Wes Coffey

I know how that sounds now, but I was.

I didn't get up there until October of 2025.

Three years after Papa died, life got in the way.

My wife and I had our second baby.

I changed jobs.

The cabin sat empty.

Dad went up a couple of times to check on it.

He told me nothing had been touched, which I thought was strange in retrospect, because that area sees its share of break-ins.

But for three years, nobody lived on that land.

Okay, let me get to it.

This past fall, I took two weeks off work and drove up to Fentress County on October 14th.

Archery season.

I was going to hunt the hollow the way Papa and I used to, and I was going to clean up the cabin, and at the end of the two weeks, I was going to drive home and figure out what I wanted to do with the place long term.

That was the plan.

The drive-in felt normal.

The road to the property is a gravel two-track off a county road.

You follow it about half a mile.

There's a gate.

Then it's another mile of two-track down into the hollow to the cabin.

I got there around four in the afternoon, still light out.