When my cousin’s husband Brent drove in to our cabin, he reportedly asked, “Are they bringing us out here to murder us?”
I will tell you, I understood the feeling.
I had known Kris a few months when I first came out to the cabin. We’d spent a few weekends together in Fairbanks and Anchorage, and we were moving to that next level of relationship: taking a trip together.
I was excited. Since we’d begun chatting on OKCupid, Kris had been sending me descriptive, romance-novel worthy missives from the cabin.
I imagined him chopping wood and writing surrounded only by logs in the cold Alaska autumn. Feeding his novels the same way he fed the woodstove.
So when he invited me to the cabin, I didn’t think twice. He was such a nice guy (I mean, he’d said I love you way too early and meant it). And I was already imaginatively smitten with the place.
As I rode in Kris’s truck on the way there, I realized…
I don’t know anybody within hours.
This man is from the internet.
We navigated like the Oregon Trail through creeks and caved-in culverts, through places where it seemed people had tried to repair old logging bridges and holes, going less than 5 miles an hour, even in a 4×4 truck.
I’ve really only spent a few days with him.
Everyone says not to go with ‘internet men’ to secluded places.
I’m not sure I could walk (think:run) away from here.
God, it’s quiet out here.
He unlocked the padlock to the cabin and opened the door. Oh my god, there’s dead things on the walls!
A pheasant without eyes was plastered flat against the logs.
A small deer skull hung over the door.
“Oh, here, you can have the seat,” he says. THE seat.
Like, literally, people, there is only one chair, as if he didn’t think we would even both sit down before he was ready to off me.
“We should put the stuff in the cooler away,” he opens a trap door in the floor. “You know, so it doesn’t rot.”
He climbs down a ladder. It’s a dungeon down there. He calls it a cold cellar, but it sure as hell looks like a dungeon to me. It’s cold and dark and I am not sure I could get out if I tried because the door that connects the dungeon to the floor is heavy!
I spend the night and survive, but the next day…
There is a gun. Several guns! Holy shit! Dead animals and guns and dungeons and I am trapped here with this internet man. I have barely any cell reception and the police probably wouldn’t find me out here anyway, ahhhhh!
I run, run out of the cabin.
But people, let me tell you…
I hate running.
I make it about ¼ of a mile before I decide to just plant myself next to some baby spruce and cry. And Kris, he sits down beside me to talk about it.
A few years later I asked that creepy internet hermit to marry me.
