May Day at Meadow Creek

We heard about Meadow Creek on a regular basis for nearly 50 years. As we'd sit around the dining room table or lounge on the living room couches, the topic would arise frequently during my dad's stories about his Bonners Ferry rural childhood or the many horses he rode or his hunting trips or even the time he spent as a ranch hand in the mountains above Montana's Madison Valley during the 1930s.

Meadow Creek held particular prominence among the tales, for it was there in the woods, a few miles north of HWY 2 east of Bonners Ferry, that his parents, William and Iva Tibbs, ran the one-room school.

As a young boy, Harold assisted them by bringing in the firewood. Knowing Meadow Creek as I do, I'm sure those days so long ago with his three sisters and older brother provided him a rich, bucolic existence as a young boy living in the small village near the Moyie River.

From the time we were kids of that same age and through our adulthood, we took annual trips to Meadow Creek to fish and to pig out on Father's Day or Fourth of July picnics. When my husband Bill came along in the '70s and worked as a forester in the Bonners Ferry area, he, too, grew to appreciate Meadow Creek, which by that time, had few vestiges of the small community my dad knew decades before.

The place eventually turned into a Forest Service picnic/campground. Nowadays, it would take some planning to ensure a spot on a holiday weekend. Meadow Creek has been discovered, but I'm sure that most folks who spend time there now hardly share the nostalgic value it holds with our family.

So, today, on this May Day when a lot of people I know will spend the day in Spokane at running/walking along the Bloomsday course, we'll load up in the car with Mother and Willie and head toward Meadow Creek. Bill wants to stash a geocache there. I asked him if there'd be much hiking involved; he said he'd consider that my mother was along and limit it to what she can easily access.

I'm hoping she'll rattle on today with anecdotes from her ample supply gleaned during her 49 years of marriage to Harold. And then, I'm hoping Willie's ears will be tuned in, consciously recording the highlights so that another generation will carry on an appreciation for the place and continue the family attachment to Meadow Creek that we all cherish so dearly---thanks to my dad's stories.

In so doing, his spirit will continue to live on.