TACOMA — Tacoma writer Patrick Hutchison is living what most authors can only dream. His first book was released Dec. 3, and it’s already receiving critical praise from The Washington Post and The New York Times.
His memoir, “Cabin,” recounts the years he spent renovating a tiny cabin backed up against National Forest land near Index despite having none of the skills needed to do so. The book is not a how-to but instead a humorous tale of a young man finding a way through life with the help of friends and a lot of bent nails.
Hutchison, 39, grew up in Chehalis. He now lives in Tacoma’s North End in a 1950s ranch house.
The cabin
Hutchison bought the ramshackle 120-square-foot cabin in 2013 after seeing it advertised on Craigslist. It was in a development of small parcels with small homes, many abandoned. The ones that were occupied were sometimes surrounded by police tape.
“People wouldn’t pay their taxes, and no one wanted to be in that area because it had a very bad reputation,” he said.
The purchase came as a whim and took all the money he could muster at the time: $7,500.
The cabin, at the end of Wit’s End Road, soon became both a filter for life’s distractions and a place where the joys of being in the woods, working with your hands and spending time with friends was distilled into a pure essence.
“The fun that friends and I had there,” he recalled Monday in an interview The News Tribune. “There was a level of intimacy and fun and childlike innocence that wouldn’t have been possible (in the city).”
Renovation
In the book, Hutchison laments the size inflation of what the word “cabin” should define.
“I’d once been invited to a friend’s supposed cabin only to arrive and find that it had a basketball court,” he writes. “Cabins do not have basketball courts. Cabins have tetanus.”
Hutchison’s cabin was only partially finished. It didn’t have electricity, running water, a septic system or even the suggestion of cellphone reception. Spiders were the only full-time occupants.
In the ensuing years, Hutchison and his friends would assemble there for weekend work parties. Days were spent adding a deck, a small kitchen (the sink emptied into a bucket), an outhouse and a wood stove. Evenings were spent barbecuing steaks and drinking beer.
“I would have hated it if I moved in next to myself,” he writes.
For Hutchison and his equally unqualified friends, there was a lot of on-the-job learning.
“The cabin was more like an improv show, lots of people freewheeling around, making things up as they go along, just trying to have a good time and get to the next sketch,” he writes.
Writer’s block
During that time, Hutchison was working in Seattle’s corporate world, writing emails and social media posts. He loved writing — just not the kind for which he was being paid.
“I was still submitting story pitches constantly,” he said. “Dozens and dozens of story pitches to totally unreasonable places … ‘New York Times,’ ‘Outside,’ ‘Men’s Journal,’ ‘Esquire’ …”
He did have successes, writing for Vice, the in-flight magazine for British Airways and others. But it wasn’t enough to quit his day job.
Early in the cabin adventure, Hutchison — using his grandfather’s old typewriter — began keeping a diary of sorts during most days at the cabin. At the time, they were more writing exercise than the beginning of a book.
Hutchison eventually quit his job to travel and ended up with a variety of short-lived stints from repairing camping trailers in Montana to refurbishing a church in New Zealand with girlfriend and now-wife Kate.
On a particularly cold day during the COVID-19 pandemic, he found himself trying to fix frozen drains on said Montana campers.
“It’d be great,” he recalled, “just to be inside where it was warm. Maybe I could write that book.”
The book
Calls were made to author friends, then to the book agents of those friends, then to an agent who was actually interested in the book.
“I sent him what I thought was a proposal that he very kindly told me wasn’t,” Hutchison said.
But from there, the process was straightforward.
“I feel like I was just incredibly lucky, but it went very easily,” he said.
Many writers dream of one day writing a book, even if it gets little notoriety. Hutchison was no different.
“I had truly zero expectations,” he said. “In my greatest dreams, maybe the (News) Tribune or the (Seattle) Times will have a blurb about it. That would be unreal, and I would be so excited. So yeah, I feel very overwhelmed by the attention that it’s gotten, and incredibly fortunate.”
“I want this book,” “Today” show weather man Al Roker said about “Cabin” in a recent televised segment with author Isaac Fitzgerald.
“Did you ever dream about giving it all up, heading out to the woods, maybe buying some ramshackle shack, fixing it up? Every day, right? Patrick actually did it,” Fitzgerald said, likening Hutchison to Thoreau.
The end
A new bridge over the south fork of the Skykomish River, soaring real estate prices and a COVID-19-inspired flee from the cities drastically changed the small development where Hutchison found his calling.
Hutchison and a friend bought two more parcels in the area and built cabins on them from the ground up. He sold his original cabin in 2021 and his last new cabin there in 2024. Since then, he and his wife have bought some property in the Olympic Mountains near Brinnon, on the Hood Canal. It came with a shipping container that, yes, he’s converting to a cabin of sorts.
But he’s not given up on returning to the Cascades.
“It would not surprise me if we got more land in Index and did another thing,” he said. “It just seems impossible to stay away from that area.”
The cabin renovation sent him down two parallel paths: carpentry and writing. He’s not ready to turn to writing full time. He still has a day job building high-end tree houses for clients across Western Washington.
Some of the questions he’s gotten from “Cabin” readers have focused on the mechanics of the story: dollar figures, hours spent. But that misses the point of the story.
Hutchison says it best, near the end of “Cabin.”
“To take an aimless kid and revive in him a sense of purpose, to show him that there was a lot of good out there if he just took the chance to go find it, to risk discomfort, to gamble a bit on the belief that things can improve,” he writes. “Everything I gave the cabin came back as something more than it once was, and I couldn’t help but wonder what else it might provide.”
