When I was single and on a girl’s trip to Cape Cod, after a delicious crab boil and a fair amount of white wine, my friends encouraged me to write out a list of the qualities I was looking for in a new relationship. Number one on my list was man with a mountain cabin. Seriously, I tell my husband Tom that he didn’t stand a chance on our first dinner date when he talked so sentimentally about his generational family cabin near Tahoe.
Fifteen years later, it is one of my favorite places on the planet. Our little Silver Firs cabin up in the northern Sierra mountains is just south of Lake Tahoe and mere steps from two small, connected alpine lakes called Echo Lake. At 7500 feet elevation, the summers are mild with warm days and cool nights. Surrounded by white pine and red fir trees, the air is always filled with a clear mountain freshness. It’s primarily a summer cabin, easily available to us from late May to early October. When we do decide to venture up in the winter, we come on snowshoes and must dig down through many feet of snow to get inside since roads are not plowed.
Next Saturday, we will celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the Belt family cabin. The way Tom heard it passed down from his great grandfather, the forest service was looking for people to build cabins and to be “stewards” of the land. They saw an advertisement in a southern California newspaper offering mountain and lake lots on forest service land where you could build your own cabin and lease the land for $1 a year for 100 years. It must have sounded like a great getaway and an even greater deal to those avocado and orange growers from Whittier, California, in the 1920’s.
So, up they came in their Model T to pick out a choice lot with a view of Lake Tahoe from the front and with a short hike down to Echo Lake. The cabin was built by hand, including the large stone fireplace using beautiful smooth stones brought up from the lake when Tom’s father was only a baby. The original structure was 920 square feet with one bedroom, a loft, a porch on two sides, and an outhouse up the hill—no electricity, no running water, and a wood stove on which to cook. It was little more than glorified camping. But, glorious it was. And it still is today.
One hundred years later, the forest service has long since reneged on the terms of the lease (it costs us much more than $1 a year at this point), and the trees have grown up to block a portion of our Tahoe view, but it has lovingly been passed down through four generations with two more generations coming up the ranks who we feel fully confident will continue to care for this little gem with as much love as their ancestors did. We now have electricity, delicious running mountain spring water, an additional bedroom, and a functioning bathroom. And I’ve learned to cook on the wood stove pretty darn well.
Between snow damage in the 1980’s and, later, a collapsed porch, the Belts have been slowly rebuilding the old cabin wall by wall and board by board. Still, the old family traditions remain pretty much the same—a jump in the cold waters of Echo Lake upon arriving at the cabin and a rowdy board and marble game called Frustration that never leaves the cabin. Everyone grows up knowing the unwritten rules—breakfast of mahogany smoked bacon purchased in Bishop on the drive up along with cinnamon bread from the local bakery, s’mores made in the fireplace after dinner, an afternoon on “picnic island” in the middle of Upper Echo, a game of horseshoes while grilling dinner, an early morning fishing and fresh trout for breakfast (if the fishermen were lucky), and always a fireside reading of The Cremation of Sam McGee by Grandpa Tom. Each of Tom’s four children’s families write about their summer adventures at Silver Firs Cabin in a journal every year before they head back home. It is a cherished piece of family history.
I write all of this to you in my Monday Morning Stretch today simply to note that I have learned through this precious cabin experience how important traditions can be in uniting a family, a team, or even a group of friends. Not only the cabin but also the family traditions and memories have been maintained year after year. What started 100 years ago and has continued through four generations is made so special through those 100 summers because the Belt family has been committed to teaching the traditions and keeping them alive.
Traditions in our personal and professional lives are grounding and can be a uniting force for people bound together in a variety of ways. And they can be started at any time. They say the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is today. Maybe today is the day to consider starting some traditions that will help to bind your team and/or your family in a unique identity and shared sense of connection—a toast to celebrate the end of the week, every week; a box at a baseball game every summer; a handwritten note of gratitude tucked in the cubby on the first of every month; or a welcome party for new hires.
This week, we will welcome almost 50 family members and friends who have enjoyed and loved the cabin through the years to a fun day of celebration with BBQ, horseshoes, s’mores, and lots of storytelling as much to kick off the next 100 years as to honor the last. I encourage you this week to consider what traditions you can kick off with your family or team that will create that same sense of goodness, connection, and unity for many, many years to come.
“Cultures grow on the vine of traditions.”
~ Jonah Goldberg
