This abandoned old building is the Ritz compared to some of the hunting camps Luke has spent time in.
HUNTING CAMPS I HAVE KNOWN
My love for building a cabin ‘back in the woods’ began at an early age. Two neighbor buddies and I used hatchets to hack down several sweet gum saplings in the patch of woods beside our farm to construct our ‘cabin’. I remember us taking turns with the dull hatchet to down the saplings. Once on the ground, we cut them into 6 foot lengths and hacked notches in them to construct a very crude (heavy on the word CRUDE) cabin. We used that little structure as a headquarters for our squirrel and rabbits hunts and even had a little fire pit outside the cabin door for cooking some simple meals of hot dogs and canned chili. As a young man with a growing family, we couldn’t afford a camper but did spend time camping in our tent. I remember one very cold day back in the late seventies when I got the idea to take the wife and our two oldest kids to my uncle’s place in very rural Red River County for an overnight camping trip. It was late October and an early cold front blew in during the night. We spent several hours in the cab of my Dodge truck with the heater running! I later purchased a homemade pop up camper that re sembled an antique wooden river barge. It was huge for a pop up camper, heavy and pulled like a wooden ox cart. But we had a roof over our heads and thought we were in ‘high cotton’! The camper doubled as a hunting camp in the fall until it finally simply fell apart.
