Book Review: Cabins of the Yukon by Finella Pescott

by Lynn R. Miller of Singing Horse Ranch

A few months back I had occasion to speak with a Yukon Territory subscriber, Finella Pescott on the phone. As we compared notes I learned that she had a photo book on Cabins of the Yukon. I was intrigued. In the interest of open-ness I should say that I offered to her a subscription renewal in exchange for a copy of her book, solely on the basis of the title and her side story of traveling and taking pictures of what, to her eye, were unique handmade homes in her part of the world. After the book arrived I was enchanted.

Being married to a phenomenal photographer, Kristi, I have learned that an artists’s sensibility and eye manifests itself in the choices made all down the line; choices of subject matter and ultimately what lives inside a given picture, choices of lighting, choices of composition, choices of narrative suggestion, choices of layering, and tonality. When I had Finella’s handsome book in my hands it took a brief half second to recognize this was the work of a discerning artist of great skill, a person with a multilayered story to capture and tell, and someone who loved the subject of these cabins with a searching thirst.

The world has many coffee table books covering specific architectural focus. Most often they are trapped inside formalities – as if to say here we offer you images that speak to a ‘higher discipline.’ The exceptional handmade seems to fall off the edge of some of those coffee tables and get buried under stacks of old newspapers.

Finella’s handsome hardcover book is not a coffee table stack topper. It’s more than that. It is a visual catalog of unashamed accessibility. It wants to be where you can always find it, to reference how certain challenges were met in construction, to remind yourself why you were first attracted to what ‘make-do, embellish and balance’ means to a human soul married to a natural life.

Finella has captured ‘domicile.’

Ms. Pescott has allowed all apologies and explanations to go poof.

She has done a quiet, elegant and lasting service to an idiom too often abused by the pros.

I can imagine myself sitting on one of these porches at the end of a long work day and asking “Now, where did I put that hatchet?”

I can smell wood stove biscuit aroma leaking out of that side window.

I know in which cubby hole I would hide my cigar box full of sawbucks.

I can well imagine a wife and partner wishing she might have more to offer when the deep south relatives come to visit. But then laughing that off after they have left.

I know I would I would have felt most comfortable thirty years ago sitting on this porch with my resonator guitar next to Gordon Lightfoot, cradling his twelve string in the chair nearby and me nervous about stepping on his tremelo.

Ya, above and beyond everything else we can say this here book is a time machine. I love it. LRM

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$40 + $20 s/h
Cheques can be mailed to:
F. Pescott
PO Box 111
Whitehorse, YT Y1A-5X9
Canada