Into The Wild This Artist Built Her North Idaho Log-Cabin Home From The Ground Up

They say that what you don’t know can’t hurt you. What you don’t know apparently can’t stop you either.

“I just didn’t consider that it was something I couldn’t do,” Evelyn Sooter said.

As the American frontier expands in cyberspace, Sooter has pioneered a remote piece of the country the old-fashioned way. She saved her money, bought a parcel of untouched, timbered land outside of Clark Fork, Idaho, cleared a corner of it, and built a house. She did it herself, by hand, with the help of friends and neighbors.

Her original, one-room house was 12 by 16 feet and made of logs small enough for Sooter to carry.

In the process of staking her claim on the land, Sooter also conquered the wilderness of a dream: She became an artist. Sooter now creates collages that combine photography and found objects. Built like a nest, largely from what Sooter could gather on her site, her house is a gifted interpreter of her vision. Twigs, stones, moss, bones and light that filters through the trees have supplied her with materials for both art and construction.

With two additions and an expanding garden that wanders away from the house like a child, the house remains her most important work in progress.

It is an American story that might have been told 200 years ago, but Sooter, 49, and her house are timely proof that independence will always be a personal matter.

In the fall of 1978, Sooter bought 16 acres in North Idaho, two miles from Clark Fork. Like the American West, Sooter has a history of independence - and the grit to go with it. She owned a horse at 13 that she bought with baby-sitting money. After high school, she bought a one-way ticket to Stockholm, without the promise of work. She found work. She traveled overland from Istanbul to Nepal because she was offered the ride.

In the spring of 1979, she began building a small cabin on her land - on a budget carved out of a waitress’s wages. She had never built a house before. If there were a genre of outsider architecture, Sooter’s home would quickly qualify.

“Everybody was building their own houses,” said Nancy Kienholz, the artist and a friend of Sooter, who had moved to the neighboring community of Hope with her husband, the sculptor Edward Kienholz, who died in 1994. “The thing that was unusual about Evelyn was that she was really doing it alone,” Kienholz said. “Her cabin had one-person dimensions, for one-woman strength, to be able to carry it and put it together.” With the project initiated, neighbors stopped by to help. Friends and family passing through stayed and pitched in.

“It’s how the region was built,” Sooter said. “It looks like, ‘Here’s this woman doing everything all by herself,’ but the truth is, in the fashion of the area - its pioneer days - I had a number of people who just came by and worked for a day.” An older man in the neighborhood cut trees for her that winter. Another neighbor “showed up unexpectedly with his chain saw, and helped notch the logs for the floor joists,” she recalled, adding, “My mom and dad visited that summer for a week, and my dad and I peeled logs.” Not every neighbor lent a hand - advice is a rural tradition, too.

“I remember one fellow who came by,” Sooter said. “He stood back 30 feet from the cabin and said that he thought I should tear it down, because it wasn’t square.” When finally framed and stacked, the logs were nailed in place with spikes, and braced with diagonal two-by-fours. It was as much collage as cabin. The seed of Sooter’s vocation as an artist was planted.

The cabin cost $200 to build, because it had a galvanized metal roof, which had to be bought. The structure went up in six weeks.

“She had to get it closed up, because she didn’t have any other options,” Kienholz said, underpinning the cabin’s naive quality with a darker reality. “When you’re in North Idaho, you can’t be fooling around with winter.” Adequate wall insulation and a good wood-burning stove brought Sooter through the winter without incident.

She had a well drilled the next summer, which Kienholz found amusing in retrospect. In theory, Kienholz said, a single man would have been content to go unbathed, unsoothed and disorderly. “It’s a woman thing that Evelyn had that well dug so early on.” That summer, Sooter also hired a local hand and built an addition to the cabin. She based the design on windows she had already collected.

“I called a window place and asked them if they had mis-cuts - windows wrongly measured or custom windows that have never been picked up,” she said. “I got probably a couple thousand dollars’ worth of windows for three or four hundred dollars.” Salvage is something of a local building style. “You didn’t go out and buy a new bathtub,” Kienholz said. “You went to the demolition place. So you run new pipes, but you run them to old fixtures. Of course, they’re beautiful,” she added, “but the main point was cost.” Salvage is also a style in keeping with an artist’s penchant for scavenging and collage. As a result of friends’ response to the house, Sooter slowly came to realize that she was creating a work of art as much as a place to live.

“I remember Nancy bringing Ed over here, when I built the first cabin,” Sooter recalled. “I wasn’t home, this funky little cabin and I saw Ed later, and he said, ‘There’s a lot of art.’ I didn’t even really know what he was talking about.” A second addition in the summer of 1981 finished the structure as it is today, and introduced electricity and indoor plumbing.

But the creative life of the house gave it its shape. In the same manner in which Sooter had found many of the pieces with which to construct her house, she continued to find objects to inhabit it: skeletal drifts of brush that hang by windows and make shadows on interior walls; bleached animal bones, and skulls and totemlike harvest bundles.

The interior landscapes grew like a garden going wild. Sooter’s garden itself - all perennials, like peonies, columbines, foxgloves and lupines - naturalized and blurred the boundaries between the house and the landscape, life and art.

Another friend, Jacqueline Crist, the former director of artist services for the Idaho Commission on the Arts, brought around groups of visitors, including a curator from Spain, a Chicago museum official and Denis Ochi, an art dealer in Ketchum, Idaho, who now shows Sooter’s mixed media work.

Sooter is reluctant to be called an artist. She recently completed college, graduating as an anthropology major. In a recent conversation, this seemed a more solid source of pride. It is no accident that anthropology interests her. At home, she has made cultural artifacts out of simple sticks and stones.

Though she denies that she is a local legend, she is something of a natural wonder, at least to friends.

“She is self-sufficient,” Kienholz said, as though “self-sufficient” were a title, like mayor.

Sooter estimates that, over 19 years, her quest for a home has cost her about $50,000; the land was $19,500, and plumbing, the major expense, was $10,000. And that, if nothing else, impresses her.

“To me, it’s not, ‘Look at what a single woman has done,”’ she said. “But, ‘Look at what I’ve done on a waitress’s wages.”’