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When I was in grad school, I rented an unbelievably tiny studio apartment in a small town. As if that wasn’t remote enough, I could easily escape to a lake house an hour away, and did so frequently.

Ron Herbig’s handmade cabin in remote northeastern Washington. (Photo contributed by Ron Herbig) In the 1960s, while in college, I read “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau. He built a log cabin, lived by ...