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.

Comments

[Rosemary Carstens]

What a touching story, Kathy. And how wonderful that Kyla spent all those summers on her own in her cabin. I know it's been a long-desired dream for you to have your cabin to spend time in, to meditate, to soak up nature as a counterpoint to city life. May the beat go on--

[Brent]

Wonderful storytelling/writing.