Waiting.

Every fall it's the same. The grass on the runs goes brown, the aspens drop, the snowmaking crew tests the guns on the cold nights, and everybody who works on the mountain walks around town looking up at the Divide like a farmer looking west in a dry June.

This morning there were clouds hanging on the peaks, low and gray, and I stood in the yard in my socks with my coffee and watched them. Nothing came of it. Shannon says I look at the sky the way my father does. She means it as a compliment. I'm taking it as one.

Here's how the season will go, if it goes like the last three. One morning it'll be white down to the trees. Then a week of cold, and the guns going all night. Refresher. Opening day, two runs of man-made, hard as a parking lot. First chair at 7:40. The bathroom questions. Sleds. Christmas. Control in the dark. Sweep at 3:45 every day till April, with me out in front now, looking in every tree well, last one down.

I'm thirty-three. My brother has the farm and my father is glad of it. I live in half a duplex with a woman who can back a grain truck up to the pit in one try. There's wheat in a pot on the windowsill again. She plants a few seeds from the coffee can every September, so there's something green in the house all winter.

It's going to snow. It always does. When it does I'll ride first chair, and at the end of the day I'll sweep Lode, and there's a thing in my sock drawer that has been waiting since August for the first sweep of the year. That's all I'll say.

Shannon, quit reading. Go look out the window and tell me if it's snowing.

Shannon and I hiked to the top today, the whole way, three thousand feet of climbing, because the summer lift is shut for the year and I wanted to check on the shack.

The shack's fine. Mice got in over the summer and had a party with a box of tongue depressors. The sleds are racked and covered. I sat on the bench outside, where I've drunk about four hundred cups of coffee, and looked down at Lode, all grass and rocks now, the bamboo stacked by the lift shack and Shannon's ramp bare.

From up there you can see the Divide and a long way past it. A couple of the high peaks got a dusting last week. It was gone in two days.

I bought something in Denver in August. It's in my sock drawer. That's all I'm going to say about it, since a certain person reads this now.

Patrol meeting tonight, first of the year, in the back room of the lodge. Thirty of us around the tables with coffee, half of us with farmer tans from summer jobs. Nine rookies, hired in August. Lift evacuation practice in October. Refresher starts November 8th.

At the end Gilley stood up and said that with Huntley going after this year he's making some changes, and that starting this season I'm the supervisor for the north side. That means Number 4, the shack, the control route on that side, and running sweep. Raise to $9.25.

Afterward I sat in the truck in the parking lot a while without starting it. Three years ago I was the rookie at the back of that same room who didn't know where the sleds lived.

Shannon was asleep when I got home. I left a note on the coffee maker. She'll find it at six.

First frost Tuesday morning. White on the truck windshield and on the grass in the bedsheet yard, gone by eight.

Trail crew finished today. The kids go back to college next week, all six of them, and every one of them shook my hand and called me sir one last time, on purpose. I let them.

The aspens are turning at the top of the valley, and the elk are bugling in the meadows above the base area. If you've never heard it: it starts low, like a man hollering across a field, and goes up into a whistle, high and strange, like a gate that needs oil. You hear it at dusk and in the dark. Shannon and I sat out on the step last night and listened for an hour. She said it sounds like the mountain trying to remember a song. I said it sounds like an elk.

That's about how our conversations go. She doesn't seem to mind.

Huntley came by the house last night with a six-pack and told us this coming season is his last. Fifteen seasons. His knees are done, his wife has been patient for fifteen years, and next summer he's going to sell insurance in Grand Junction for her brother. He said it the way he says everything, like the snow report.

He's the one who rode first chair with me my first day, and kept his mouth shut on my first sled, and got to the tree well when I needed somebody. I didn't say any of that. He knows. I said Grand Junction's a good town. He said it's a fine town. Shannon went in the kitchen for a while.

When he was leaving he said, "You're going to be the old man up there." I'm thirty-three. I said I wasn't. He said, "Sure you are. You look in every tree well."

The north side trail opened Friday, two weeks early. Shannon cut the ribbon with my pocketknife. (It was flagging tape.)

Saturday at two o'clock a man from Denver came down the new trail on a bicycle that cost more than my truck, faster than the trail was built for, and went over the handlebars on the third switchback. I was fifty yards below with the crew, setting rock. I heard it.

Collarbone. Nothing worse. I had my first aid kit in my pack, because I always do. In about four minutes I had him sitting up with his arm slung against his chest, and one of the kids ran down to the lift to radio for the four-wheeler. He kept apologizing for messing up our trail. I told him that's what it's for.

On the way down he asked if I was on the patrol in the winter. I said yes. He said, "How'd you know?" I said know what. He said, "That I was going to be fine. You looked at me and I knew I was going to be fine." I didn't have an answer for that. I don't know how to look any different.

One of the kids said afterward, "Sir, you were like a different person." I said don't call me sir. But I've been thinking about it. It's not a different person. It's just the one I'm surest of.

The bridge is in. Twenty-two feet, two log stringers, plank decking, a handrail on the downstream side. We set the stringers Wednesday with come-alongs and some language I'm not putting in my mother's folder. After the last bolt the kids all stood on it and jumped up and down at once to see if it would hold. It held. I stood on the bank thinking that's not how you test a bridge, and then I went out and jumped too.

Up high in July there's a storm about every afternoon around two. You can watch it build over the Divide from late morning: a little white cloud, then a tall one, then a dark bottom on it. When you hear the first thunder you have less time than you think. Thursday we were up on the ridge with steel tools in our hands when it came. I yelled, and we dropped everything and ran down off the ridge into the thick timber and crouched there in the rain with our feet together while it went over. The kids thought it was the most fun they'd had all summer. I was counting between the flash and the thunder, and I got to two.

Shannon shuts the summer lift down for lightning. She radios it in and the whole mountain stops. She says when you grow up with cows you learn to respect anything that can kill you without meaning to.

Back from Kansas last night. Twelve days.

Shannon drove the grain truck. By the second day she was better at it than me, which Craig enjoyed more than he needed to. The first time she pulled into the elevator in town, the old men at the scale house came out to watch a woman they didn't know back a loaded truck up to the pit. She did it in one try. One of them took his cap off.

On the last afternoon Dad let her run the combine for a round. Nobody runs Dad's combine. Craig and I stood at the end of the field with our mouths open, like the old men at the elevator.

The wheat was good. The price wasn't. Less than Dad got some years in the seventies, with everything else costing three times as much.

Mom took one look at Shannon and stopped asking me questions, because now she had somebody who'd answer them. Every night they sat at the kitchen table with the folder. I've mentioned the folder: every page of this, since 1996, printed out on Pam's printer and three-hole punched. Shannon read the whole thing in two nights. So she reads this now. Hello.

The last night, Craig and I walked out to the north field after supper. Stubble, and the sun going down red through the dust. I told him I don't want any of the land. It's his. He stayed. He said, "You sure." I said I was sure. We shook hands, which we've done maybe three times in our lives. When we got back to the house Mom was at the sink and didn't turn around, which means Craig told her first, or she guessed. She usually guesses.