Lodges
Free mountains and my dad's lumberjack days
When I was a kid, only the AM dial on my dad’s car radio worked. As we drove back and forth from school and my various extra-curricular activities, we’d listen to shitty conservative talk radio or an occasional Twins game. It was..bleak. The one bright spot was the Mischke Show. It was on late so our opportunities to listen were a rare treat. Mischke felt like free jazz - it seemed so utterly at odds with the rest of the programming on AM 1500. To go from Rush Limbaugh to Mischke’s weird poems and long stretches of silence and wacky callers and obvious human decency was such a whiplash. I still have no idea how Mischke’s show managed to be on a conservative talk radio outlet for almost two decades. Maybe he survived because of the fierce loyalty of his listeners. More than once, my dad and I sat in the car in the driveway, unable to tear ourselves away from the radio.
“I knew the Mischke kids” my dad would tell me. “I was friends with his brother.” It felt unsurprising — baby boomers from big Catholic families who grew up around St. Paul and went to Cretin High? Of course he knew the Mischke kids.
That’s why when I saw someone named “John Mischke” had messaged me on Facebook, I decided to open it. The message was months old; John said he’d been friends with my dad in high school, had just learned of his death, and was putting together a reunion of the men who had built the Williams Lake Lodge in the 1970s.
The lodge rang a bell — my dad told me stories of building log cabins in the Canadian wilderness, in a place so remote you had to take a floatplane to get there. He was 18 or 19 when he went on this grand adventure — a kid from the suburbs turned into a lumberjack.
My dad’s summers building in the backcountry were on my mind a few weekends ago as I hiked to a much less remote lodge — the Tourist Club.
The Nature Friends San Francisco Tourist Club sits high above Muir Woods in Marin County. It was started in 1912 by a group of largely socialist German immigrant tradesmen. The club was part of a much larger organization, Die Naturfreunde, founded in Austria in the late 1800s, which was created to expand access to nature for the working class. “At a time when the Hapsburg monarchy and other elites still controlled access to most of the Austrian mountains…Berg frei—free mountains—was their slogan.”
The parallels with the Ramblers in the UK — socialists fighting for working class access to the countryside — are obvious, but I never came across the Nature Friends during my walking research in Europe. Instead, I learned about them through a friend who is working to become a member. While it’s a private club, there are a few public events every year, which is how I found myself hiking in the Marin hills.
I had parked my car on the winding Panoramic Highway and spent a few terrifying minutes walking down the tiny shoulder of the twisty road until I got to the trailhead. Spread before me was a magnificent view of the valley, the ocean hazy in the distance. I started the descent, going down rough and eroded steps, crossing a broad and sturdy bridge over a shallow stream and then started climbing up again. The path hugged the side of the hills, which rose steeply and dramatically to the right. The crevices between the hills were full of bushes and trees — it was easy to see where the water flowed.
Gradually the path took me from grassland to scrubby forest to redwoods, the air gradually getting cooler and more moist. After a switchback, I took a fork off the path to a little road. I could hear polka music — I was definitely in the right place.
I padded down a flight of stairs and there it was — the Tourist Club. A jumble of charming Alpine chalets terraced onto the hillside. People in lederhosen and traditional German dresses milled about, drinking beer and eating pretzels with mustard. A friend of my friend’s, who is a full-fledged member of the club, gave us a little tour of the place. We followed her along porches and through a gate and down steps to a little house with a magnificent view out back - remarkably tranquil despite the hundreds of people nearby.
The next stop was the bar, complete with little homages to the tradesmen who built the place and the activities of the club:
The original lodge was built before the Golden Gate Bridge existed — when you had to take a ferry to Sausalito and then a train to Mill Valley and then hike in. All the building materials had to be brought in by men or mule. While my dad might have had some technological advantages building cabins 60 years later, I can imagine the remoteness of the place having some parallels — felling trees on-site, being creative with your resources (no quick popping over to Home Depot), the camaraderie that can come with adventure and hard work.