the cabin in the woods.

Unique three room house with sleep loft in Blowing Rock. $400/month.

That's what the ad said. And though $400 is a little out of the range of rent that I wanted to pay, the thought of living in an actual house by myself made me copy down the information a week ago and finally call the number yesterday.

The person who answered, I wasn't even sure what sex they were. The speech was slow and the responses to my questions were a little odd. After I talked for a good while, I decided that the person was very old and female. She put down the phone to turn off the TV, a process that took about two minutes, before coming back and explaning that she was 79 years old and a stroke victim.

She gave me directions to the cabin, an old cabin part of the new defunct Camp Catawba for Boys. They were directions like people in North Carolina give them, describing for me in great detail roads and turnoffs and then telling me that I didn't want to go down those, they were the wrong way.

I asked about the lease period, and she hemmed and hawed a little bit and told me that I could choose whether or not to have a lease, an idea that was altogether wonderful and suspicious. She said she didn't want anyone to feel trapped there, then pondered on how anyone could feel trapped in a place with apple and pear trees.

That afternoon, I decided I had time to make my way to Camp Catawba to see the place. I wasn't sure if it was going to be someplace I would want to live, I remembered the cabins at the camp I went to when I was little, but I was definitely curious to see the place. I dragged Ashley along and we called the woman to tell her we were coming. She told us okay, but be there before it got dark. The place was right outside Blowing Rock, the ritzy tourist village where I work.

It was only on the second turn of the directions that the road turned to dirt. We got partway down it before we reached a snow-covered hill that my little Toyota couldn't climb. We had no idea how much further the place was, and my cell phone couldn't get any reception out that far. So we parked the car and walked up the hill, trying to identify animal tracks on the way. The woman on the phone had described a brown gate with a reflector. We found a pair of posts with a reflector, and decided that would do. We walked through the brown gate and down the snowy road to a pair of brown houses, one with a sign that said Camp Catawba For Boys, and an old Winnebago.

This was another world. On our walk, we had even passed a bed and breakfast for tourists with four-wheel drive and a desire to stay in the middle of nowhere. But somehow, in walking through the brown gate, we can crossed some sort of line between Blowing Rock and a scene from Deliverance.

We knocked on the door of the house with the sign, since it looked the most lived-in. There was firewood piled neatly on the porch, as well as a huge mailbox turned on its side that read Camp Catawba. There was no answer to our knock. I peeked through the window and saw an old bookshelf and a desk, both piled with the kinds of books you see in antique stores in plastic wrapping. The door was locked.

We made our way through the snow to the other cabin, which we figured was the one up for rent. When no one answered the knock on that door, we found the door unlocked and went inside, calling out to anyone that might be inside. The place was empty.

Rustic isn't even the word. Rustic is a word they use at some of the inns in town to describe the decor or the atmosphere there, like their rooms have an old rustic charm. The place was clean, but it was old. In the main room, there was an old medical scale in the corner, a plastic broom and dustpan leaning against the wall, and nothing else. There were picture tiles in the wall and windows that hadn't even heard of Windex. To the right was the bedroom loft, which looked more like a lean-to with a double bed with a questionable mattress. To the left of the main room, there was another small room with a modular couch all piled up on top of itself and a ladder up to the attic. The attic door was open, and we could see a toilet. There was also a mirror on the ceiling of the attic, and through it, we could see a bathtub right underneath the reflective glass. We thought it was a bizarre place to put a mirror, or maybe a bizarre place to put a bathtub. The kitchen had all the basic appliances, a fridge, a stove, a sink. Inside the fridge there were random items, including some Hershey's chocolate. Another bathroom with a toilet and a shower adjoined the kitchen.

The place was incredible. I didn't know there were still places like this left in Blowing Rock, places like this left in the world. I thought I was from the backwoods. I didn't even know what the backwoods was.

At some point in our exploration of the house, Ashley heard the sound of scurrying upstairs. I listened for a minute, and then I heard it too. I was afraid to poke my head through the attic door, fearing that my face would be thrust into a fight with some angry and rabid critter, and my face was sorely unarmed. I asked Ashley to hand me the broom, and I stuck it through the hole and banged it around to scare whatever it was away. If only the thing would just get into the bathtub, I could see what it was through the mirror. Finally, broom in hand, I climbed the ladder halfway to see upstairs. Nothing. Frightened even more of the thing we could hear but not see, we left the cabin.

From this angle, we could see another, more inviting door to the other house. We trudged over and gave it a knock and finally heard a woman's voice answer. Inside, we finally met Tui, though we didn't know we had until she told us.

Tui was a tiny little woman with wild white hair and big brown eyes that looked like they had only gotten bigger with age. She was wearing a pink long underwear shirt and a pair of gray sweatpants tied around her waist with a shoestring. Her boots looked like children's snow boots, so tiny were her feet. She wore a jacket over her shirt.

The room where we met this tiny mountain woman was cluttered with all manner of things. There were pictures of people and hand-made cards on the walls. One of these was where I learned the spelling of her name. There were a couple of chairs, a bed, a coffee table, and a heater in the corner. On the table were books, pill bottles, glasses, and all manner of clutter, including a little plastic baggy with some dried up greenery. There was an armchair in the corner next to the heater with some sort of animal skin draped across it. There was a TV on a table beside the door, and a gray tabby cat that Tui called Mabel sat beside it and tried to decide if she would let us pet her.

Tui didn't see well, so Ashley and I introduced ourselves loudly and explained who we were. She asked us if either of us were wicked enough to smoke cigarettes. Neither of us are, and she was disapppointed that she couldn't bum one off of us. Then she asked if we had any friends wicked enough to smoke cigarettes in our car and leave a butt. I'd never let anyone smoke in my car before, not that anyone had asked, but then and there I wished I had, even though my car was about a quarter of a mile away right then.

We told her we had already looked through the cabin, and she asked if we had looked out back. We told her we hadn't, and she told us we were missing the best part.

She disappeared through a back doorway and returned a while later with a coat. We walked ahead of her before we realized she needed a little assistance getting through the three or four inches of snow on the ground. She leaned on the both of us and we made the slow walk to the back of the other cabin, asking her this and that about herself as we went.

Behind the cabin there was a little open area with some chairs and a tiny grill. The courtyard was surrounded by rhododendron and then bigger trees bare of leaves. There was a little path in the back, and Tui said it led down to another one of the old camp cabins that was deserted now. It was quiet and the snowfall of a couple of days ago had been mostly undisturbed until then. It was so tranquil, the kind of peace that comes from being completely alone in the middle of nowhere, which was exactly what we were. Tui looked up at the sky, and said, "Look at that blue sky."

We turned to go back to Tui's cabin. She took a couple of steps in the snow, one foot sinking an inch and groaned. I gave her my arm to lean on, I could barely feel her weight she was so light, and we walked slowly back.

Ashley did most of the talking, asking her questions. Tui had lived around here off and on since 1941, the year before my mother was born. The Winnebago was hers, and was named Earnest. She said it was spelled like ear-nest because she was a musician. Ashley asked what she played, and Tui explained that she didn't play, she wrote. She was a composer.

Tui liked to talk about her music. She told us she had written all kinds of things, classical pieces, had even had a couple of CDs out. She knew a man in the music department at the university, and they had been working on doing a performance of her work. One had been scheduled for the previous week, but one of the singers had gotten sick and it had been postponed indefinitely. She said that now she was reaching the end of her career, the one thing she had never done was to have a performance on a grand scale of her work.

Time wasn't on our side yesterday, and we had to leave Tui to be back in Boone by 5. We said our good-byes, promising to bring her cigarettes next time, to which she laughed. We made the long walk back to the car, back through the brown gate to the rest of the world, trying not to fall on our faces in the snow. We wanted to go back, to turn around right then and go sit down and talk to Tui more, to look at all her old things, to hear stories from way back when. I wished more than anything that I was the type of person that could live in a place like the cabin Tui was renting. I was pretty sure I could not get DSL service out here and I wasn't sure if I wanted to be a big enough person to deal with that. Not to mention the invisible creatures that make scurrying noises in the attic.

Still wanting to hold on to that piece of the world we found in the backwoods of Blowing Rock, I did an online search for "tui, composer". I came up with entries about Tui St. George Tucker, a composer and recorder player born in 1924. I did the math, and it came out right. I searched for her name in the phone book and found the address we had visited. The old lady in the woods was actually a composer, was apparently not too shabby. The information made her even more incredible to us.

I sent the link to Ashley, and we both did a little research. We found places to buy her CDs, bits and pieces of information about her life (including something that said she lived in Greenwich Village, wouldn't they be surprised?), and listings of her musical career. She had a symphony called peyote, which we found interesting, but not altogether surprising.

We wanted to go back to the woods. We wanted to go back through the brown gate. We wanted to sit on the couch and listen to Tui, to hear her music. I wanted to live in the cabin in the woods. I felt like I would never run out of writing material if I lived there.