When Mike and Billie Broadhead bought the Chalet Cafe 23 years ago, they had the only telephone in Provo Canyon.
"We used to take phone messages for everyone in the canyon," Billie Broadhead said. The Broadheads knew everyone and everyone knew them. "We met so many good people," she said.As new homes and condos equipped with telephones were built, canyon dwellers became less dependent on the Broadheads.
But people never stopped coming to the bustling roadside cafe. It was the heart of the canyon. The cafe's soothing, relaxed atmosphere served as a way station for hungry skiers, weary hikers and stranded motorists.
"It was just like taking a tranquilizer, only better," Mike Broadhead said.
"If people had trouble it was the Chalet they came to," Billie Broadhead said.
Not anymore. The Chalet Cafe is gone. And so is the life Mike and Billie Broadhead, both 63, immersed themselves in for two decades. The rustic, chocolate-brown building still stands, but Mike Broadhead stopped cooking breakfast inside or broiling steaks to perfection in September.
Utah Department of Transportation workers are the only ones coming and going now. They use the building for an office. UDOT is preparing to reconstruct the two-lane canyon road into a four-lane highway. There's no room for the Chalet.
"You wonder sometimes how intelligent progress is," Mike Broadhead said.
UDOT condemned the Broadheads' cafe and about three acres of land on which they thought they'd like to build a cabin. The state bought the property, but the couple doesn't like the way it did business.
"You work all your life for something. It's paid for. You say, `It's mine' and they come and take it away from you," Mike Broad-head said.
The Broadheads say they don't think UDOT communicated well with them. "They never came to us. We always had to go to them. The only time they approached us was when they said, `This is the way it's going to be,' " Billie Broadhead said.
"I don't know why they booted me out as fast as they did," said Mike Broadhead, who's unemployed for the first time in his life. "It's hard to just stop and not do anything."
The Broadheads do have an option to buy their land back if it isn't paved for the "tunnel" section of the four-lane highway UDOT plans to build through the canyon. They don't know whether the birch tree Billie planted for Mike as a Father's Day present 23 years ago will be spared.
The Orem couple rarely stops by to look at the old place anymore.
"I do miss the place now. It breaks my heart to come up here. This is only the third time. It's too hard," she said.
Billie Broadhead wishes she had kept a journal. Maybe she would have recorded the day former LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson stopped in for breakfast. Or the day one of the Broadheads' four daughters served her first meal. Or the day some visiting royalty returned specifically because they liked the way Mike Broadhead grilled tomatoes.
"This old building has a helluva a lot of history," Mike Broadhead said. History that lives on only in their memories.
"That's the one thing they can't take away from you," Billie Broadhead said.