Hig Flies to Grand Junction

Hig’s flight toward Grand Junction begins with a choice between the guarded routine he shares with Bangley and the possibility that a radio transmission might lead to news from beyond their immediate world. The message is already three years old, and its sender’s knowledge is uncertain; still, Hig starts The Beast and flies west over a landscape marked by fire, abandonment, and remembered life. The departure is both practical movement and a wager on the possibility of contact.

The transmission and the decision

Bangley first frames Hig’s proposed trip as a possible return to fishing, asking whether another fishing vacation is needed after the last one. Hig answers that he is flying, then identifies Grand Junction as his destination. The reason is a transmission from the tower there. When Bangley asks how long ago it came through, Hig says three years. The delay makes the message a frail basis for action: it is not a fresh invitation or proof that anyone remains at the tower, but a remnant of communication that might still point toward someone living.

Hig knows the flight is dangerous. He reasons that whoever sent the transmission had power and access to the tower’s powerful radios, and might know something worth learning. His hope is not specific; he wonders whether the sender might have news about the Arabs, but offers this only as a possibility. The trip therefore begins without certainty about who is waiting, what information might exist, or whether the signal’s source can still be reached. Its motive is the chance of news itself.

Bangley’s reaction sets that chance against his own habits of vigilance. He is working with a file and a pipe beneath the gun rack Hig built for him, part of a room arranged around ready firepower. He repeats the three-year interval and asks what the sender could know, but does not prevent Hig from going. Instead, he describes Hig as a shark who has to keep moving or die, and says Hig must do what he has to do. His words recognize the impulse without resolving the risk or offering reassurance; after Bangley walks away, Hig turns to the aircraft.

Starting The Beast

Before boarding, Hig hand-cranks the heavy hose back onto its roller. He climbs into The Beast, latches the door, switches on the master system, turns the key in the magnetos, and presses the starter. The Continental engine catches; its first rough turns give way to a steady roar as the propeller gathers speed. The sequence makes the flight concrete: after talk of an old transmission and uncertain news, there is fuel equipment to put away, a door to secure, and an engine to bring to life.

The aircraft’s acceleration carries a stark image of escape and disappearance. That sensation does not erase the danger Bangley has just acknowledged. It marks Hig’s departure from the settled perimeter and the habits that keep the two men alive there, even as the destination remains only a possibility beyond the mountains. The evidence records the beginning of the flight and its route, not a confirmed arrival at Grand Junction.

Across the Divide

Hig flies straight over the Continental Divide. Boulder lies burned below, while the angular slabs of the Flatirons rise against the mountains like blank headstones. Even the beauty of the terrain is inseparable from evidence of loss: a town once regarded as exceptionally beautiful could not endure. The view converts the journey into a passage through the remains of places that had seemed permanent.

The route carries The Beast over the ski area at El Dora. Old trails and slopes scar the mountain, and the empty lift chairs swing in the wind. The aircraft crosses a snow saddle close enough for Hig to see the tracks of a single large animal strung along the ridge. He registers the sight as nearly impossible, then thinks of the group as caught out too high. The mountain offers no simple reassurance of wilderness renewed; its exposed tracks and abandoned infrastructure instead sharpen the sense of a world where survival is contingent and elevation itself can become a trap.

Beyond the Divide, Winter Park and the Fraser Valley open into view. Ski runs appear tender green against the rust-colored dead forests, a contrast between new growth and visible ecological death. Hig has skied there before, so the flight passes through not only altered terrain but a landscape held in personal memory. The greens and rusts are present-day features of the view; the recollection gives them a second life as remnants of the world he once shared with Melissa.

Memory in the flight

As the aircraft passes the familiar ski country, Hig recalls a last time skiing there with Melissa. They split up for a run, and he rode beside a large man visiting for winter break with a church group from Nebraska. The man described the group as nondenominational and said they followed the Bible word for word. Hig remembers the speaker’s pleasant smile and head shake, and his own readiness to believe him. The memory is brief and specific, emerging amid the flight rather than interrupting it with a separate account of the past.

That ordinary encounter stands against the present view of empty lifts and dead forests. It also shows what the destination cannot yet promise: the radio signal may lead to news, but the flight already brings Hig face to face with the distance between former social life and the solitary work of crossing the mountains. Melissa’s presence survives in the remembered ski trip, while the living landscape below offers no return to that earlier world.

Significance and limits

The flight changes a three-year-old transmission from a trace of past contact into a present course of action. Hig does not know whether anyone is still at the tower or whether its operator has useful news; he chooses to investigate because the possibility matters enough to justify the risk. Bangley’s response crystallizes their difference without breaking their partnership: his attention remains with the weapons and the security of the place they defend, while Hig accepts the need to move beyond it.

The journey’s first leg does not resolve that uncertainty. It takes Hig over the Continental Divide and past the burned remains of Boulder, abandoned ski infrastructure, and Winter Park’s green trails against dead forests. In this movement between a hoped-for human signal and a damaged landscape, flight becomes neither proof of rescue nor escape from loss. It is an attempt to find out whether anyone beyond the familiar perimeter can still answer.