“I think they probably hosted thousands of queer couples. In those days, you partnered up, got two adjoining rooms. It’s fitting that we took it over,” Tyler mused, holding a branch up so I could pass under. “Constance, the last surviving Granger, an eighty-five-year-old pain-in-the-ass, sent me a clipping that described the big bed we used to sleep in and begged me to burn the property down instead. Jes wrote back and told her we were renaming it Queers, like Cheers.”

“No wonder they went out of business.”

“No kidding.”

I stumbled over a rock. He held his hand out like I might fall. I shook my head. “I’m okay,” I said. “Keep talking.”

Granger’s closed in 1975, and the property sat empty until Pine City purchased it at auction over twenty years later. Waving his hands enthusiastically, beaming with the thrill of the memory, Tyler said they’d taken it on because of the youthful conviction that your own space gave you self-sufficiency and ownership but were initially unprepared for the volume of work required to make the place habitable. It took years for them to fix up the cabins and their studio spaces. But you didn’t quit, I pointed out. No. We were stupid, and naive, and incredibly stubborn. Influxes of money, he said matter-of-factly, disappeared instantaneously, dissolving tens of thousands at a time into the workaday banalities of roof shingles and updated sewage pipes and the money pit of studio equipment and materials.

I inquired about the studios. He told me that Jack’s, the former Arts and Crafts pavilion, was half textile factory, half woodshop. Jes filled the Theatre with computers, projectors, slides, film stills, and a darkroom, though she rarely used a studio anymore. Marlin’s was the print shop, and he, in Sports, the former gymnasium, had installed a bronze foundry and a forge.

“Can I have a tour?” I asked.

“That we don’t do,” Tyler said, shaking his head, one hand running through the gray of his hair. “We rarely go in each other’s spaces. We’re together so much that we try to delineate our actual selves.” His other hand fluttered with nerves, his index finger pushing back the cuticle of his thumb.