Day 4 – Hochatown

Today was my one scheduled trip back to civilization.

I had to at least get to where there was cell phone service, because I had told people I would contact them on Sunday to let them know I was still alive. If I did not contact them, they were supposed to go into panic mode.

I also wanted to grab some supplies, and eat some real food. I wasn’t really going to run out of supplies, but I did at least want to get some more ice.

So, I made the 20-mile-or-so drive back to the Hochatown area, which is the nearest place that has both a convenience store and a restaurant. If I remember correctly, Hochatown was a town on the river, which became submerged when they filled the lake. So, there really is no Hochatown, but there is a spot on the highway closest to where the town used to exist that is known as Hochatown.

What’s a Hocha?

On the drive out there, I passed a bearded man on the side of the road, carrying a feed sack. He was collecting something; aluminum cans, I suspected. Seemed like an awful remote place to be walking the highway, looking for trash.

Since I was going to an area with people, I tried to make myself a little more presentable. Primarily, that means I put on a pair of Wranglers that did not have a hole in the crotch, and put on a clean shirt. I also put on a John Deere cap, which is much easier than trying to do anything about my bed hair. Looking at myself and my scraggly beard in the rear-view, I realized that I now looked exactly like a graduate of Shidler High School.

I bought some gas, ice, pretzels, and something to drink at the one convenience store, and then went across the highway to the Stephens Gap Restaurant. I had wanted to just grab something drive-through, and avoid any public appearance. But the nearest drive-through was another 15 miles or so away, and I couldn’t see myself driving that far just for McDonald’s.

I was seated by a waitress wearing a jersey-style T-shirt with “Senior Girls” written on the front.

“So, are you a senior girl?” I asked.

“I was last year”, she replied.

Ah. This I could relate to. Broken Bow may be a bustling metropolis compared to Shidler, but they are culturally very similar. I remembered the girl in my class who worked at the local diner during high school. When I went back one year after graduating and stopped in for some familiar cooking, the same girl was still working there, now full-time.

While they cooked my burger and fries, I took the opportunity to clean up in the restroom, using real soap.

After eating, I realized that I had forgotten to get a map of the lake. I went back over to the convenience store and asked another cute recent high school graduate if they had one.

“No, we just ran out”, she replied. “What are you looking for?” she offered.

“Just a map of the lake.” Drat. That’s not what she was asking, was it.

I drove down the road to the next store I could find, and was able to get a passable map, from another girl who I would estimate is a future recent high school graduate.

On the way out, I saw a notice posted on the door. “BURN BAN IN EFFECT”, it said. And, in the details: “CAMPFIRES ARE PROHIBITED.”

Oh.

As I drove back to the campsite, I passed a bearded man on the side of the road, carrying a feed sack and stomping on an aluminum can.

While chatting with the old codgers, I asked them about a cabin I had seen at the top of a cliff overlooking the lake.

The cabin had really intrigued me, because it seemed to be in just about the most remote and beautiful spot it would be possible to place a cabin. Besides being on top of a cliff, the cliff was on a peninsula that wanted to be an island. I did not know how you could get to the place with a car, but I knew it would have to be about a 10-mile driveway if there was such a road.

I thought the fogies might know something about it, since a couple of them had been coming to this lake since the early sixties.

“Yeah, I don’t know who’s that is, but it looks like they’ve deserted it now”, one of them replied. “It looks like all of the windows have been broken out, or at least the ones you can see from the lake.”

Oh really? I had wanted to hike up there and check it out, but had been worried about what the inhabitants might do if they saw me. But if it was deserted, then I had to give it a visit somehow. Might even make it my new camping spot, if I can figure out how.

So, I put some sneakers in my kayak and paddled the mile or two down there. I wasn’t going to attempt to climb the cliff, but an arm of the lake wrapped around behind it, and the slope on that side seemed more manageable.

I pulled into a small inlet created by a couple of ravines meeting the water, pulled my boat up onto the steep rocky shore, and picked one of the ravines to climb up.

Hike up, actually. It was steep, but not so steep that I had to use my hands. All of the rock around here is some sort of shale, which means it breaks off in steps.

The ravine split into two branches, and I picked one to continue up. Since I could not see the cabin from this back side, I tried to develop a plan for how to find it once I reached the top of the long cliff, and how to find the right ravine to go back down afterwards.

But then, with about 100 feet to go until the summit, I looked up and saw the cabin.

Ah, well, that was easy, I thought. I happened to pick the exact right ravine to reach it.

But then something else caught my eye—a patch of red through the trees. Some sort of four-wheeler—two of them, actually. Drat. It’s not abandoned after all.

I wasn’t going to stop so close to my goal, so I continued toward the top. I could see that the windows were, in fact, completely broken out. But I also heard voices, and then saw someone on the edge of the porch.

“Howdy”, I offered. They were going to see me, so it was best not to be sneaky about it.

If I was surprised to see him, the old man in overalls was twice as surprised to see me. “Oh, howdy…uh…how’d you get up here?”

“Just walked. Up the ravine. Thought I’d do some hiking.”

“Walked? From where? How far away is your truck?”

“Oh, well, I kayaked over to this ravine down here, and then hiked up. It wasn’t all that far.”

“Kayaked?”

This guy was obviously not the urban type, and I’ve found that most folks from the country seem to think that kayak is a foreign word. That is the difference between outdoor enthusiasts in the city and outdoor enthusiasts in the country. In Dallas, if you say kayak, most people understand and don’t consider it odd. In the city, those who claim to love the outdoors usually do so using kayaks, rock climbing, scuba diving, and expensive fifth-wheel trailers. In the country, outdoorsmen utilize four-wheelers, fishing boats, shotguns, and makeshift tents stretched over the bed of their pickup. I am kind of a hybrid: I carry my kayak around in the back of my pickup and sleep in the cab, if necessary.

The old man’s name was Lloyd, and his companion was a bit younger man named Barry. Barry might have been Lloyd’s son, based on the age difference, but if so, there was a big tide in the gene pool. I probably had Lloyd beat by 10 or 20 pounds, whereas Barry might have taken us both at once.

It turns out that they were not in any way the proprietors of the cabin, but had come upon it themselves while four-wheeling. Lloyd’s ride had broken down, and an absent third member of the party was on his way to get parts for repairs. It was going to take a while. There was a road up to this place, of sorts, and they informed me that it was, in fact, at least 8 miles long. But it wasn’t so much a road as just a rocky trail, and an unused one at that. Their friend had been gone an hour, and Barry mused that it might be another 2 hours before he returned.

So, they were just hanging out at this clearly abandoned, and never completely finished, cabin on top of the cliff.

I asked them about its story, and they did not know any more than me, except for what they had been able to deduce over the past hour. The cabin had come very close to being finished, and a lot of work had gone into it. There was wiring throughout the cabin, and a place outside where they had probably intended to put a generator. It had plumbing, and a well had been dug out back, but it was then capped. The workmanship, they said, was superb.

The location, which had first impressed me, was the most damning thing about it. It sat on the edge of the cliff, with a wood deck sticking out over it, and from the deck you could see for miles. The cliff was higher than most of the other hills around, so you could see several bends in the lake to the east and south.

But it was also dang near impossible to get to, unless you are an adventurous off-roader or a naïve kayaker. And, the two men said, it was on national forest property. As far as they knew, you could not own land on national forest property. In their opinion, this meant one of two things:

Either the cabin was bootlegged in there, piece by piece, until the forest service put a stop to it and left it in its almost-finished state; or

The government started to build it, got about 98% completed, and then canceled the project.

They debated the options for a while. It seemed hard to believe that it could have been bootlegged in; that would have required so many trips, and so much work, that it just didn’t seem like anyone would have the patience and money for such a venture, not to mention making it that far along before being caught.

On the other hand, if it was a government job, it should win an award for stupidity and wasting taxpayer funds. They threw out a half-million dollars as an estimate, and debated that for a while. A half-million would be an outrageous amount for a 40-by-20-foot cabin, regardless of the fact that it was never used. But when you consider that it would have been a government job, and you would have had to pay someone to go down that 8-mile trail, carrying all building materials and supplies, two times each day—they would ask to be paid a whole lot of money to do that.

And yet, the cabin exists.

It was obvious that the cabin does get used, at times, by interlopers like us. Beer bottles were strung about, and different initials and dates were scratched into the wood at various places. The oldest date I found was from October of 2003, and they became more numerous as they approached the present date. Someone had written “Hulton Oklahoma Hilton” on the doorframe, with a Sharpie marker. But I’m not sure what that means.

Lloyd and Barry were completely friendly, chatting with me about hometowns and football and the benefits versus disadvantages of different types of four-wheelers. They were from Longview, TX, and Lloyd, at least, was an Aggie. I get along well with Aggies. And we shared a bit of kinship, as all three of us were crazy enough to end up at this most remote of places on an October afternoon.

After saying goodbye and walking along the trail at the top of the cliff for a bit, I headed back down the ravine. I found my kayak where I had left it (Still not stolen! Yes!).

On the way back, though it was out of my way, I paddled down to the part of the lake I had seen from the cabin on the cliff, and waved with my paddle at the invisible people at the top. I don’t know if they were looking down at that point. But, I wanted to give them a look at what a kayak is.

© 2006 by Kevin McConaghy. All rights reserved.