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I'd never seen the house-buying process before. It was astounding. It reeked of responsibility with all its forms and appointments and phone calls and emails and bank ... stuff. It dawned on me that a real estate purchase might be an ideal solution to my problem. For two solid weeks, I reveled in telling folks that I was "looking into buying a house" when they asked how things were going. It was marvelous, but the dream was short-lived. As it turned out, while I could afford a house, I could not afford any house within a zip code I was familiar with. It was 2012, and Seattle-area home prices were the lowest they had been in more than a decade. There could not have been a more affordable time to buy a house, but I was nowhere near being able to do so.

Outside of Seattle, there were options. I'd sit at my computer, zooming out farther and farther until I saw listings that matched my "financial profile." They were far from the city. Far from traffic and streetlights. They were in farmlands and river valleys, and still farther yet, they were nestled in the foothills of Washington State's Cascade Mountains. And often, they were not homes at all. They were cabins.

I'd grown up in the woods, on a few acres about an hour and a half south of Seattle. My childhood was spent tromping through dense forests of hemlock and Douglas fir, pushing through ferns and blackberry bushes with the family dog, a chocolate Lab named Mud, who had a taste for sticks and deer shit. When the long days of summer allowed, friends and I joined one another in the woods building tree forts with my dad's rust-covered hand tools. When they were complete, we'd pack ourselves inside and spend hours practicing swear words, farting, spoiling our appetites with Cheez-Its and warm cans of Mountain Dew. Scrolling through pictures of cabins on real estate sites let loose a torrent of nostalgia from those tree fort days. Though adult life included summers with frequent camping trips, I still missed the woods. Certainly a vacation home was the sort of surefire totem of responsibility that I was hoping to find, but when I saw those cabins, my real estate pursuits became fueled by a desire to return to that magical feeling of being in the woods, cramped into a cozy space with good friends, maybe swinging a hammer around from time to time.

There was a problem, though. While I could afford a cabin, I could not simultaneously afford a place to live in the city. Escaping to a woodland retreat was what I wanted. Becoming a full-time hermit was not. Nonetheless, I kept looking, gawking at log structures in snowy mountains, drooling over humble cottages alongside lakes and rivers. It became the mindless thing I did on my laptop or phone in the morning when I woke up, on the toilet during work, and late at night when I couldn't sleep. This went on for months.

Until late one night, in the early fall of 2013. I was on Craigslist looking for ads featuring any one of a number of items that had been stolen from our house during a recent burgling. Having no luck, I returned to the search bar and, on a whim, typed in "cabin" and hit Enter. The inquiry had the sophistication of an eleven-year-old typing "boobs" into Google. It was just as effective.

My eyes locked onto the top result: "Tiny Cabin in Index."

I knew Index. The little outpost hemmed in by brutally beautiful mountains consisted of a shabby mini-mart, whose shelves of dust-covered beans and out-of-date camping equipment never seemed to change, a small coffee shop, whose OPEN sign was always illuminated even though the door was always locked, and an adventure rafting company that offered guided trips down the Skykomish River. Apart from that, Index maintained a volunteer-run fire station, a small collection of cabins, a school, and a decrepit inn that had been neglected for decades despite a constant stream of new owners with grand plans to renovate. My visits to the town were always quick stops on my way to hikes or camping spots. Index was a last chance to stock up on ice or a few cases of cheap beer before diving deeper into the mountains.

But it wasn't the town's name that drew my attention to the ad. It was the picture and the price. The simple, tiny cabin was set against a backdrop of moss-laden trees. Only ten by twelve feet, it looked more like a big chicken coop than anything else. I knew people that had larger places to store their lawn mowers. Architecturally, it took inspiration from drawings of houses made by preschoolers. Box on bottom. Triangle on top. All around it, the forest floor was covered in a sea of bright ferns. Here and there, the first leaves of fall added a pop of gold or crimson, donated by a few mature maples that towered overhead. Nestled into the forest, the cabin begged for someone to cozy up inside, light a fire, take a slug of whiskey, and let the world drift away, all for the price of a used Hyundai. They were asking $7,500.

I sent an email immediately, requesting more info and a visit as nonchalantly as possible, so as not to appear overeager. When I heard from the owner the next afternoon, the reply was quick and equally casual:

Yeah, that's no problem. The key is above the door. It's the fourth place on the left up on Wit's End Pl.