In this memoir, Caleb Hutchison writes about the adventures of fixing up a cabin in Washington’s North Cascades.

Patrick Hutchison was a kid who grew up in the woods of southwest Washington, then headed to the University of Washington for college and big-city life.

After graduating, he launched his dream career as a writer, which actually looked a lot more like sporadically publishing freelance articles about the great outdoors while toiling as a copywriter in a cubicle in a Seattle office building in order to pay his rent.

Within a couple of years, Hutchison knew this was taking a toll.

And then a Craigslist ad changed his life.

“Cabin” is Hutchison’s memoir about the dilapidated shack he bought for $7,500. It was located up a roughly graded road called Wit’s End in the North Cascade Mountains.

“There was no electricity, no water, no plumbing, no wires, no bathroom, no lights, no wi-Fi, no cell service,” Hutchison reflects. “If you counted gravity and rain, the total number of utilities would have been two. It was a wooden box with a roof and a door. It was perfect.”

This week’s book

“Cabin: Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman” by Patrick Hutchison

St. Martin’s Press — 304 pp — $29

As a first-time property owner, Hutchison resolved that this would be his getaway, a place to bring pals together, a cozy launching pad for communing with the great outdoors.

He takes readers through the snowy nights alone, the summer days with friends, the kaleidoscopic glory of autumn. And the sometimes-incessant rain.

In 2014, the same year the catastrophic Oso landslide — just a few miles away — grabbed headlines, the Wit’s End community of scattered cabins was another area that got cut off from traffic access to the outside world by a landslide.

Hutchison writes about setting out with a couple of friends to assess the situation at his cabin when he gets stuck in a thigh-deep quagmire along the trail.

He reassures his friends, looking on with concern, that he is alright … “But there’s something about a guy who can’t stop saying, ‘It’s okay,’ in rapid bursts that makes it seem like he may not be okay.”

Eventually he gets unstuck — from the mud and from the doldrums.

The book’s subtitle, “Off the Grid Adventures with a Clueless Craftsman,” really tells the tale. It turns out that the cabin offers a whole host of compromised structural concerns to contend with — a leaky roof, holes in the floor, missing siding and a rotten rim joist, to name just a few. This was the beginning of a long series of weekend projects that involve hammers, saws, boards, nails, screws — and a fair share of screw-ups before getting it right.

“Years later, we’d come up with a term for this style of carpentry: jazz,” he writes. “Jazz was what happened when you recognized that a complete lack of mathematical proficiency is what had driven you to a liberal arts degree.”

But this kind of experimentation and activated imagination and work-generated entertainment was exactly what Hutchison craved. And as self-deprecating as he sounds, he gradually acquires carpentry know-how and a new direction in life.

Mixing hilarity with humility and abundant good cheer — “Cabin” is a must-read.