22 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM {sloane citron} two halves, a kids’ room with two bunk beds, and my parents’ room. In between the bedrooms was a narrow hallway with a wall phone, where we had a party line, which meant that all the families in the canyon shared one line. If I was bored, I’d carefully lift off the handle from the receiver and listen in on conversations. For us kids, the cabin was a place of freedom, exploration and discovery, often about ourselves. Teens were allowed to drive on the dusty, rocky roads, often ending up in ditches, from which we had to be extracted. We blew things up with M-80s and Cherry Bombs and captured lizards, turtles and frogs for weekend pets. Sometimes we used old bamboo fishing rods to pull up slimy catfish. At some point, the unique cabin caught the attention of someone in the publishing world, and a well-known photographer, John Rogers, did a photo shoot of the cabin and our family. I was seven but remember it well. Some months later, LIVING magazine published an article about the cabin and featured some of those photos. Recently, an archivist at the University of North Texas contacted me for more details about the cabin and our family to accompany the photos that are now in their possession. The best part was that she had access to the original images from the shoot, many that we had not seen before. There was Shelley with her horse Tuscan and the three of us lying on the floor playing board games. There was a great picture of the large gong. Through the images, I could touch the time at the cabin, full of innocence and adventure. Our father, much to the great displeasure of me and my brother, sold our cabin a couple of years before his death. I guess he thought we wouldn’t have come back often enough to make it worthwhile. But we would have, and I wish I could take my kids and grandkids back to that special place. We’d hit the gong, look for arrowheads, chase lizards and blow stuff up. And when it got dark, we’d watch the stars and try to capture the fireflies that danced through the night. One of the great joys I had growing up in Amarillo was our family’s cabin in the “canyon,” which I’ve previously written about here. We’d pack up the Chrysler station wagon with our stuff and our big, black German Shepherd Tamby and head out. As a child, I thought the trip was a long one. Only later in life did I understand that it was only 30 minutes away. Still, its remote uniqueness from our suburban home always made it feel like an adventure. The cabin came to be because several Amarillo doctors decided to build weekend homes in a beautiful small canyon, known always as simply the Canyon. Nestled within its walls was a small creek that ran through the middle, filled with belching bullfrogs and big, slimy catfish. At night, the sky was bright with stars and fireflies darted through the air. While the other doctors constructed typical, basic cabins and rustic homes, my father, influenced by the time he spent in Japan as a surgeon during the Korean War, decided to build a true Japanese home out there in the Panhandle dust and weeds. Probably sketched out on a scrap of paper, the design was simple and straightforward, though it was clear that the details were thoughtfully considered. The home was small, I’d guess under 1,000 square feet, and comprised two parts: one for living and one for sleeping. The location, on the eighth hole of a rudimentary golf course, was one reason that my father, a forever golf-duffer, wanted to have a cabin out there. Rising behind our small cabin were rugged cliffs that, when breached, led to the forever flat plains that defined the region. The cabin, though thoroughly Japanese in style, was simple. The living area was one room with a small kitchen on one end and an attached screened-in porch to keep the multitude of grasshoppers, snakes and mosquitoes outside. The living area had small chairs and tables and a sweet built-in couch that was perfect for wrestling with my brother Danny or hunkering down with a Mad magazine. We kids ate our meals on a high counter-bar when we could be cajoled into coming back from wherever we were playing, summoned by the striking of a huge gong in our front yard that reverberated throughout the entire canyon. A very distinct orange bridge, about 15 feet across, connected the living area to the smaller sleeping section, divided into the cabin
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