WE HAD TEN PILLOWS. It was the first thing my son Nick said when we entered the motel room and we were tired from traveling all day and surprised by the deep cold as we got out of the rental car, five degrees or so, and the warm room was perfectly cozy, the two big beds and the large television, and when he said we had ten pillows we both just laughed. Most of the time ten pillows are too many, but now with the trip and the dark and the cold, I wanted all my pillows.
It was wonderful to park our small cases on the bureau and turn on the television. It was October and it was game three of the World Series. Things were working out. The bathroom was big and well lighted and there was all kinds of soap and a coffeemaker. “Are we going over there?” Nick said, meaning Wally’s, the burger place we’d seen across the street.
“We’ve got to,” I said. “Wear your jacket.”
Outside, the parking lot was full of trucks with fans of mud along the doors and bumpers, big trucks with all kinds of oil gear and toolboxes in the beds. If it hadn’t been so cold, there would have been dogs in a few of the trucks, but now I knew the motel was full of smart shepherds and collies. I loved seeing the trucks and I loved seeing our little rental car in its place; we arrived late and still got a room full of pillows.
The cold was like metal in our noses and we tucked our chins and walked across the old empty highway to the little glassed building: Wally’s, Home of the Wally Burger. In the street Nick kept bumping into me and laughing. On the sign each of the red letters had a big blue-painted shadow and the Wally Burger had been painted there, big as a car, beautiful and steaming and dripping and sort of vibrating by the depiction. Beneath the burger was the phrase: FRESH-CUT FRIES. Nick opened the door for me. He had read it all and was happy.
Inside there was a couple, a man and a woman who were my age, sitting in one of the little plastic booths by a coin-operated video game with a plastic rifle attached to it. It was called Big Game. The man had a huge white mustache, and they were both eating their Wally Burgers in the bright light. They still wore their coats and I wondered if it was a date. They had a paper between them, spread with the beautiful french fries.
The two teenage boys at the counter in their white paper hats were waiting for us. There wasn’t a line. It was so great. I wanted to get a bag of this fine food and get back to the ball game. One kid wrote it all down: two Wally Burgers with everything, two cones of fries. When I ordered I said, “fresh-cut fries,” and there was pleasure in it. In the old days I would have asked if Wally was around and Nick would have ducked in embarrassment at his old man, but I stopped that years ago. I turned and saw there were fringes of condensation frozen in the corners of the big front window, but it was warm in Wally Burger and I loosened my scarf.
The bag was hot and we hustled it across the dark highway and into the motel parking lot. The cold was over everything, the great arctic cold which had slid over Wyoming. In the warm motel room, we each sat on a bed picking at the greasy brown fries which were heavy and salty and delicious. The Wally Burger took some skill so that the onion and tomato didn’t slide out. It was like food from the fifties and we ate without talking while the game unfolded. This was the game in St. Louis in which Albert Pujols hit a home run and then he came up again and hit a home run. Nick was lying on his bed watching the game and I put on my pajamas and was watching the game. After a while Nick said, “Why do they keep pitching to him?”
I was tired and full of fresh-cut fries, so I turned out the lights so just the game was on and I washed my face with great satisfaction and started sorting my pillows. They had been a terrific help while I was sitting up, but now there were too many. I didn’t like putting pillows on the floor. Nick’s pillows were all on the floor. Nick was sleeping in his clothes and I reached across to his bed and put my hand on his shoulder. I didn’t need to say anything; he turned and undressed in one minute and crawled into bed.
I’d been at home in Southern California that morning and Nick had been in Phoenix with his mother. There wasn’t a fall in my little beach town. The ocean layer thickened and the air grew damp and the days short. I’d met Nick in the Salt Lake City airport and we’d motored northeast to Evanston, Wyoming, for the first night of our fishing trip. I grew up in this part of the west, Utah and Wyoming, and I’d loved walking across that old highway in the dark. I found the remote control in the covers of my bed and watched the television for another minute. Nick was lost in sleep. They pitched to Albert Pujols and he hit a third home run.
We got up early and even so all of the trucks in the motel parking lot were gone. The sun was clear and sharp, shooting across the sides of things and catching in the yellow leaves in the bottom of the trees and on the street. There was frost in the shadows.
The interstate highway was full of trucks and Nick drove us east among them toward the Continental Divide. The bright sunlight was on the sage hills and the day was opening. At the great valley of Bar Hat Road, we came over the crest to see the highway descend in a straight line and rise up the far side, and Nick said, “Seven point two miles,” which is just the distance. I’ve known it since this big road was just two lanes sixty years ago and my father used to ask how far I thought it was and I’d say twenty miles.
A little farther on we came to the big green fireworks sign in the high desert and the abandoned Fireworks shop where we’d stopped so many times. There was only one building at the exit, and Nick’s mother called me the Mayor of Fireworks because I let the kids buy all sorts of armaments in the bright-colored packages. We drove past that summit, both of us now feeling the trip had really begun; we were far from home and would be at the cabin in three hours.
Twenty miles east, we left the interstate and drove into the Bridger Valley and stopped at Fort Bridger, the frontier garrison. The parking lot for the old territorial military base was empty, banked with leaves against the low fences. Nick had his camera and went ahead of me taking his long steps out onto the grounds by the old wooden schoolhouse and the grave of the famous dog who saved the barracks from the midnight fire. Across the lawn I could see the ancient steel bear trap and the antique buckboard; the museum was down the lane. We’d been in it a few times and I remembered they had a Hotchkiss machine gun. Today there was a wind and it was tricky to decide in the fragile sunlight if it was warm or cold. This little town always thrilled me, isolated as it was in the broad valley, and now watching my son drift among the old white-board buildings in the sharp fall day, it was as lovely as it could ever be. I went back and climbed in the rental car and was pleased at the sun warm on the seats.
At the four-way stop in Lyman, where there used to be two buffalo behind the Thunderbird station, we turned south. The buffalo, which Nick’s mother and I saw the day after we were married forty years ago, are gone and the Thunderbird station is gone.
The mountains you can see from the town of Mountain View are the great Uinta Range running there along the northern edge of Utah, a thin and magnificent white line along the horizon, all the distant peaks covered in snow. It was a lot to look at and I was excited. You try not to hurry on such trips to the real mountains, but it is hard not to hurry, and as you get out of your car in the parking lot of the Benedict’s Market in Mountain View, you walk toward the store with the measured steps of someone who is not hurrying and it is a kind of happiness in the sunny October day. We filled two carts with supplies: rib-eye steaks and big cans of stew and two bags of sourdough bread and big deep-green cucumbers and a block of sharp cheddar cheese and milk and half-and-half and a box of fresh chocolate chip cookies from their bakery and candy and a bag of potatoes and four onions and tomatoes and two kinds of apples and some soda and beer and bottled water and English muffins and salted butter and paper plates and coffee and hot chocolate and tea and a tub of coleslaw the guy spooned up for us and a bag of green beans and two pages of bacon and four of sliced ham and little cans of green chiles and two dozen eggs and a butternut squash. We checked out and I couldn’t help myself and I told her we were going fishing and she said, “Good luck. You’ve got the day for it.” Above the front windows of the big supermarket were fine examples of taxidermy, an antelope and a coyote, and above the woman and our groceries was a mountain lion rearing to reach for a pheasant. The big yellow cat’s claw was just touching the bird’s tail feathers, frozen in the air. The whole story.
We drove south out of town and then east into the badlands above Lonetree. It was on some of these lonely roads in this barren place where we’d set off plenty of fireworks twenty years before. There was an amazing kind of mortar box you could buy at Fireworks and it had six sleeves and six small balls each with a fuse. It was big stuff for our two boys. You light the fuse, drop the ball in the sleeve, and run back. The running back was everything.
From the badlands, Nick and I drove into the low willow meadows outside of Lonetree, the creeks full and amber, the real streams you see on such a drive. The old Lonetree general store closed twenty years ago, but I was in it as a child. It is where we stopped to use the outhouses behind the old school and to buy a lime pop out of the cooler in the wooden-floored store. The last time I was there was with my father and he admired the old clock on the back wall, a clock made in Winsted, Connecticut. The thing everyone remembers about Lonetree is that there is a parking meter in front of the store by the wooden hitching post. Every time I saw that meter in my lifetime, I was with someone I loved.
Now we were up along the northern slope of the Uinta Mountains, a mile from the Utah state line, and we drove along the beautiful hayfields of the last farms parallel to the state line and below the state and federal land. To our right we could see the great white peaks getting closer behind the foothills.
Yesterday, we had met at the airport and we’d rented this Subaru and the October light in my old hometown wanted to break my heart. We drove up past the university and along Foothill Drive and there at Parley’s Way Nick pointed and I said, “Yeah. It’s the church where I married your mother.”
Now the fields were tall with grass and we passed the old ruined trailer and the neat log-cabin house and tiny abandoned cabin as old as anything in the region, and then we rounded a shoulder on the hillside and crossed back into Utah, though nothing changed.
A minute later the town of Manila, Utah, came into view, the scattered buildings and the blue of the lake behind it. We would fish tomorrow on the far shore.
The entire trip in a straight drive takes just four hours, Salt Lake to the cabin, and every town, every turn has a story: the flat tire and the crushed fishing pole, the herd of deer jumping the wire fence in the moonlight, the mountain sheep, the flood, the bear and her two cubs, the moose, the elk. Going through Manila, Nick had tried to find the Mexican restaurant we’d eaten at after coming out of the mountains on the backpacking trip when he was sixteen. It had been a double-wide trailer and the combination platters were killer, so good, but that place was long gone. Now we drove through the afternoon sunlight without talking. After the last hayfield in Manila, we turned in at the tipped stone canyons and there were two Fish and Game vehicles in the turnout with their orange traffic cones. There was a big black Ford pickup parked there and the hunters were showing the officers the buck. We could see the pink tag on the antlers. I had long ago told Nick of the times that I had deer hunted, all of them three-part stories, pretty good, especially the time when I was a kid and my dad and I woke to a snowstorm and decided to break camp and drive home a day early, but ran into a guy who had shot his hand and my father helped him fix a proper bandage. It wasn’t a terrible wound, but I remember blood on the man’s canvas trousers and my father working quietly with his first aid kit and the medical tape on the man’s hand. My father hated accidents and was angry. When he came back to our truck, I asked him what had happened and all he said was, “There are two ends of a gun, always.” I never heard him tell the story again.
On the radio, the football game came and went. Nick and I drove up the sage switchbacks above the massive blue lake and stopped at the rest area which was abandoned this late in the year. The big loneliness of the planet was part of it now, and even in the nourishing sunlight I felt the wind tucking at us; it was fall. Farther, the canyon walls that plunged into the water were red and yellow and gave the whole reservoir its name.
After the promontory we crossed into the real mountains and the pines, past the road to Spirit Lake, the place I learned to fish when I was seven. The forest along the back of the mountains is still thick and green, not ruined yet by the bark beetle. It is like a vast garden, a million pine trees, fir and ponderosa and piñon growing down to the road. This time of day and after three weeks of elk and deer hunting there would be no danger of game on the road. The first feeling in this place is always also the last: We’re here. Everything else is gravy.
Nick could sense it too. “Where do you think Colin and Regan are?”
“North of Moab,” I said, thinking of desolate Highway 191 as it cuts through the wasteland. I could imagine the connector to Interstate 70 and the fifty miles of that before the Loma turnoff. “No, they’re farther. They’ll cross into Colorado any time now and then climb over the summit.” My son Colin and my brother Regan were driving today from Arizona and would meet us tonight at the cabin. “I hope we can get everything working,” I said. “If the water is frozen, it will be a tough night.”
I hadn’t been to the cabin for a year and a half, and nothing was certain. Now driving with the sunlight holding, everything was still rinsed with optimism, but the bright edge of the short day was crumbling and the shadows of the thick tall pines cut at the roadway in a dizzying serrated shadow that wanted to put me to sleep. When we came to the junction for the lake and the lodge, Nick asked, “Are you hungry?”
“Sort of.” We were both thinking of the Flaming Gorge Burger with bacon and cheese which had grown bigger in memory; it had been a while. It was always stunning to eat at the lodge, to sit in a chair and have the salty chili fries set before us on a plate. “But let’s go set up and make a pot of spaghetti. They’ll arrive sometime about eight.”
“Root beer float,” Nick said as we passed the turnoff.
“I’m going to get one tomorrow.”
Now we drove up the long hill which was the eastern shoulder of the Uinta Mountains and at the top we followed the old highway south through the forest and felt the light change. This was a section of road I sometimes imagined when I could not sleep: each frost heave, turnout, campground, the old corral fence. Nick eased the rental car down to the steel-pipe gate and I stood out in the shadow of the mountain. The sun was golden on the green hills behind us and the brook was talking where it crossed under the road. There has never been in my life a feeling of homecoming like this: unlocking the gate, swinging it wide for the car. When I’d secured the gate again, Nick drove us slowly along the gravel lane. We could see our little cabin from across the loop and it looked like a cabin in a story, a house a child would draw, the window, the door, the chimney. It was sweet not to hurry and Nick drove slowly so that he could point again to each place he’d had a bike accident, and the slash field, and how big the one hill had seemed twenty years ago and so small now. Our entry was marked with the sign my father cut out of stainless steel, the outline of a little moose along with the number 15, our number, set on the cedar post I’d dug in fifteen years ago. The long tree-lined driveway was grown with tall grass, which you want to see in a place, a thing which makes a house look abandoned and full of ghosts, and after driving on the gravel, our approach became very silent as Nick rolled down into the dooryard. The long woodpile lined one side of the grassy driveway, and I had to say again, “I’ve had every stick in that stack in my hand.”
“I know,” Nick said.
“Your kids will burn that wood.” When I used to say that, Nick would come back, “I don’t think so,” or “Who are you talking about.” But now we stood out of the car and he looked at the wall of stove-length logs and he said, “They probably will. I’ll be sure to tell them what you did.”
The cabin stood before us shuttered and silent like a big puzzle box we were about to open. There was work to do. Nick opened the front door and we went in and found the old good smell of firewood and burned coffee and the dry smell of the books. Nick opened all the blinds, copper Levelors. I remember the summer they came. Then we carried outdoor stuff: the ladder, the bicycles, the mower, the barbecue, the picnic table and the two butterfly chairs onto the tall grass behind the cabin. I turned on the electricity and the lights came on in the gloom and the radio roared with static and the fridge chugged and began to grind forward. It was forty years old.
Outside against the cabin wall I opened the small wooden lid over the waterworks and removed the insulating carpet and Nick and I looked at the blue valve that held our success. It was all as I had left it two years ago. I knelt and said, “Listen for it,” and opened the valve turn by turn.
Nick ran inside and I called, “Anything?” I could not hear water running.
He appeared a minute later. “I can hear it filling the water heater, but no leaks under the sinks.” I looked at the old blue valve and the piping in the ground. It was all working.
“Man,” was all I could say, standing up. The feeling now was like being airborne. The meadow in front of the cabin was all yellow sage grass in shadow and the high friction of the air moving in the trees sounded like water over a spillway. The sun was still flat gold against the hills to the east and every time I looked up, walking back and forth from the car to the cabin, the line of shade had advanced. When you know your brother and your other son are on their way, it gives you great reason to assess your groceries again and plan out the spaghetti with thick tomato sauce and hot Italian sausage and big wedges of lettuce with stripes of blue cheese and burned toast and ginger ale. They would have now passed through Rangely, Colorado, through the oil field and the antelope, and they’d be driving into the last low angle of sunlight, the shadow of Regan’s Blazer sixty yards behind them.
Nick went out and turned the car around, parking it nose-out in the dooryard, and then he came back in the cabin and found me sitting on the couch. I could feel the altitude a little. It was pleasant looking over the meadow though we knew there would be no deer tonight; they were all in the high country. In the summers, there were deer every night and one summer a moose had tried to head-butt our dear dog Max. Max’s tags were in an antique mason jar on the bookshelf.
“How soon will they get here?” Nick said.
“Just after eight, if I know Regan,” I said. “We’ll go down and meet them.”
“Do we need to cook now?”
“Not for an hour.”
Nick took the kindling bucket and stood in the doorway. “I’m going to get some sticks and start a fire.” We could feel the chill now that the sun was gone. He opened the closet and drew out a pillow from the shelf. “Why don’t you lie down there?”
The pillow was perfect. I remembered the old pillowcase pattern from early in my marriage, and I laid out on the long couch and felt the blood beat in my knees while I listened to Nick break sticks and open the stove door and start the fire. I’d napped here a hundred times. Max would find me and lay his chin on my stomach for a minute before curling on the rag rug beside the old couch under the wagon-wheel ceiling light.
One November night twenty-five years ago my father and I put the woodburning stove in the fireplace. It was a great stove with a big glass door and the draft vents made lighting a fire easy and then, when engaged, it heated the whole room. Many times during storms when we’d lost power, Nick’s mother would move all the pans to the woodstove top and make a pot of a soup she called slumgullion with knots of sausage and thick carrot coins and tomatoes, and she’d set the teakettle there for hot chocolate or tea. The cabin would fill with steam and sweet smells, and there’d come a moment late in the middle of the night in the dark with everyone asleep when the fridge would suddenly chug and the radio spit static and it was always an odd disappointment: the power was back on. We’d made soup and had an evening of card games in candlelight.
Now I lived four blocks from the Pacific Ocean and it was fresh there, fresh being the word I used for the wet cold which captured many an evening at my cottage. The boys’ mother had given me an electric mattress pad I used most nights. I had never lived near the coast, and it was a good place. I could hear the concussions of the surf from my room, and I had a good bicycle which I used every day. I once had a wife and two sons and a good dog, and now I had some tenacious plants and that bicycle. I had survived the pinching loneliness and now I was just alone and, I would admit, a little proud of it. I couldn’t cook very well, but I got around that by cooking selectively or riding my bicycle out for Thai food or fish tacos or Mexican food or what there was. I carried a book and rode my bicycle to dinner here and there. Some nights when I rode home from the restaurants in the village, I rode down the middle of the empty streets and I breathed the fresh air deeply under the few stars and remembered being a boy in Utah. In some ways they were the same days: I was just independent, a boy with his bicycle, and now I was an old man alone who rode his bicycle everywhere he could.
I woke warm; the yellow flames fluttered in the glass stove front and it was dark. Nick was on the other couch looking at his iPhone in the gloom, his face lighted by the screen.
“Colin called. They left Vernal fifteen minutes ago.”
“Okay then,” I said, swinging my feet to the floor. I could feel my heart in my forehead, the altitude, and I let it subside before I tied my shoes.
“What’s that?” I said, pointing where the big frying pan steamed on the stove.
“I just fried those sausages and cut them up into the spaghetti sauce.”
“Smells good.”
Nick adjusted the stove to low simmer and we went out into the cold mountain dark. The stars were coming out a million at a time and it was quiet in the meadow. If you stood still, you could sense the heavy layers of worlds above us. Nick pointed and pointed again at satellites sliding among the stars. I said: “That’s your phone company making sure you have reception.”
“Or UFOs,” he said. We got in the car. “I should have warmed it up,” Nick said. “Sorry.”
“We’re good,” I said. “The radio stations will be popping up and maybe we can get something.”
He drove us up the narrow grassy drive to the circle road and we crept the mile to the gate. I got out of the car and was clamped by the still cold as I wandered back of the car to pee. The stars piled on my shoulders and the great silence flooded the sky. It was a big night in the world and we were waiting for a rendezvous.
They’d been driving ten hours. Headlights came north and Nick, who had the best eyes of anyone I’ve ever met, said, “That’s Regan’s Blazer.” I felt a tension let go in my back, and I climbed out again and unlocked the gate, waving at Regan’s headlights and waving them through.
“Hello, boys,” I said to Colin’s open window.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Go on to the cabin. We’ll be right there.”
The cabin was warm against the frozen evening, and Nick took two more logs for the stove when we went inside. You want to hear someone say, “Smells good,” when you enter the only warm room in the mountains and Regan said it. “That’s spicy spaghetti sauce.” We were all standing around and Colin peeled off his fleece jacket and stored his gear on one side of the wood box and Regan began to put his gear away, and I boiled the water and dumped in the pasta and fired up the toaster with sourdough bread and unwrapped the butter and sliced four thick wedges off the cheddar. Nick pulled cases on the pillows and after a while we all sat at the old table in the big room. The silverware drawer was an inventory of the ages. The spoons were silver soup spoons from the Ambassador Club, gone thirty years now, forty, and the forks were heavy and perfect for the spaghetti. We ate and talked about the day’s travel, and Regan said my chainsaw was in his car, and we decided not to do the tree work tomorrow, but to fish in the morning over by the state line at Antelope Flats. We had two full days and everyone was talking like you do when you’re rich that way.
Nick banked the stove and we made a campsite of the room, pulling out the giant sofa beds and throwing down our sleeping bags. The old couch beds had always been noisy and tilted and crazy to sleep on, even when new, but we were all tired, which improves a bed. We groaned a little bit, I did, but it was all show and led the way to sleep. In the dark cabin every edge caught the orange glow of the pulsing fire.
The cabin percolator was a tall silver pot, elegant and sixty years old. It was the kind of thing that in 1958 looked like the distant future. When it first chugged, the water would start to flush into the glass topper, and the smell of coffee filled the room. It was cold now in the cabin in the morning, thirty-nine. I stepped carefully over all the gear and around the couches and out the front door. The day was like a slap; it was twenty degrees outside and the meadow was frosted white. Inside again, it felt warm. Nick had seen to the fire. I fried the big pan of bacon and dropped eight eggs into the hot grease. Colin was up and he loaded and reloaded the toaster. Regan sorted his gear and got his boots on and then he and Nick put the room away so we could do some good. Everyone was drinking lots of water from the old jelly-jar glasses and even so I could still feel the pressure in my head from the altitude. In ten minutes the kitchen table was wall-to-wall dishes and cups.
“Some coffeepot,” Colin said. The percolator rocked and a column of bright steam shot from the spout. We already had the half-and-half on the table.
“We’ll stop at the lodge and get licenses and drive across to the flats.” We all dipped buttered toast into the thick milky coffee and drank orange juice out of paper cups as old as the boys.
“Sounds good,” Regan said. “We’ll see if that fish is over there.” He went out and came back with the chainsaw and set it on the wood box. “You keep this thing clean as a violin,” he said.
“I always did,” I said. It was a good saw and I’d gone right by the book with it. We were here to cut down one big dead tree and to remove two that the Forest Service had already dropped. Their annual letter outlined what we needed to do to keep the lease. Colin picked up the saw and looked at me. “We can do this,” he said.
“Tomorrow you’ll be a lumberjack,” I told him. It was a weird thing, passing the saw. I’d cut three hundred trees in twenty-five years, half of them standing dead from beetle kill. I’d loved the work in the summers, writing all morning and then a tree or two in the afternoon.
Nick put the big pot full of water on the stove to boil to do the dishes. I remembered seeing his mother there at the big steel sink bathing both boys at once, a naked little boy on each side. Outside the front window the meadow filled with light and now the first gold grass showed the sun. I knew this light as well as any in the world.
All along the drive down the mountain, the sun burned off the frost and the day opened into broad Indian summer. With the deer hunt concluded, the lodge parking lot was empty, a rare sight. With the few yellow leaves in the two maples, it made a lonely place. Summers there were always big pickups hauling pleasure boats. We already had a big bag of lunch in the car, so we bought licenses and candy bars and big cups of coffee. On the store bulletin board Colin studied the dozens of Polaroid photographs of all the big lake trout being held up by fishermen. On the little magazine rack, Nick saw the copy of a sports journal with my story in it and showed it to Regan; it was the story about a trip Regan and I had made three years before and a fish we did not catch.
I went out into the day. The sun on the mountain downslope and the layered plains of Wyoming in the distance filled me with hope. Nick came out of the store with our goods in a brown paper bag, then Regan with a twelve of Coca-Cola, and then Colin reading his fishing license.
The drive to Antelope Flats was a sinuous switchback descent to the big blue lake, past the marina and then over the silver bridge and then twenty miles per hour over the Flaming Gorge Dam. Now there were two highway patrol cars in the visitors’ center parking lot, side by side, as part of Homeland Security. The reservoir here was always a stunning sight: the vast blue-water lake brimming against the huge curved dam and on the other side the red-rock canyon drawing down on the Green River way below. The road wound up and over through where the huge forest and brush fire burned ten years before, past the hamlet of Dutch John, and spooling out around the tendrils of the reservoir and between the rock gaps.
A mile before the Wyoming state line, Nick turned our car down the gravel road that runs down the broad ridge to Antelope Flats.
“Look for my hubcap,” I said, because I always said it. That was five years ago or six. Nick drove twenty-five miles per hour down the broad washboard track, sun everywhere in the pale sage. The water was bluer than the sky. Across the huge expanse of the lake, we could see the village of Manila. As we neared the lake, we saw the little campground shelters, each with a cooking grill on a steel post.
“Do you even still have that car?” Regan said.
“No, but look for my hubcap.”
Colin said, “There they are,” and he pointed to the hill beyond the campground where the antelope stood in clusters.
There were more antelope along the top of the big empty parking lot by the boat ramp. They were all lying down and took little notice of us and we stopped and opened all the doors and organized our chairs and the lunch and then we geared up the fishing poles. They watched us for a while but none of the antelope moved. The air was still here and it was warm in the sun. “I’m going to sit in the car for a minute,” I told them.
“You feel okay?” Nick asked.
“Good,” I said. “I just want to rest. I’m glad to be here. Catch a fish.”
Nick led Colin and Regan over the sage hill and down to the water. I’d first fished here forty-five years before on a trip with two friends the last week of high school. There had been no campsites then, just clearings in the sage; the dam and the reservoir were new. I had waded in my Levi’s and later dried them by the fire, burning up a pair of good wool socks. It was warm in the car and I lowered the window a few inches; the sun in October was a blanket of its own.
The road from Manila, old Utah Route 43, used to connect to Antelope Flats. It was just one mile straight on the highway. Then the year I was sixteen, they finished the dam and the water backed up and now with this lake it was fifty miles to drive around. The old two-lane road was still down there somewhere under the lake. For years they used it as a boat ramp on both sides.
Sometimes a little nap is just the ticket and I don’t know how long I slept, half an hour perhaps, and when I stood in the slanted daylight all the antelope were gone.
At the lake Nick had caught two fish. I loved this desolate place, the ridged mountains rising out of the water across the lake in a way I’d memorized years ago, their geologic layers tipped in a clear display, a place I saw once a year all these years and always unchanged. Regan had his sleeves rolled up in the sunshine and Nick came over to me with the sunblock. “Where’s your hat?”
“In the car.” I had forgotten it. “It’s okay. We won’t be here that long. It’s October.” I tied a swivel on my line.
Colin had his ball cap pulled low because of the late-day glare. The water was silver for two hundred yards.
Spin casting into the glittering lake seemed a perfect activity. We fished for an hour and Regan, Colin, and Nick each took a fish and Nick two more. I unpacked the lunch and handed out the ham sandwiches with the wedges of cheddar and just enough mayo to make the tomatoes slippery. “Too much pepper?” I asked Nick.
He smiled, my pepperhound. We had apple slices and salty chips and bottles of water. Regan and I propped our poles on the shoreline willows and sat in the gravel of the beach. The sun was at us pretty good. “I never caught a fish without the pole in my hand,” Regan said, getting up and reeling in for another cast.
“I did,” I said, “and I was unhappy about it. He ate the thing, some little fish, and I had to kill him.” I reeled and reset my gear and put it out there thirty yards, the lure making a little sound when it hit: loop! I stood fishing until my legs ached, casting, and then I walked up and down the bank stretching.
“Three more casts,” I said.
“Well, give it a good go,” Colin said. “Because this is as far from home as we’re going to get and when we turn for the cars, we’re headed back.”
I knew he was making fun of me, the thing I always said on our trips, but it didn’t sound like mockery. It sounded like my son letting me know the news. I’d said it first on our backpacking trip into the Uinta Mountains, Island Lake, a ten-mile hike. It was a magnificent trip and when we fished Island Lake, a deer, a small doe, followed us like a dog. I’d never seen that before. We caught a lot of fish, putting back all we could, and finally we had to stop ourselves. When Nick had lifted the last cutthroat trout from the water, Colin had said, “That’s ten we’re keeping.” The rocks we stood on were wet and Nick had looked at me to see if we should begin hiking back around to our camp. I said then, “Here we go. Every step now takes us toward home and your dear mother.” We had a feast that night in the high mountain camp, frying the trout and dropping the filets into the thick trout chowder we made from leek and mushroom soup. How many times in a life do you have a day where the food is a match for the effort?
The sun fell over the broken red cliffs until we were looking at a world that was only silver and shadow, huge shifting sheets of glittering water. Regan said, “Oh oh,” the way our father used to and I turned to see his rod bend and start to dance. Regan was walking along the sand being led by his pole.
“He’s a big,” Colin said.
“Is that the one?” I asked Regan.
“We’ll see,” he said. “Maybe he’ll have your hubcap. Grab that net, Nick.”
Regan walked straight back up the bank hauling his fish in, sliding it on the sand and Nick netted him, a silver rainbow sixteen inches.
“A big fat fish,” Regan said. “Let’s keep him and have a fry.”
“Perfect,” I said.
Colin pulled the stringer from the lake with the other fish on it and we knelt and began cleaning and rinsing the fish. Nick took a picture of Regan’s fish.
“He’s not the one, so we’ll have to come back next year.”
Nick’s arms were sunburned. “What a day,” he said. “This is like summer.”
“We were lucky,” I said.
“It’s been like this every year, Nick,” Regan said. “It’s a secret, this last week in October.” We were walking up the narrow winding dirt path over the first sage hump to the big parking lot in the high desert wilderness.
“Parking hasn’t been a problem for the fishermen today,” Regan said.
We lodged the fish in the cooler and Colin passed out some ginger ale and Regan grabbed his Coke. It was a pleasure being in the car, sitting, and Nick did a slow U-turn and eased onto the gravel road.
“Check,” Colin said, pointing ahead.
“Slow down and they won’t run,” I said, and Nick slowed to five miles an hour and we drove through the middle of the loitering tribe of antelope.
As we drove back up the slope into the forest and along the mountain meadow, the evening wind was up and the temperature had dropped fifteen or twenty degrees and low clouds were moving in tatters around the mountains. We were all a little sunburned and we could feel the cold. “This could put a wrinkle in our plans to fish at East Canyon tomorrow,” Regan said.
We stopped at the empty lodge and it was dark in the café; they hadn’t turned the lights on in the late afternoon. We stood at the counter there long enough for the waitress who had been working at the desk over a pile of motel receipts to come pour Regan and me big coffees to go and set out all the creamers and spoons and we made a little mess and before I could strike, Nick nabbed a Coke for himself and Colin and put three fives on the counter and ushered us back into the changing day. “You are required to overtip in the territories,” he said. Having the coffee was like treasure. Nick drove us up to 191 and then turned up the mountain. We had the windows up and Nick had the heater on.
Colin unlocked the gate, and as he bent to it, I wondered again at all of it, of the days before the great lake filled, before I met the boys’ mother in Miss Porter’s class, where we read Silas Marner and I read my poem after which she spoke to me in the hallway of the old Union Building, and two years before the two of us camped above Kamas with the smallest campfire in the history of Utah, and before I ever had sons and now they were grown and one was driving the car and the other swung the gate open and wheeled his arm and called, “Move it out, buddy!” and we drove through. I could see our little cabin in the trees.
The wind bit at us when we climbed out of the car. It was loud in the trees and the sky was banking up with slow-moving clouds in the deep dusk. Regan put the fish in the sink and rinsed them again, and we hauled firewood into the firebox. Any place out of the wind was warm and our sunburns bloomed when we went indoors.
“We’ll bake these trout and my beautiful squash,” I said. I looked at my watch. “In about two hours.”
Nick banked the stove and in ten minutes the glass front was orange flames and the circulating fan was pumping out waves of heat, a blessing. Colin came in the front door and announced: “It’s twenty-five degrees. How can that be?”
Everyone had staked a lamp and part of a couch. Nick was reading a stack of magazines and kids’ books that he and Colin had read years ago including an utterly wrong-headed book called Desperate Dan, which I had bought in England thirty years before at the seven-story Foyles Bookshop by the Tottenham tube stop, and I had told their mother that I was buying Desperate Dan for her kids who were that day still eight years from being people. Regan was sorting his gear, and Colin was going through the floor of the closet to see if there were any boots he could wear should it snow.
“It’s going to snow,” Regan said. “Can you smell it?”
I’d just put the squash in the oven and could only smell the clean smell of the oven heating up after two years.
“What about these?” Colin said, pulling my old Chippewas out of the tangle of shoes.
“Try them on. They’ve been here ten years, fifteen. I caught a lot of fish in those shoes. I caught a ten-inch cutthroat on a bare hook in Dime Lake.”
I stepped past him and went out the front door in the dark. By the light from the window I could read the thermometer on the porch post: twenty degrees. Now I could smell the dry frozen promise of snow and I could feel the low clouds. There wasn’t a star available on such a night. Inside the window everything glowed in lamplight and the fire pulsed.
I peppered the fish and sliced lemon and sweet onion inside of each and laid them on the broiling pan to bake. Nick was reading sections from the scurrilous children’s book aloud and laughing and Colin was walking around my father’s wagon-wheel coffee table in his new shoes. It was the last Thursday night in October of a year in the mountain cabin with my brother and my sons.
We slathered the steaming squash with butter and we each had a piece big as a cake and a trout which fell apart on our plates and came cleanly away from the bones. The skin was crisp and salty and we ate it with our fingers. Nick wiped the plates with his wadded paper napkin and then slid them into the warm dishwater. Colin opened the couches and pulled out the beds.
“I’m sleeping with my head this way,” Regan said, meaning toward the fire. We had already stood four round stove logs on the hearth to load in the middle of the night.
The old poker caddy was full of three kinds of mongrel chips all clay and older than me, fun to handle, and we divvied up four stacks and dealt the old blue Bicycle cards. Nick was talking poker, big blinds and small blinds and being on the button, and Regan said, “Let’s just play cards,” and so we did that: seven-card stud. Immediately Colin distinguished himself as a bluffer, ten if not twenty every turn, bet and raise, and he got clipped early but wouldn’t stop. We played almost an hour. Nobody wanted any ice cream.
“Hey,” I said, examining the king of diamonds in my hand. “One of these cards is torn.”
“King of diamonds,” Nick said.
“You didn’t know that?” Regan said.
“A marked deck,” I said. I lay the red king on the table.
“That black two has a folded corner,” Colin said, and now he was all in and after a minute he showed a seven high, the lowest hand in the history of the cabin.
He stood up. “So close,” he said.
Nick and I took a minute and sorted the old chips into the slots and boxed the damaged cards.
“I’ll remember that king,” I said.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could,” Regan said. “It’ll take us an hour next time to figure it out.”
“That time, we’ll have a big blind and a small blind.”
“I’m blind right now,” Regan said. He’d put his glasses on the driftwood table beside this bedroll which he was struggling into. “Fire up the stove, Nick.”
“I will.” Nick was rolling out his bag on our bed. “Think we can get the game?”
“That’s right,” I said, “they’re playing tonight in St. Louis.”
It was an old black plastic General Electric AM/FM radio, a small console that had been my parents’, in their first kitchen. Days it would get the station from Vernal that advertised auto glass all day long and played eighties songs, but nights the radio stations came out like stars and sizzled against each other, rising and fading.
“Let’s see.” I leaned against the couch and turned the AM dial up loud and began to drift through the stations.
“They all sound like the ball game,” Colin said. And they did, each with its static roar. All the self-help and political bullies were on the clear stations and then just before ten on the dial, I got it. We heard the announcer say, “…coming to the plate…” and then it faded. I got scientific with my tuning, a whisker, a whisker and we could hear him in there under all the noise, but we couldn’t hear what he was saying. I held the radio up and tilted it this way a little and then over there.
“You’re a terrible antenna,” Nick said. We had done this before on summer nights, the radio dance. Then I tuned in a channel so clear it sounded like someone talking at the table. “It’s the UFO guy,” Nick said. “Listen.”
“What would it take,” the baritone voice pleaded. “What would it take to believe they are among us? One convincing crash. Just one. And how many do we have?”
Somebody else, it must have been a caller, said, “I don’t know. How many?”
“Fifty-two,” the expert said. “We’ve got fifty-two documented crashes and there are still skeptics. Oh, it’s a tough road, my friends.”
Regan turned his lamp off and now the cabin was dark except for the fluttering orange glow from the stove fire. I was still holding out the radio.
“Well, let me ask,” the caller said. “If these extraterrestrials are so advanced, why are they always crashing?”
The expert didn’t miss a beat: “Oh man, come on. Do you think they’re sending their best equipment to this planet? They’re working with some off-brand airships; it only makes sense.”
“Makes sense to me,” Regan said.
After Nick and Colin saw the alien visitor movie Fire in the Sky, when they were nine and ten, Nick would not sleep outside on the trampoline anymore. His mother had asked him why not, and he said, “It’s too easy to get us. We’re like snacks on a plate.”
I put the radio back on the shelf by the boys’ old Lego constructions: jet fighters and battleships. I could feel my forehead sunburned. I was tired in the way you are when a day uses you and it felt good; the room in the muffled light was good.
In the morning, despite the thick gray cloud cover, it was only nine degrees outside. Nick fired up the stove and turned the blower on high while I fried up the bacon and burned a pan of hash browns. We could feel the wind working at the cabin and behind Regan out the front window, I saw the dots commence as it started to snow.
“You guys can tell me how it was at East Canyon,” Regan said, stirring cream into his coffee. He was using the white enamel mug we called spidercup, which when you told the story, it made you shudder. “I’ll be here reading a book. That place, that trip was as cold as I’ll ever want to be.”
We’d had a trip four years ago in such wind and snow at that reservoir that I had trouble opening the car doors, and Regan went out to the whitecap water and caught a fish. When he came back up, his eyelashes were iced up. We have a picture somewhere.
“We could do that tree work unless the snow gets too heavy.”
Colin had folded his bacon into the sourdough toast, pressed it with his big hands and took a bite. He nodded at me. “Let’s do it and learn about this saw.”
We laid the saw out on newspapers on the kitchen table and I went through it with Colin. Nick said from the couch, “Teach him and if I need to know it, he’ll tell me.”
We disassembled the saw and Regan said, “I can’t believe how clean that thing is.” There were the caps, oil and gas, and there was the trigger and the choke. Regan gave one of the new sharp chains from the bag to Colin. They were lightly oiled and had been in storage for three years. Regan pinched one of the small blades and held it up for Colin. “This is the cutting edge. Set it on the drive rail so this is forward.” I stepped back. It was funny about the saw; it was hard not to have it in my hands, but now I knew it was long gone.
“He’s got it,” Regan said. “Let’s do some good.”
Nick was wrapping his scarf on and he had his gloves in his hand. We had a lot of gear hanging from the ceiling wagon wheel to dry and I took my jacket off a hanger and pulled it on.
In the meadow, the wind had subsided and the crazy snowflakes were crossing wildly as they descended. It would last all day. We had two hours before it got too deep to work these trees. I checked the toolshed and found the mixed gas and the bar oil right where I put them two years ago. I showed both bottles to Regan knowing he’d appreciate my providence. Colin pulled his glove off to handle the gas and he pulled an envelope out of his back pocket and turned to me and said, “Oh yeah, Mom sent this for you.” I recognized her blue stationery and I put the letter in my front pocket, so it wouldn’t get wet. We just stood back and let Colin fill the reservoirs in the saw and then adjust the choke and pull the starter rope. He was a big man and made the saw look much lighter than I ever did. It snorted alive on the third pull. Colin stood with the idling saw, adjusting the fuel feed with the trigger. When the rpm dropped to a hum, I said, “You’re good to go.” There was one fifty-foot jack pine standing dead with its cowl of rusty branches, and he knelt to it. I showed him to make one front cut horizontal to the ground and perpendicular to the fall line, then the angled wedge cut, which he did in less than a minute, kicking out the wedge with his boot easily. We all stepped clear and he ran the saw in the back of the tree and it tilted sweetly, silently in the falling snow and fell alongside of the driveway. Colin looked at me and we talked for a moment about how to limb it up, cutting each branch at the trunk, no hurry. The three of us stood back and watched him walk up the tree, left right left right, sending the limbs into the grass. Nick took more pictures.
“He looks like he’s been doing this for a while,” Regan said. And it was true. Colin was now bucking up the log, cutting the trunk into stove-length pieces, and we hauled the logs to the old woodpile, the bright yellow ends sharp against the gray wood. The whole job, something that would have taken me two hours, took twenty minutes and we had nothing but a stump and two piles of slash.
There were two more trees, old giants that had been cut down by the power company last summer, and which we’d been instructed to remove. Colin limbed both big trees and we made haystacks of the branches and then he started cutting each log into lengths. They were each almost the diameter of the length of his blade but he didn’t force it, letting the saw find its way, and he finished the last tree in half an hour.
We were all red-faced in the snow and Colin turned off the saw and carried a log down to the stack with his other arm.
“What now?” he said, and we all felt it. We wanted more. We needed another tree standing dead or leaning or even downed, but there were none. The trees towering above us had been knee-high twenty years ago. A tree that Nick replanted as a seedling was now thirty feet tall at the corner of the meadow. It was the old feeling: The day is young and we’re good for it, and I laughed. The snow was still general, but we could see it wouldn’t trap the vehicles or snow us in.
Inside, Nick heated a big pot of Dinty Moore stew, cutting one of our onions into it and simmering it until the brown gravy bubbled, and then he imbedded bread-and-butter pickles in some grilled cheese sandwiches which he fried until they smoked in the pan. The fire had slumped while we were outside and I opened the woodstove and laid in three fresh logs and I closed the glass door and it filled with bright fire. With the fire stoked we ate salty vinegar chips at the table, crunching on the sandwiches, dunking the corners into the potato-thick stew, drinking ice-cold ginger ale. We had one more day.
After lunch, Colin cleaned the saw, taking it apart and wiping it clean and storing it in newspapers in an open cardboard box on the closet shelf. Nick stared out at the snow in the meadow. The snow itself now was not flakes but a steady dusting.
“What do you want?” Nick looked at me. “You want to go for a walk?”
“Yeah, Dad,” Colin said. “Let’s go. You can show us this place.”
Regan had already pulled his boots off and he had his plastic tray of flies on his lap, sorting them for tomorrow. We knew as soon as he lifted his feet onto the wagon-wheel table, he would be asleep. “Have fun, boys.”
It was funny going out into the great day. I wasn’t sure I was ready.
We walked around the cabin and already the places we had tracked up were covered with snow, the slash piles snowy heaps. The boys would have to haul all those sticks next summer.
“Up the dead end,” I said. “And then across the marmot ranch and into the trees.”
At the top of the spur road, I led up across the rock spill where all the marmots lived in the summer and they were certainly back in their chambers now. At the far side, I slipped and knocked my knee on the last rock. Colin grabbed my arm and held me up.
“You okay?”
“I’m good.” There were no tracks, but across and into the trees, we merged onto a game trail already marked by two deer or three, fresh tracks in the snow. When we were in the trees, Nick said from the rear, “This is just a little weird.”
“Not really,” I said.
When we approached the big red sandstone boulders, I turned and said, “Do you know where you are? Can you find this place?”
We looked back, marking the grove of trees.
“It’s not even half a mile.”
“Got it,” Colin said.
“We’ve been here before,” Nick said. He was standing next to me and then closer and he bumped me like he always did.
“A couple times,” I said. “Remember when we saw the coyotes, the mother and the pups, and we had to stop so Max wouldn’t catch the scent?”
“Right,” Nick said. “These are those big red-rock rooms.” We walked the corridor between the rocks each as big as a bus, and I stopped. It was strange to be here in the snow. Once, twenty years ago, I’d surprised forty elk here and they’d stood and disappeared like vapor. That was when I knew the spot. Now it was quiet in the space between the rocks and the snow fell silently in the odd shelter.
“This is it,” I told the boys. “Stand up there on those rocks and let me go.” You could see our breath in the spotty snow, the gray afternoon. Nick had come up and grabbed hold of me, just a hug.
“Good idea,” Colin said and grabbed me, such big men. “You want us to mark it? Should I make a steel tag, your initials?”
“No need,” I said. “You guys will know. That’s enough.”
“Good deal,” Colin said. “We’ve got it. It’s a great place.” My son looked at me. “You want to say something? You’re the guy with words.”
“Not really,” I said. “It’s sweet to be here.” Then I added, “You boys.”
“Let’s go back,” Nick said. “We’ll fish that lake tomorrow, but every step from here starts to take us home.”
“You lead,” I told him. “So I know you know the way.”