Twenty-Five Years Above Timberline

Twenty-five years ago this morning I was sitting on the side of a mountain above timberline, waiting on light.

My uncle and I had walked out of camp in the predawn dark to get to a place where we could watch for elk. It was the fourth day of Colorado muzzleloader season. You learn to make that walk without much conversation, boots finding the trail more by memory than by headlamp, and by the time we settled in above the basin the eastern sky was just starting to gray out the stars. Below us the alpine valley that cradles Taylor Reservoir was still holding the night in it. That is a view worth the climb on any morning of your life.

What we noticed, and what we talked about, was the quiet.

Not the ordinary quiet of that country. Something heavier than that. No contrails stitched across the blue as the sun came up. No high steady drone from thirty thousand feet. Anyone who spends time in the high country knows how much of the sky belongs to airplanes, even when you are not paying attention to them, and that morning the sky over Taylor Park was empty. We remarked on how eerie it was. We had no way of knowing what it meant. We sat there and watched an alpine valley and commented on the absence of aircraft while the rest of the country was watching the towers come down.

It would be several hours before someone came into camp with the news that America was under attack.

We heard those words in disbelief. There was no possible way that was occurring. Not here. That was the first honest reaction, and I think it was the same reaction most Americans had in the first minute, whether they were standing in a kitchen in Denver or sitting on a rockslide above timberline.

We went looking for a radio signal in a place with no cell coverage and precious little of anything else. Whatever we could pull in came and went with the terrain. What came through was enough. It was not the facts that landed on us so much as the sound of the voices carrying them. You could hear the panic in the reporters. You could hear a nation that did not know where its own president was, and did not know what was coming next, and was saying so out loud on the air. Sitting in a camp of a dozen or so in the mountains of Central Colorado, listening to that, it began to resonate that something in the world had changed. Shifted.

Then the thoughts went to the people who were not with us.

Our own safety was secure for the immediate time being. We were a ragged band of Rocky Mountain hunters, armed with primitive weapons, sitting a long way from anything anyone would want to attack, and with no clue what was happening in the outside world. That is an odd kind of shelter. It keeps the danger off you and it keeps the information off you at the same rate.

My father and my de facto uncle had wives in Florida. With every aircraft in the country grounded and no word on when that would change, those two women were stranded, and there was nothing to be done about it from a camp in Taylor Park. That was the part that got into the men around that fire. Not the abstraction of it. The specific people.

My uncle flew top secret missions in Strategic Air Command during the Cold War. When the question came up of where the president was, he answered it plainly, from what he knew of how that machine works and where it puts a president when the country is under attack. Hours later the reporting caught up and confirmed he had it right.

By the time we came back down to civilization, the footage that had been playing endlessly on every channel had been pulled, out of respect for the victims and for the sheer carnage being experienced by Americans at ground zero. So we came in behind the worst of it. We knew what had happened and we knew our lives and the course of history had been changed forever. What we did not know at that moment was how much. Nobody did. Twenty five years later I am still finding pieces of it in places I would not have thought to look.

That silence is the piece I have never been able to set down. Everybody who lived that day carries one image that comes back before the others do. Mine is an empty sky over an alpine valley, and two hunters sitting there remarking on how strange it was, hours before we had any idea what we were looking at.

I am proud to be an American. I hope that in just twenty five short years we have not forgotten our strength in solidarity.