Cabin Journal

A Day of Contrasts

I knew snow was forecast when I went to the cabin this week. Still, it was a shock to see the grass coming up through the snow and hear the hummingbirds buzzing, while the drifting flakes changed from hard grauppel to lightly feathered, as the temperatures flirted around the freezing mark.

My brain was confused. It appeared to be winter—snow on the ground with  more snow coming down and the pine trees heavily smothered in white, —and yet the calendar says May 21, and there’s new plants coming up, the aspens are starting to leaf out, and young ground squirrels are running around.

I headed for the Fern Lake Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park, where there were more incongruent sensations: as the snow drifted around me, waterfalls spilled off the cliffs to the north; small purple violets were popping up; the leaves of the willow and dogwood bushes were starting to unfurl; and the small meadow by the river seemed impossibly green.

After a while, my mind stopped trying to compute this paradox and accepted it, because the landscape was truly beautiful.

 

There’s the soft brush of lime green from the aspen trees across the creek; the tenderness of the whirling snowflakes; the intense colors of the moss and lichen on the boulders; and the fragments of clouds that circle the mountains, muting their harshness. On top of all these visual sensations, all this moisture has released deep, fragrant smells that haven't existed since last fall.

But it’s a cruel beauty, too, because nature has to suffer, has to endure colder temperatures than usual. The hummingbirds, in particular, have to work harder to stay warmer and find food. The usual food sources for chipmunks, bears and birds in spring are delayed, so animals must find other sources—sometimes at the cost of starvation.

And it’s ominous too because this cold weather that has persisted for weeks would indicate a new and disturbing weather pattern –one with the potential to disrupt life. I’m torn: do I enjoy this day of new sensations or worry about the future of this planet? A little of both, I guess. It's the paradox of our lives now.

The Place at the End of the Road

I often wonder how people find Meeker Park.  It’s tucked off one of the main routes to the tourist town of Estes Park. Most people speed by Cabin Creek Road, the dirt road that leads down to this assemblage of cabins grouped around the valley bottom (referred to as a park in the classic sense of the word) and in the shadow of 13,900-foot Mount Meeker.

Passing motorists might notice the historic Meeker Park Lodge on the main road and slow down enough to be curious about Cabin Creek Road, which is just past the lodge. I first found Meeker Park, more than 10 years ago now, via a real estate listing. Others find it through family connections or word of mouth. After visiting my place, my sister and her husband bought two cabins here. Many of the cabins are owned by families that go back several generations.

Of all the stories I’ve heard, I like Kyla’s best. She and her husband were taking their yearly summer vacation to Estes Park from their home in Kansas. One day, the weather  wasn’t cooperating with their plans for hiking, so instead they decided to do some exploring by car. Heading south from Estes toward Allenspark, something made them turn onto Cabin Creek Road. Through a series of serendipitous turns, they ended up on Bill Waite Road, just a few houses down from my cabin, where the road splits in two.

That’s where Kyla and her husband turned around but not before noticing a red wood-slatted cabin (in the center of the photo)—and the people inside curiously watching them, as if the residents didn’t see a lot of people come down the road.

Something about that cabin and about Meeker Park sent Kyla and her husband back to Estes to look for a real estate agent to help them buy property in the area. Not knowing where to start, they asked the proprietor of a gift shop if he knew of a good real estate agent. Coincidentally, this man had friends who wanted to sell their house, and he gave them the directions.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that, the next day, the directions delivered them to the same red-painted cabin they had seen the day before. Sometimes fate delivers us to the exact spot where we want to be, even if we didn’t know it before we found it.

I didn’t know Kyla then, but I presume she and her husband enjoyed the cabin for several decades until he died prematurely young. After that, Kyla made the trip every summer to the cabin alone, stacking her van with everything she would need for three months.

Even though I'm not far from Kyla's house, I didn’t get to know her until the great flood of 2013, when Kyla, then in her 80s, and a few other neighbors were stranded together, our exit blocked by washed-out roads. Daily, we traded the latest rumors and information about the extent of the flood’s damage. One day, she caught me transporting back to the creek, in a pail, a fish that the flood had dumped in a ditch that had only a few inches of water.

A few years later she told that story over dinner to neighbors who weren’t here during the flood. It was the last time I saw her. She died of cancer the following winter. At dinner that summer night, with the hummingbirds still buzzing in the early twilight, she didn’t tell any of us about the cancer that must certainly have been already ravaging her body. I have a feeling she knew this would be her last summer in Meeker Park.

I miss her and wish she were still here to help me fill in the details of the story she told years ago of how she found her cabin. Maybe we find places because our heart draws us to them, and these places are just sitting here, waiting for us to find them. I know there will be others, like me and like Kyla, who will find their way to this magic little kingdom without knowing how they actually got here.

What Spring Feels Like

With all the snow still on Mount Meeker (right), it may not look like May, but the signs of spring are unmistakable. After being gone from the cabin for two weeks, I arrived to find something missing—something huge. Almost all the snow had melted, so when I looked out the back window, I could see the picnic table that had been covered with snow all winter. On the east side, the septic system was now visible. The back porch was unburied.

Small shoots of grass are coming up among last year’s dead grasses, and I can hear the frogs down by the creek, singing quite lustily. A few weeks ago, the ground squirrels and chipmunks were out, looking a little dazed after a long winter underground. This week I heard the unmistakable buzzing of a hummingbird. Around the valley, the aspens are blossoming (below), a pale pink against the deep blue sky.  

It feels like the shackles are coming off the earth. Now that the weight of the snow is gone, the earth is rebounding, and life is emerging: the chipmunks and bears from hibernation, the pasqueflowers and spring beauty poking up from the ground; the hummingbirds, house wrens and swallows arriving from other parts of the world. All of nature is responding to the sun’s warmth, as the earth turns toward the sun. Even the creek, silent all winter under a mantle of snow, has come alive, filling every corner of the creekbed, speeding down the hillside, finally free to go where it wants. Every crease in the hills is filled with running water.

It feels like an explosion of energy that can’t be controlled, like something that has been tightly held in check has been loosened. Who knows what this could lead to?