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 t
here 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.
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