The Empty Sky
A Bet on Another Season
Written in the truck with stops for sanity and soul, Taylor Park through Grand Junction, on toward Salt Lake and Idaho.
Twenty-five years ago this morning, I was sitting on a log near the top of a peak in Taylor Park, next to my uncle Charlie, and the sky was empty, and I did not know why.
We had walked in over the top in the dark. When the light came up we sat, the two of us, and looked down into the park where the timber falls away to the reservoir. It was quiet. Too quiet, even for that country. No wind in the trees to speak of. And when I looked up there were no contrails. Not one. The sky over the Rockies on a clear September morning, and nothing crossing it.
My uncle and I sat there and we did not know what was going on. Two thousand miles east it had already happened. The towers were already down or coming down. The world had already changed and the news had not climbed the mountain yet. We sat in it and felt only that something was strange about the sky, and then we got up and hunted, because that is what we were there to do.
We found out a few hours later, back at camp, in pieces. Somebody had a radio, and we set in the camper and listened, trying to pull bits and pieces of it out of the air. The reception came and went. We had no cell phones then, or none that worked in that hole. So it reached us the way weather reaches you in the backcountry, in fragments, out of order, worse each time the signal returned. And you could hear it in the broadcasters' voices. The panic. The not knowing coming across the radio as plain as the words did.
They kept saying they did not know where the president was. Over and over. No word. We have not heard. As if the man were lost, or worse, and nobody in the whole country could tell you. Nine of us that year, or eighteen, I do not remember, grown men with muzzleloaders, black powder and patched balls, standing around a camper in the timber trying to understand whether it was war, and how far it would come, and whether the people we loved were under it.
But Charlie had been a crew chief on B-36s through parts of the Cold War, Strategic Air Command, stationed in places like Roswell and Greenland and Texas, and he understood the mechanics of a day like this in a way the newscasters did not. He listened to them say it again, no word on the president, and he just said it calm. He is in a base in Nebraska. We will hear about it later. And hours later it was confirmed. He had gone underground, into a secure bunker, exactly where Charlie said he would be at Offutt Air Force Base.
That is the thing I keep coming back to. That you can be sitting inside the morning that changes everything and not know. That the sky can already be empty and you read it as nothing but a strange quiet. And that some men, the ones who have seen enough, can look at the same fragments everyone else is panicking over and tell you plainly what is true.
I have been reading skies my whole life. Charlie taught me how.
We ran that camp for thirty years. Charlie and my dad held it between them, though Charlie was the elder by a dozen years and there was never any question whose camp it was underneath. When I was a boy he was a big man and a hard one, and camp was work. We cut wood. We packed animals. We did what we were told. He was the command, and you did not cross it.
He softened later. Got quieter. More given to sitting and watching than he had been. I noticed it the way you notice a season turning, not on any one day but all at once, looking back.
I asked him once how he saw so much game when I saw so little. I was young and I was walking the ridges the way young men walk, fast, covering country, sure the elk were somewhere ahead of me. He told me it was simple. He said he just made sure he looked. Walk ten steps. Stop. Look all the way around. Ten more steps. Stop. Look again. That was it. That was the whole of it.
Years later, a stretch of years on from that log and the empty sky, I got to watch him do it, and he never knew I was there.
I was sitting against a log on the edge of an aspen stand, drinking tea, when a small bull, a spike, fed his way down into the aspens below me and bedded. He was not spooked. He had no idea I was there either. He just folded up in the grass and lay there in the sun, chewing, easy, the light on his face.
Then up through the trees above him I caught the orange of my uncle's vest coming down the ridge. And he was doing exactly what he had described to me. A few steps. Rest on his walking stick. Look all around. A few more steps. And then he saw the bull bedded in the aspens, and he stopped.
He did not raise his rifle. He circled a little and found himself a rock and sat down on it, on the far side of that bull from me, the two of us bracketing the animal without the animal knowing either of us was on the mountain. Charlie took out his lunch. He ate his sandwich and drank his tea. Then he packed it all up, quiet, put it back on his back, stood, and walked past the bedded bull and on up the ridge. He never lifted the gun. I do not think he ever saw me. He just let it be. He let it live.
I did not understand it as a lesson that day. I only knew it had weight.
The next year, working over the ridges toward the road, I came on a five point. A good bull. A bull I would have taken any other year without a thought. I raised up on him. And I held there, and I watched him.
By then I had reasons of my own to know that a body only gets so many seasons, and I had started to feel every one of mine. I will not lay the particulars out here. It is enough to say that somewhere in those years the country stopped being a thing I moved across without thinking and became a thing I measured myself against, and I did not always like the measure. A man who has felt his own clock start to run does not look at a living animal the same way. It stopped being predator and prey. He had his seasons left the way I had mine, numbered, running, and I found I did not want to be the one to end his count just because I could.
So I let him bring me close, closer than I had any right to get, twenty yards. And then I eased off. I let the bow down. I said, quiet, I will see you next year, buddy. And I let him walk off unhurried, unspooked, still whole, still out there to be met again.
I did not know it, but Cody was up on the ridge above me, not far, through the trees. He had watched the whole thing. We worked our way out separately and ended up on the road together later, and that is when he asked me. Why did you not shoot. Why would you let a bull like that walk.
I told him the only thing that was true. I said, as we get older, sometimes the better thing is to let him walk and plan on seeing him again. Sometimes the whole reason you are able to take a thing is so you can choose not to, and keep it out there in front of you instead.
Charlie was eighteen when my grandfather passed. My dad was six. My grandfather was a strong man in our family, a man who worked every day of his life until the day he could not, and when he was gone there was a hole in that house that had to be carried. It was my grandmother who carried it. She raised my dad and my aunt Marie, Marie the big sister, and my father has never lost his respect for what that woman did and what it cost her. Charlie did his part. He was barely a man and he stepped up on his father's passing, and then he went off to the Air Force, and when he came home he was there again, a steady presence over that family for the rest of his life. But the day to day of raising those two children fell to my grandmother, and she did not set it down.
So when I say Charlie and my dad shared the camp, understand what is underneath it. That family was carried by more than one strong pair of hands. And Charlie's were among them, from the time he was hardly more than a boy.
He passed four, five years ago now. And the camp broke up. Thirty years of it, and it did not survive him. That is not a coincidence and it is not a mystery. When the man who holds the thing is gone, the thing scatters. It is only a question of how fast.
Stan is Charlie's son. Stan and I came up together from grade school on, the two youngest on my dad's side of the family. My own brother is three years behind me, and he ran more with another set of cousins on my mom's side, Tanya and Tammy, so it was Stan and me who were paired at the bottom of it. Weekends. Summers. Years of them. You do not choose the family you are born into, but somewhere in all those weekends I chose Stan, and he chose me, and it took. He was not a cousin by then. He was a brother I got to pick.
It got truest when we were down. In my twenties I was coming apart from my first marriage, the boys still little, toddler sized, and Stan was already through an ugly divorce of his own. And the two of us made a pact. We were going to stay single for a few years and actually live. And we did. We went archery hunting in the high country, just the two of us. We fished. We planned things, the way you plan things when you are finally standing on your own feet again. Those were the years that made the bond what it was. Not the easy ones. The hard ones we got through side by side.
Then he met someone, and he went a different way than the pact. He married. I told him, straight, we said we were going to stay single a while and enjoy what we had. But a heart goes where it goes, and a year or two later I married Kate, so I was in no place to hold his own choice against him. We tried to keep the thing alive across two marriages. It did not hold. The distance came in, helped along by people and forces around us that I am not going to lay out on a page, and the door that had always been open between us swung most of the way shut.
We have not spoken in any meaningful manner in three years.
I am not going to lay it on anyone. I have lived long enough to stop needing a villain for these things. The truth is quieter and worse. The thing that held us let go, and the distance came the way weather comes into the backcountry, in fragments, worse each time, until one day you look up and the sky between you is empty and you cannot say exactly when it cleared. Stan is still around. He is not gone. But the two old men we were going to become, the last two standing, upside down in that biplane, they never got made.
And here is the part I have to be honest about. I did not see it coming. Me, of all people, taught by the best there was to walk ten steps and stop and look all the way around. I did not read the sky between Stan and me until it was already empty. That is the cost of not seeing. That is what it takes from you. And I have carried that one a long way.
Here is the part that is hardest to write, because it is the part where I got to be Charlie for a while.
My boys started coming up to Elk Camp when they were big enough to rabbit hunt, eight and ten years old, Cody and Dylan two years apart. Stans’s son Spencer was two years older than Dylan and Tyler and had been a regular in camp basically since he could walk. And they all came up with their cousin Tyler, my brother Jim's boy as well. Tyler and Dylan were born a month apart, Tyler at the end of June, Dylan at the end of July, and Cody ten days off that on the calendar two years up. So the four of them in various combinations were a cluster, the next set of youngest coming up together, the way Stan and I had been the youngest coming up together a generation before. That is how the camp always worked. There was always a pair or a knot of boys at the bottom of it, learning to see.
When they were little they would hike with us, camp with us, take in the whole thing, and then most years they would head back after the first weekend to go to school. Twelve was the line. Once a boy could carry a big game tag he could stay up and hunt elk with the men. And that was our camp in those years. Me, Stan, my dad, Charlie, my brother Jim, and the boys. That was the group that stuck. That was the bunch that held together.
Cody and I got his first bull together, walking up on it side by side at the same moment. There are not many things a father gets to do exactly even with his son, but that was one, the two of us walking up on it together, neither one ahead of the other.
And then there is Dylan's cow, and I will tell it the way it happened, because it is the best thing I ever watched in that camp.
Dylan was seventeen. It was a Wednesday, the last day the boys and I were going to be in camp. We had already broke camp down. I had tagged out my cow with the muzzleloader but I still had an archery elk tag in my pocket, and Dylan had a muzzleloader cow tag, so we went out to do one last push. I was not even in my hunting clothes anymore. Tennis shoes, blue jeans, a white T shirt, a ball cap, carrying my bow up into the timber. Cody was more interested in the truck, because a boy that age without a license, the only place he gets to drive is up in the hills, so he stayed down with it. Six of us walked that ridge to push it out toward the trucks.
I got maybe a hundred yards up into the timber when I heard a boom. Good, I thought, somebody is into elk. Then another boom, not long after, and these are muzzleloaders, it takes a while to reload one. Then a third. I figured the elk were running the line and everybody was getting a chance. So I held still against a tree and let the dust settle. And while I was standing there a bull came down through the trees walking right at me, slow, closer and closer, and I could not move without him seeing me, so I stayed pressed to that tree until he was ten yards off on the far side of it. When his head went behind the trunk I dropped, knocked an arrow, came up the other side, and took him. A through and through. He ran, the way they do, and I marked the blood and let him go, figuring he would bed down and stiffen up and we would find him easier.
So I walked up the ridge to see who had been shooting. The first one I came to was Chancey. Chancey Parsons, a family friend going back further than I have been alive. His dad was the principal when my own dad was in high school, and Chancey has been part of this family forever. I asked him, was that you, did you get a shot. And Chancey shook his head. No. He never saw a thing, never got a shot off. He nodded on up the ridge. It came from up there, he said, toward Stan and Dylan.
So I kept climbing, still not knowing, and a little farther up I found Stan. I asked him the same thing, was that you shooting. And Stan started to laugh. He said, no. He said, that was all your kid. That was all Dylan. He said it looked like the Last of the Mohicans. Dylan had taken his shot, and when the cow ran he went after her down through the timber on a dead run, reloading the muzzleloader while he ran, took another shot, she rolled and got up, and he loaded again on the move and kept after her through the trees until he got her. Seventeen years old. Stan saw the whole thing, and Stan is the one who handed me that story, laughing, proud of my boy like he was his own.
That was Dylan's first cow. And I have to tell it true. That was the year before he went into the Marine Corps. It was very nearly the last whole day. Because the Dylan who ran that cow down through the timber, the one Stan watched and could not stop grinning about, is not the Dylan who came home. He came back from the Corps carrying a hard, hot anger, and he has been swinging it at his own blood ever since. I do not tell that to take anything from him. I tell it because I want it on the record that there was a day, before, when everything in that boy was pointed the right direction, and it was a glory to watch.
We never did find my bull. We looked four hours that day, and after Cody and Dylan and I left for Grand Junction the other men walked that ridge another day or two, and nobody ever turned up a track. That is the part that still sits with me. On the best day, the day my son became something in that camp, I left an animal in the timber I could not account for. Both things are true about the same morning. That is how it always is up there. That is how it always is anywhere.
And now I am watching the same fracture start again, one turn of the wheel down.
Cody and Dylan are not speaking. Cody marries Meg in two weeks, and Dylan is not part of it. Two sets of near brothers, mine and Stan's, and now Cody and Dylan, thirty years apart, same country, same ridges, same break. I could not read it the first time, with Stan, until it was already done. I am not going to make that mistake twice if I can help it.
So today, driving through Taylor Park country on the anniversary of the emptiest sky I ever saw, I did the only thing the seeing is actually good for. I reached.
I had lunch with Cody and Meg. Two weeks out from their wedding, him up hunting the same country that made all of us, and we sat down together like men who have a future to plan. And I got Dylan on the phone. That door has slammed on me more times than I want to count, and this time it did not. We talked. It was good. He is working, working toward a promotion, moving his life forward, and if he is being straight with me, and I think he is, he is in a good place. He left it open for more. There is still an older thing between him and me to sit down over one day, some hard words said in a hard season, air I would like to clear when the time is right. But today was not the day to force any of that. Today was the day to keep the door from closing.
I did not tell either one of them I was seeing the other. That was not theirs to carry today. Today I just went to each of my sons, separately, the way you walk up on something you do not want to spook.
And I told them both the same thing, and I am still not sure I should have said the last part, but I said it anyway. I told them that at some point this is theirs to mend. That I cannot do it for them, much as it would kill me to leave it undone, that a father does not get to reconcile his sons any more than he gets to shoot the bull for them. That it breaks my heart to stand here and watch it and not be able to fix it. And then I said the thing I said. That I hope the next time the two of them end up in the same room, trying not to look at each other, it is not at my funeral.
That is the whole of what I can do. I know that now, driving north with the aspens going gold on both sides of me and the light coming down the way it only does this one month of the year.
I cannot mend it for them. I could not mend it with Stan either, and I was in that one myself, with both hands. That is the hardest thing the years have taught me, that you can see a thing coming with perfect clarity and still not be able to reach out and stop it. Seeing was never the same as fixing. Charlie could read where the president would be from a mountaintop with a broken radio, and he still could not have told you, that clear September morning, everything that was coming for this country. Nobody gets to know. Nobody gets to fix it in advance. You get to see, and you get to reach, and then you have to let the country do what the country does.
But I have also lived long enough to know the other half of it. I let that five point walk and I meant it, I will see you next year, and there were plenty of years I did see him again, or one just like him, standing in the same aspens grown a little older, both of us. The bull you let live is not a loss. It is a bet on another season. And you make that bet because you have decided, somewhere down in the part of you that has felt its own clock, that the point was never the killing. The point was the seeing him at all, and the chance to see him again.
So that is the bet I am making with my boys. I said my piece to each of them today, quiet, close, no shot fired. And now I let them walk, because that is the only way they come back on their own feet, which is the only way that lasts. Cody has Meg and a wedding two weeks out and a whole life pointed forward. Dylan has a promotion he is chasing and a door he left open a crack, and a crack is not nothing, a crack is where the light gets in. I do not get to force the two of them back into the same country. But I raised them in it. It is in them the way Charlie's ten steps are in me. And I have to believe that what a man is given young does not scatter as easily as a camp does.
I did not know, twenty five years ago on that log, where any of this would land. You never do. The sky is always already changed before the news climbs the mountain. But I know what Charlie put in me before he went, and it did not scatter when he did, and it is in the truck with me right now running north toward Idaho, and if I have done this right it is in my sons too, waiting on a season I may not live to see.
Ten steps. Stop. Look all the way around.
I will see you next year, buddy.
That is what he meant. That is what he still means. That is what I am driving with, and it is enough to go on.