Chapter 7

Tuesday, November 24, 1998

This ought to be a pretty quiet evening, Jason thought as he wheeled his Ford pickup truck into the driveway and hit the button for the garage door opener. He knew Vicky was working the evening shift at Walmart, which she hated -- along with every other shift -- and since it was a council night, Kevin would be watching the kids. It might be a good night to watch TV, or if there was nothing in particular on, to check out the W.E.B. Griffin novel he'd bought a couple months before and just hadn't gotten around to reading.

It would make a nice break. The three of them had been hitting the bike rebuilding and knife making pretty hard the last couple weeks. Kevin couldn't come over as much as he wanted to without drawing Emily's suspicion that something might be up, so he and Vicky had put in a fair amount of time on it on their own and were making good progress. It was still a couple weeks away from major reassembly, but he hoped it wouldn't be much more -- there needed to be some time for testing, and for dealing with the unexpected problems that almost certainly would arise.

The evenings had been pleasant, even though they were split between knife work and work on the bike. Kevin was starting to pick up on the forge and anvil work some; although he was a beginner, he was proving to have some talent at it and showing some interest in it. It seemed likely that he might stay with it some once the work on the little Harley was completed. It would be nice if that worked out; over the years the knife making had proved to be a solitary hobby, but Jason enjoyed the teaching and the camaraderie that went along with working with someone else.

As he parked the pickup in the garage and hit the button to close the door, he gave some thought to eating. He'd already made up his mind to bypass the Chicago for once; while the food was pretty good it got old after a while. Back in the years when Duane had been living at home, they'd often cooked dinner, but just cooking for himself was a pain in the ass, so if he did fix anything he usually didn't put much effort into it. Nuking some hot dogs and having some chips along with it would probably do nicely, he thought as he headed inside.

He'd no more than set his lunch box on the shelf when the phone went off. It proved to be Vicky's mother Mignon. "Jason, would you like to come to dinner tonight?" she asked. "Vicky's working, so I've got an extra pork chop that will go to waste otherwise."

"Yeah, sure," he replied automatically. It was not an infrequent invitation, although irregular; since Duane had left for college over three years ago, it had come about once a week. When you got right down to it, the Varneys were about the closest friends he had, going back a long, long way; he'd gone to school with both Joe and Mignon from early elementary years through high school. He'd dated Mignon for a while in high school, even though she'd been a grade ahead of him. Even with the help his folks had been, there was no way he could have made it through the last years with Christine without their help. There were plenty of debts of friendship there that would be impossible to repay, short of a major illness or catastrophe that he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy. "What time?"

"Oh, when you get here. Joe isn't home yet."

"Good enough," he replied. "I'll change out of my work clothes and wander over after a while."

Even though he worked on the plant floor, he usually wore nicer clothes to work than he did when he was in the back shop at the forge. Even though he didn't plan on going out there tonight it was good to get out of his work clothes and take a shower before heading across the back yard.

"Joe's still not home although I expect him any minute," Mignon reported after he'd knocked on the back door and gone inside. As always, she was well-dressed; she worked in an office and didn't like to look like a slob. A little shorter than her daughter, she was even heavier-set, but still, even at their shared age, not a bad looking woman, going gray now -- and, hell, there was a little of it around his own temples, as well. She'd been on the chunky side even in grade school, he remembered, but hadn't gotten beyond that until after he'd come back from the Army to discover she and Joe had moved in across the back yard.

"Anything I can do to help?"

"Not really," she shrugged. "It's pretty well under control until he's here. You like a beer?"

"Sure, I'm not going to turn one down," he smiled.

In a moment, she handed him a Miller's and opened one for herself. "So," she asked conversationally, "Are you working Thursday?"

One of the downsides of the job at General was the place worked twenty-four hours a day, every day; truck drivers were on the road all the time, and time spent sitting around was time and money wasted. That meant there had to be some people who worked over holidays, even Christmas. In most cases people wouldn't like that very much, but they kept things to a skeleton crew, and people who volunteered to work a major holiday got two days off in payment, so they usually had little grousing and little trouble with getting those days staffed. In general, the custom was if you worked Thanksgiving you'd get Christmas off, or vice versa, although there were people who would trade around for the extra days off.

"Thought I might as well," he reported. "I kind of wanted to be off Christmas. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the last one with Duane for a while."

"He's coming home for Thanksgiving?" she asked.

"He's supposed to wrap up classes Wednesday noon and then head down," Jason reported. "So, it's going to be nine or ten before he gets here. I'm actually a little surprised he's coming at all, but they lock the dorms, and they must not have much snow at the ski areas."

"It'll be nice to see him again," she replied. "I just didn't get much chance to see him last fall."

"Hell, I didn't either," he snorted. "He was only here about twelve hours and sleeping most of them." He shrugged, shook his head, and went on, "But hell, when I was his age, I didn't have a lot of time for the folks either, so I guess I understand."

"That's a boy for you," she nodded. "Troy is the same way, but I think Duane got more than a little of his mother's wanderlust."

Jason understood without clarification that Mignon meant Jody, and not Christine, who had been the kind of person happy where she was. Although Jody had burned his ass big time when she left, in later years he'd gotten a little philosophical about it. She wasn't a person to be tied down, and she had to have felt desperately trapped to resort to the extreme measure she'd taken. Still, the resentment had burned out long ago; he only occasionally got a little curious about where she might be, if she were still alive at all. "I'm sure that plays a part," he agreed without emotion. "Of course, I must have had something to do with it."

He did, of course -- and so did the Varneys, to a degree. The Varneys, young and old, had gone out of their way to take Duane under their wing a little during Christine's last years -- Vicky, of course, along with Joe and Mignon and especially their youngest son, Troy, a grade ahead of Duane. In spite of that difference, which can be a big deal in school, they were best friends and playmates through elementary school, and to a somewhat lesser extent in middle school and high school. After Christine died, Jason's major priority was to reconnect with his son a little, to try and make up for some of the times he had to be shunted to the side because of her illness. Troy got swept up in that, partly because they were friends, but also because Jason felt he needed to pay the Varneys back a little for all their kindnesses toward Duane.

Back when Jason had been a kid, Boy Scouts had been a big deal and he'd been heavily involved, but he had discovered in the years since that much had changed, and for the worse. Scouting was no longer the big movement it had once been; only a handful of Bradford kids were involved by then, the attention of most having been sucked off by video games, computers, school sports, and television. Still, Duane had a taste for the outdoor stuff and with Jason's encouragement and involvement, more or less stayed with it through high school; Troy drifted away after a while, drawn by sports and girls. Though never a star, Duane played football in the fall and wrestled in the winter, but his heart was really in less-organized outdoor pleasures.

Both Jason and Duane had a greater taste for the outdoors than they could get out of the Boy Scouts. Neither of them thought the scouts got outdoors enough and screwed around too much when they did. Although Duane stayed with it to become an Eagle Scout, the real adventures were outside their purview. For several years they did major summer trips and some shorter weekend stuff. It started out with easy river canoeing, often in the early years with Joe and Troy, but went on to headier stuff. As Troy and Joe's interest faded, another scout and dad combination, Cory and Dave Luma started to join the trips. Over the next few years, there were canoe trips to places like the Boundary Waters in Minnesota and some rivers in Ontario, along with weekend trips whitewater kayaking and rafting in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Jason's interest in whitewater was limited, but Dave got into it pretty seriously, and they took a number of trips to the East Race artificial whitewater course in South Bend. As a result, Duane was pretty skilled around whitewater by the time he got out of high school.

They did things other than rivers -- hunting and fishing, for example. Duane's heart really wasn't in deer hunting, even though he'd become a respectable shot with both gun and bow. It proved he'd really rather watch the deer than shoot them; he rather enjoyed small game hunting, though. He became moderately skilled with a fly rod and wasn't above dropping a line in the water during a break on a canoe trip. In the winter there was skiing and snowboarding; although it was a long haul to a good ski hill, he became moderately skilled at that.

The Midwest isn't great backpacking country but has some pretty good spots. A week or two of backpacking was a regular feature of summer over several years, places like Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, the Porcupine Mountains, the Superior Hiking Trail, and finally, the year before Duane was a senior, Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior.

Troy and Joe hadn't gone on that trip; Troy had graduated from high school that spring and preferred to spend what time he could with his girlfriend before he headed off to college, so that trip was just Jason and Duane and Dave and Cory. For Duane, the trip proved to be a watershed.

One night ten days out and towards the end of the trip, the boys were feeling rather down about the hike coming to an end. At the time Jason's legs were thinking warm thoughts about the comfort of the seat of a fork truck, and Dave was having similar thoughts about his backhoe. That evening, hanging around on the beach at Little Todd Harbor on the Minong Trail just watching the sunset, they happened to meet a young couple who had hiked the full length of the Appalachian Trail a couple years previously. They had great stories about their summer-long hiking adventure and the sights they'd seen, and the bug bit Duane and Cory hard.

Over the course of the next few months the boys researched the idea of a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail, initially with the idea of doing it the next summer. Soon, they came to the conclusion it was just too big a bite to chew in the slightly under three months they'd have between graduating from high school and starting college. On top of that, it was probably too big for the nearly four months' break they'd have over the summer in college, but after they developed an alternative they moved the AT to the "eventually" file. Over the winter, they discovered that a little-known, long-distance hiking trail ran right through Michigan. While it was unfinished and in pieces, there were large sections of it completed from near Grand Rapids, a hundred miles to the north, and the Wisconsin border at the far west end of the state's Upper Peninsula. Many of the gaps could be filled on small forest roads. At about 800 miles, it was just about the right size for their end-of-high-school break, leaving enough time to pack for college. To top it off, the kids decided they wanted to do it by themselves as a rite of passage.

That was just fine with both Jason and Dave, as if there were some way they could get off for two months at the height of the summer, anyway. Privately, they figured there was only about a fifty-fifty chance the kids would make it all the way before cashing in their chips, but both the men pretty much remembered what it was like to want to gain their spurs and their independence. Cory's mother was a little negative about the two being out in the woods by themselves, until both Jason and Dave reminded her they'd both been only months older when they'd gone to Vietnam. A summer on a hiking trail seemed like a much better adventure all the way around.

The day after their high school graduation, Dave dropped the two off at Croton Dam near White Cloud, Michigan, and they disappeared into the forest. There were occasional phone calls home over the next weeks; the two made good time through Michigan's Lower Peninsula, then, a little more trail hardened they headed off into the wilds of the Upper Peninsula. North of Tahquamenon Falls they lost the faint trace of the poorly maintained trail, and more or less bushwhacked their way along backwoods tracks until reaching Lake Superior, then turned west. Right after the first of August, Jason got a phone call that they were almost done, and would he be so nice as to pick them up the day after tomorrow? He did, driving almost 600 miles one way to do it, to find the two tan and hard, just about ready to blow off school and follow the trail west to North Dakota. But bigger things beckoned, and they stuck to the plan.

For some time it had been more or less clear to both the boys that they wanted to have some sort of outdoor career, and Cory had been thinking about wildlife biology. But Duane had picked out a different idea: more than a year before, on the Isle Royale trip, the four had spent a quiet evening talking with one of the park rangers who roamed the backcountry. Duane was awed by the fact that people actually got paid to do such a thing! The young woman, whose name he'd long forgotten, had clued him in on a number of things, not all of which were upsides.

One of the first downsides was that it was very difficult to get into the National Park Service on a full-time basis -- it was necessary to work as a seasonal employee for some years, usually over a decade, before enough seniority to get a full-time job could be accumulated. But, Duane eventually reasoned, that wasn't all downside; it left part of the year when other things could be done. Especially during the period of being a seasonal, assignment locations could vary, but you got to see a lot of the country at six months here, six months there, six months somewhere else. When you stopped to realize that those places were national parks, many of interesting historical significance and some of magnificent wilderness and beauty, it seemed like a heck of a deal.