The Cabin at the End of Herrick Road. Derek Wachter
down payment onto the cabin to get started. Christina decided to head back inside and walk around the condo home one more time, double-checking to make sure that they hadn’t left anything behind. Christina was glad that she did. In the bedroom she found her cell phone charger still plugged into the wall. She walked over, unplugged the charger, wrapped it up, and stuck it in her jeans pocket. After she had finished walking through the condo, she turned and took one last look at the entryway of the home, then slowly backed up and shut the door.
Christina made her way down the ramp toward the car, her husband, Matt, smiling at her from inside the car as she walked down the ramp. Christina opened the driver’s side door to the car.
“Ready to go, baby?” asked Christina with a smile.
“Ready when you are,” replied Matt.
Christina sat in the driver’s seat, then leaned over and gave Matt a kiss. Starting the car, she put the car in gear and started to go. Christina pulled out onto the road and made her way onto the highway, heading toward Highway 101, north to Port Angeles.
“Do you want me to GPS the cabin address in Elwha, honey?” asked Matt.
“Yeah, you better. I know we have to hit the 101 going north to Port Angeles, but from there I can’t remember exactly how to get myself to the cabin,” replied Christina.
Matt searched the GPS coordinates of the cabin from his cell phone while Christina got on the interstate to go north until she reached the Highway 101 exit. There she exited I-5 onto the 101 to go north toward Port Angeles. Christina looked back in the rearview mirror to see the tall capital buildings of Olympia fading into the distance behind tall and lush pine trees along the sides of the highway. There was nowhere to go now but forward, toward a new life together. It took them nearly three hours driving the Highway 101 to make it to Port Angeles with all the traffic on the highway. The couple finally reached Port Angeles and decided to take a break and gas up their car. They found a gas station near Port Angeles, along the side of the road along Highway 101, and pulled into the station to park and gas up. It had rained the moment they had left Olympia and the whole way to Port Angeles. Christina got out of the car, opened an umbrella she kept under the seat of her car for such rainy days as this, and walked into the gas station market. She folded her umbrella up and walked up to the attendant at the counter and told him thirty dollars on pump one, handing the man a twenty-dollar and two five-dollar bills. The attendant took the money, rang up thirty dollars dollars’ worth of gas on pump one. The attendant told Christina that the pump was ready for operation and Christina turned around to leave and go pump the gas into her car. While she was walking out the door, four old men were jabbering away over their cups of coffee while sitting by the window at the long bar table that ran the length of the front window. Just before she walked out the front door of the station, she overheard the men talking about a man that went missing up by the Elwha River. One man told the story that he had read in the local newspaper, and the other men laughed at the end of each sentence the man told them. Christina heard the man talking about the newspaper story, speaking about the location of where the man had originally went missing. If she remembered right, the location sounded like it wasn’t too far away from the cabin where the man was last seen. Nevertheless though, Christina walked out the door, opening her umbrella back up, and went to pump gas into the car. She thought to herself that it was rather rude for grown older men to be having a good laugh about someone getting lost and going missing in the forest.
While walking through the parking lot and gas pumps back to her car, Christina thought to herself that the movers ought to be at the cabin by now. Hopefully by the time she and Matt got to the cabin they would be nearly finished in unloading the truck and ready to help move furniture. They had left before Matt and she did after all. They also had a key to the front door of the cabin so that when they got there they could immediately begin unloading and not waste any time waiting for Christian and Matt to arrive. Christina opened the gas cover to her gas tank, took the gas nozzle from the pump, and pumped gas into her Subaru. The thirty dollars filled her gas tank nearly to the top where Christina didn’t have to go back into the market to get change. She took the nozzle out of the gas tank, careful not to get any gas on the side of her car, and replaced the nozzle on the pump. She ran around the side of the car and got into the driver’s side, folding her umbrella up as she was getting into the driver’s seat and quickly shutting the door.
“Boy, it’s really coming down out there, huh?” asked Matt.
“Yes, it is. But what did we expect? This is the west side of Washington,” replied Christina. “Plus, we’re up closer to the mountain range and near the waterfront too. We’re bound to get something other than sunshine, honey.”
“That’s true. Remember the last time we came up this way?” asked Matt.
“Yes, I do.” Christina smiled. “We had driven over to Forks for vacation for a weekend to your family’s vacation home in the mountains. That was a fun weekend. How crazy it is we got away from doing that. So busy with our careers and our own lives. I miss the times where we would just get out of Olympia and just spend time together, you and me.”
“Well, we’re going to change that from now on. Love you, Chris.”
“Love you too, Matt.”
Christina leaned over and gave Matt a kiss. She then turned the keys in the ignition of her car and drove back onto Highway 101, heading west on the Olympic highway toward their road that would take them to the cabin—their new home. They reached a small road called Herrick Road just off the Olympic highway that took them straight through the small town of Elwha. If they blinked for just a moment, they would have missed the whole town. The town of Elwha, Washington, was a small, unincorporated town at the foothills of the Olympic mountain range on the northside of the range. Elwha had a decent-sized RV park for vacationing trailers and campers in the summer months, along with a couple small ma-and-pa run grocery stores in the area that sold a gallon of whole milk for $5.99. Christina continued to drive through the small town until she came up to the end of paved road on Herrick Road, at the end of the paved road, the road continued on but was dirt and gravel the rest of the way as it cut through the heavily wooded pacific northwestern forest. Matt’s GPS had now started to fail as his cellular phone started to lose service the farther Christina drove through the town.
“Shit,” said Matt. “Oh well, who needs cellular service anyway. Not like I will be needing it up here.”
“Right, let me check my phone,” said Christina.
Christina picked up her phone from the cup holder between the seats where she would keep it while driving. Looking at her phone she noticed that she still had a couple bars indicating she still had service on her phone. Christina continued to drive the dirt road, winding her way through trees, bushes, and past large potholes in the dirt road. Christina only hoped that the moving trucks didn’t have any problems on the way up to the cabin. It seemed to not take too long until Christina finally came into an open clearing on the road. The clearing was officially the end of Herrick Road, and there at the end of Herrick Road, the Carters’ cabin sat in peace, surrounded all around by a dense field of tall grass and beyond that a thick forest of Douglas fir and hemlock pine trees. The tree line to the grass clearing was maybe a good one hundred yards in each direction. In the center of this grassy knoll sat the single level-built log cabin with solar panels attached to the roof on the sunny side of the cabin. The front door of the cabin faced the old dirt road, and a long wooden ramp was built in place of the steps at the front door so that Matt could easily access the cabin.
“Oh good, that contractor made it out here and built the ramp for us,” said Christina.
“Was there a possibility he wouldn’t make it this last week?” asked Matt.
“Oh yeah, he wasn’t too sure if he would make it out here or not, but hey, he did,” said Christina, smiling back at Matt.
Matt sat in the passenger seat with an expressionless look on his face. “Yeah, I suppose it is a good thing he made it out this week,” replied Matt.
The movers had already arrived at the cabin. Their large yellow truck parked in the front of the home with the back door