The story you are about to read is a story about camaraderie, boyhood energy, and the bonding that takes place through group effort. In the building of this cabin, there was no adult supervision. There were no detailed plans. There was no boss, no supervisor. There was no reward save the end result, which was a crude cabin in the woods, a plethora of memories, and a bond between boys that spanned decades.

I came across a picture of it the other day. “The Cabin” is what we called it.

The year was 1975. I was a 17-year-old senior in high school, and my friends and I, like so many of our peers, were bored with our daily existence and looking for something — anything — to inject fun or a sense of purpose into our lives.

We had long outgrown high school in most respects, and going to classes was little more than a stale ritual. Don’t get me wrong. We were good students, that is when we wanted to be. The trouble was we had long stopped wanting to be. There had to be another reason to get up in the morning.

We had kicked around the idea of building some kind of shack or cabin, though, for the most part, it was just the pipe dream of boys wanting to be men, of boys wanting that independence reserved for adults. It was a desire to have a place of our own, a place we could call ours. Small boys built forts, hung signs that said “no girls allowed,” and only allowed people in who were in their “club.”

That was not remotely what we had in mind.

It was Mike and his brother John who first proposed building a log cabin on land owned by their parents. They owned a golf course with 160 acres, and on it was a large swath of woods far off the beaten path. There was an overgrown logging road leading into the woods that emptied out into a small clearing.

Tall pines, birch, and poplar provided a canopy over the site. It was perfect. Our budget, however, was not. To be completely honest, saying we even had a budget was a gross exaggeration. We had no money at all. What we did have, however, was determination. Sometimes determination is more important than means. This would be one of those times.