The Quote Wall

 

Beside my house sits a small cabin. It is ten feet wide and twelve feet long with a small wood stove in the corner and a giant window facing south at Broadway. The foothills of the Pintlers are hidden by the far ridge, but the mountain peaks shine in the morning sun. Before I built our house, this dry cabin was my home for nearly three years. 

A twin bed, a coat rack, a small table and countertop with a mini fridge and electric kettle. Christmas lights twinkle permanently from the storage loft. Over stuffed bookshelves teeter precariously over the final few square feet of floor space. A vacuum cleaner props beside my dad’s shotgun and the Makita tool bag behind the door. In winter, the floor is impossible to keep clean between firewood dust, muddy dog paws and slush from my boots, so I keep a pair of indoor slippers for inside time.

I sit with my feet kicked up on the end of the bed. The dog has claimed the pillow end of the bed as his. I am reading the north wall and revisiting old thoughts. For the last couple years, I have been writing quotes, inspirations, jokes, bad puns on the weathered wood in Sharpie so that I can remember them every day. Some are silly, like “I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.” Some are thoughtful, like “If you must fight, fight like you are the third monkey on the ramp to Noah’s Ark and it’s starting to rain.” Song lyrics are sprinkled in, like Darrell Scott’s Crooked Road. “I walk a crooked road to get where I am going, and only when I’m looking back, do I see the straight and narrow.”

This is a tradition I have kept since I moved out of my parents home at seventeen. It hearkens back to my dad’s woodshop where I learned how to build furniture and maintain skis. Decades of sawdust and unfinished projects piled to the ceiling, obscuring his thoughts and wisdom over the years. On frigid winter nights, I would stoke his woodstove up and set up the waxing vice, preparing for the following day’s ski race. As I waited for the wax to set, I would climb around on the work benches, sliding aside clamps and bottles of glue to read things like “run from beauty and it will follow.” “Throw the little ones back and pan fry the big ones.” “The size of your engine means nothing if you are spinning your wheels.” Faded pencil on bare sheetrock speaking ideas and parables from previous decades before my birth. 

I carried on the tradition in my dorm room at MSU. On the walls of a room not much bigger than the cabin I am currently sitting in, I wrote Foo Fighters and Phish lyrics all over the walls much to the chagrin of future janitors. Later, on long drives across the plains, I would scribble in pencil on my dashboard whenever an idea popped into my head. Passengers in my truck would ask me about the gibberish; sometimes, I couldn’t even recall writing some sentences. All the scribbles disappeared with one mechanic’s overly exuberant vehicle detailing in Oregon. 

Tomorrow, I am officially moving into the real house I have built next door. Someone else is moving into the cabin and the quote wall is going to be covered up, because everyone is inspired by different words. But someday, the sharpie scribbles will be uncovered like Indiana Jones unearthing a tablet of some past civilization. I hope it is some stranger who peels off the wood paneling to read thoughts like “Nothing good ever climbed up the side of a boat'' or “Atheism is a non-prophet organization.” Long after the dust bunnies are vacuumed up and the books are restacked, silly quotes and proverbs will tell of an era of my life I will never forget.