in an area of the Borough known as Miller’s Reach. Before it was contained, it had burned more than 37,000 acres and almost 350 structures. As the Borough’s Director of Planning, John was heavily involved in response and recovery operations for the fire. Cabin-related work was delayed for almost two months.
Finally, in late July, a contractor constructed a one-thousand-foot driveway into the building site, and then excavated a crawl space and installed a concrete block foundation for the cabin. Around the same time, a comprehensive list of building materials was compiled and sent to local lumberyards for bids.
By the end of July, the hot dry weather that had fueled the Miller’s Reach Fire was a distant memory. We were now in the rainy part of the summer. At long last, in early August, a truck with a flatbed trailer from Homesteaders in Wasilla made its way up the driveway. We could hear it before we could see it. On the back was over $16,000 worth of lumber, all of the wood we needed to build the cabin. I hadn’t really thought about how the lumber would be offloaded. Earlier that day, I had spread tarps over the muddy ground where the lumber was to be offloaded and stored. As the truck backed up to the tarps, I was shocked when the driver began raising the cab end of the flatbed. I then realized he was going to dump the lumber onto the ground just like how a dump truck offloads gravel. In my mind, I had mistakenly thought the lumber would somehow be offloaded by hand.
Once the angle of the flatbed was high enough, the entire load of lumber slid off, immediately ripping through the tarps I had naively placed on the ground. The noise, which included the sound of splintering wood, was something I will never forget. After lowering the flat bed, the driver popped out of the cab so we could sign the requisite receipt. We waved as he turned around and headed down the driveway. After the rumble of the truck disappeared, we were left alone in silence. We stood by the mountain of lumber, somewhat in shock, looking back and forth at the pile and each other in addition to our two pairs of hands, and wondering what the heck we had gotten ourselves into.
Unlike stories we had heard about how these kinds of building projects enhanced a couple’s relationship, we were under no such illusion. We took a very different approach. Quite simply, we figured, worse case, we would end up killing each other, at least figuratively, if not literally. We assumed anything less would be a bonus.
I had absolutely zero experience building anything. John, however, had helped construct a couple of cabins across Cook Inlet. He was also skilled at plumbing and electrical work. So, he was the brains and brawn of the operation. I turned out to be skilled at measuring and sawing and also helped with the grunt work. Initially, I did have to say to him that if he used a particular tone of voice when providing me with instructions that that was not going to work. Once that was understood, we were off and running. While I did develop a bit of a “potty mouth,” it was never directed at John, only at whatever task proved to be particularly difficult.
During the next two months, we completed the first two stories of the cabin, working primarily on the weekends but also sometimes after work. We took some vacation days as well. The second weekend of October, during the winter’s first snowstorm, John recruited a friend to help us lift two, four-by-eight-foot arched windows into place on the first floor. With that, the cabin was finally secured from the elements.
That winter we did not yet own a snowplow, so the unimproved road leading to our driveway and our driveway itself was snowed in. After work on Fridays, we would each make the trip from our respective office, John from Palmer and me from Anchorage. After parking on the edge of the nearest Borough-maintained road, we cross-country skied, typically in the dark using a headlamp, the half-mile to the cabin. We each donned a day pack and pulled a sled, making sure that between the two of us, we had a porta potty, car battery (for lights), food, water, and whatever else we needed for the weekend.
Many a Friday night, the temperature inside the cabin was well below freezing. Whoever arrived first, fired up a kerosene stove followed by the wood stove. We then stayed huddled around one or both stoves most of the rest of the evening as the temperature in the cabin, and its contents, warmed up above freezing. Water, heated on a propane camping stove, was poured into hot water bottles to help thaw out a futon bed on the loft. We were singularly focused on the warmth of each other and the snugness of our surroundings.
As it turned out, building the cabin was a true bonding experience. For many years after it was finished, every time we walked inside, we would stop, marveling over the fact that together, we had built this home with our own set of hands. It provided us with immense satisfaction.
Beginning that very first winter, our cabin and surrounding land became our hideaway, our private sanctuary, our “Chateau-Relaxo.” We welcomed all of our critter friends—including moose, bears, foxes, lynx, porcupines, sandhill cranes, great gray owls, magpies, gray jays, woodpeckers, and snipe—that graced us with their presence and caused us to take time to stop, look, and listen.
The cupola was added the following summer. Over the years, our lives changed. John became the Borough Manager; I became the DOI Regional Environmental Officer for Alaska. Both jobs were stressful and demanding. At the same time, the cabin changed as well. By the time it became John’s primary home while he was Borough Manager, it included all the luxuries of a typical house.
Now in our third chapters, but still leading busy lives, the peace, serenity, and warmth that our hideaway afforded us that very first winter, have continued to sustain and ground us through the years. By placing that ad in the Sunday Singles those many years ago, I found my soulmate, discovered untapped skills, realized the satisfaction of building one’s own home, and rediscovered the peace that nature brings.