Island Richards

• Spent the last five days chasing deer and elk with Scott and Dad, but didn’t catch anything. Had fun though! #

Teresa and I took a ride around Little Mountain yesterday. The idea was to scout for elk since I have a permit for that area again this year. Rifle season opens Oct. 1, but archery season is going on right now. I hadn’t planned on bowhunting so I didn’t take one, even after Dad said just before I left, “You better take a bow, because if you don’t, you’ll see one at ten yards and wish you had one.”

“No, I said, just looking today.”

We drove around Little Mountain for about four and a half hours and saw plenty of antelope and deer, including a couple of nice muley bucks, but not a single elk. Not a single elk, that is, until we started heading home.

As we came around a curve in the dark, I thought, “Why is there a great big dead cedar in the middle of the road?” Then that great big dead cedar jumped and ran off the road to the right. He was massive. Long heavy beams and a big clubbed drop tine on his right side. I turned my headlights toward him and he stopped about ten yards off the road and struck the classic pose with his nose stuck up in the air. We tried to take a picture, but couldn’t get the camera to work in the dark. Arghhh.

Then, he turned around and walked across the road again right in front of us, ten or fifteen yards away in full view of the headlights. Six points on his left side, but way bigger than my bull from last year. Wow. He meandered across the road and jumped the fence on our left, almost getting his back feet tangled in the top wire, and joined a couple of cows just out of range of the headlights, but close enough for their eyes to shine blue in the darkness.

I know it was dark, and I know I was excited, but I’m pretty sure he was the biggest bull I’ve ever seen in the wild. (Yellowstone and feed lot bulls aside) Scott thinks he was probably a bull that a friend of his has been photographing for the last couple of years, and if he is the same one, estimates that he is about a 370 bull.

It was too dark to shoot him, even if I had brought a bow, but just seeing him was well worth it. Next time though, I bet I have a bow with me.

National Park Service 9-11 Statue of Liberty and WTC Fire

Today marks the 7th anniversary of a day our country will never forget. I don’t have to explain it to you. If I needed to, you would never understand anyway.

On that morning, I was scheduled to work the morning shift at one of our family businesses, and I was on my way to work at about 5:15am (Mountain Time) listening to the morning news when the newscaster mentioned something about a prominent leader and promoter of democracy in Afghanistan having been assassinated that morning. I didn’t give it much thought until later that morning.

A while later, during a break in customers, I caught the first report that some type of plane had crashed into one of the towers. Wow, I thought, that’s horrible. I wasn’t very good at taking care of my customers for the rest of that morning. Sure, I went through the motions, rang up their stuff, and took their money, but my ears and attention were on the radio that I had turned up to full blast. I listened intently as they reported the second plane had crashed into the second tower. Oh, God! I, along with every commentater, was sure now that this was a terrorist attack. I wondered at the time if it was related to the assassination report that I had heard that morning, but any further news of that was lost in the chaos that was unfolding in New York City.

I listened with horror as they described the collapse of the first tower, and was numb with the realization that possibly thousands of people were dying at that very moment. I had made a few calls home and to other family members throughout the morning, but I felt the need right then to talk to my wife again, so I ignored the customers that were in the store and called home. I don’t remember what we said to each other, but it was enough to comfort one another and keep us moving through the morning.

When the second tower fell, so did my heart. I listened as they described the loss of the firefighters who had entered the towers to save strangers, and the sadness compounded. I was glued to the radio or the television for the rest of the day.

For some reason, I had to be out of town that night, and my whole family spent it in a hotel a couple hundred miles from home. We had all been numb all day. We tried to explain to our three children, who were between 6 and 11 at the time, what had happened. They were too young to truly understand, thankfully, but I know that we were all struggling with what was happening. Later that night, probably after midnight, my wife and children were all asleep in the room, but I was still glued to the television, enthralled by what was happening to those people 2000 miles away, but so close to my heart.

At one point during the coverage, journalists were interviewing people from around the world and recording their reactions to the tragedy that had just befallen the people of New York. Most made the obvious and expected statements — that it was horrible, that their hearts go out, etc. But one person was different. She said something that will stick with me until the day I die. She was a middle aged French woman on the streets of Paris, and when the reporter asked her thoughts on what had happened that day, she said, “Today, we all suffer together. Today, we all cry together. Today, we are all Americans.”

That is when I cried. With my wife and children sleeping quietly all around me, I cried.

-Wisdom