
The Wicker Creel
Wednesday night we received a phone call from our renter who lives over the garage in our Breckenridge cabin. He said that he heard the loudest explosion he had ever heard and ran out of his apartment. The entire metal roof had blown off of the cabin in sheets on the front lawn. The windows and doors blew out, slamming into the houses next door and knocking out their windows. Then, the fire began.
Evidently, there was air in the propane line, and it blew out a pilot light on one of the appliances, causing a build up of gas until the whole place finally just blew apart. The fire actually started after the house was blown apart.
We really didn’t have any idea what to expect as we drove the LONG 2 hours to Breck. Sometimes, we just sat in silence while other times we reminisced about the cabin, special family times there, all of the hard work and special touches, and what we might see when we got to the cabin. We didn’t know at that point if any of the other houses had been destroyed or if the garage and apartment had been destroyed, or even if there was anything salvageable from our “reality escape.” Phone calls kept coming in from various police and fire department officials as well as the insurance company.
Once we arrived in Breck, we saw that the highway was closed so that water could be tanked in from down the road as there are no hydrants near our cabin. The police let us go through, and we parked across the highway and hiked the last bit to the cabin. The only word that kept going through my mind was “surreal.” As the lights flashed from the police cars and fire engines and the smell of smoke filled my nose, I felt like I was in a movie. We walked with the fire chief all around the perimeter of what used to be the cabin with the garage still in flames and part of the log wall still burning. Broken glass crunched beneath our feet, and the ground was muddy from all of the water. It was difficult to even tell which parts of the cabin we were seeing and where the actual garage was. After a few minutes, Rowland gave a statement to the fire department, and we slowly walked back to our car, once again with the flashing lights blinding us as tears streaked each of our faces.
What now? We found a hotel, checked in, watched TV, and went to sleep. I felt like life was too normal during those hours, like there was something else that should be happening as our precious cabin smoldered only a few miles away. Rowland wasn’t able to sleep and went back out to the site where the fire fighters stayed all night and into the next day.
Thankfully, Rowland had not stayed at the cabin that night as he had originally planned. Thankfully, this didn’t happen while the kids and I were up there during the last month. Thankfully, there were no renters as they had just checked out on Tuesday. Thankfully, we have insurance, and it wasn’t our “home.”
Sadly, though, it was not just a place of memories, but a place of future plans, of decorating our first Christmas tree there this year, of spending our first Christmas and ski season in our cabin, of more “girl trips” and times together as a couple as well as with the whole family. Sadly, our plans for the next few months of creating more family memories will be put on hold, but our memories from the past year can’t be burned. There were only a few special items in the cabin, a wooden plaque made and painted by the children that said “DAD,” a special old bamboo fishing rod, an old green living Bible that my mom had given my dad back in ‘73, and a bowl and wooden rocker brought back from a Costa Rican mission trip. There were also some very special pieces of art that we were sad to lose but that can be replaced.
In our sadness, though, (and I must say that it has been especially devastating emotionally to Rowland) we have looked at the positive side of things and thanked God for His protection and His great blessings in our lives. And WE WILL REBUILD!!! I keep telling the kids that if I know their daddy, and I do, it’ll be even better than before!!!

The Newspaper Article

Nothing But Ashes