Cave mountain, p.2
Cave Mountain, page 2
In a short time, perhaps about ten minutes, they came to Hawksbill Crag, oohed and aahed atop it, then continued hiking on the trail, which gets much wider and easier going on the south side of the lookout point at Hawksbill Crag, along the top of the bluff to the fork where, from the direction they were coming, the path on the right leads up the mountain to the trailhead on Cave Mountain Road and the one on the left leads a short way down to the small waterfall.
Now, a waterfall is a picturesque sight, but only when you’re standing at the bottom of it. This one is certainly no Niagara Falls; for most of the year Whitaker Creek is just a trickling stream that high up on the mountain, falling about thirty feet from a ledge. There are two flat shelves of rock on that side of the mountain: the higher one, from which the water falls, and a lower one maybe fifteen feet below it, too far a fall to safely jump. There is just no place to get a good look at the waterfall from the higher shelf. The first time I was there, I held on to a young tree, slender but strong enough to hold my weight, and bending it leaned over the edge of the cliff as far as I could, trying to get a look at the waterfall, until I started thinking what I was doing wasn’t a good idea. Apparently there is a way of scrambling down the rocks on the other side of the creek in order to see the waterfall and another way that involves climbing down a certain tree on the lower shelf that you can hop into from the upper one (and that’s the way Jay and Clay got down that day); either of these ways is only for the more advanced-level hiker, which Jay certainly was and six-year-old Haley was not. Jay and his old Boy Scouts comrade Clay Bass climbed down to the lower shelf from which you can see the waterfall, saw it, and climbed back up, while everyone else, including Joyce and Haley, stayed on top, resting and soaking up the view of the mountains. It was about a quarter to noon. Hiking to the crag and the waterfall had taken a bit more time than they’d thought it would, and if they wanted to get back to the cabin, eat lunch, and make it to the organized group hike to see the wildflowers that would begin at one, they would have to head back ASAP and make a little hay on the way back, too. By the time they began to hike back up the trail that passes Hawksbill Crag and leads back to the cabins, Haley was steaming with waterfall jealousy.
Child and grown-ups were at an impasse: Haley wanted to see the waterfall, but it was time to go. She sat down on a rock at the top of the waterfall and refused to move. She said she wanted to be carried. She was being difficult. She was being childish. She was a child.
Joyce told the others to go on ahead back to the cabin and fix lunch—she would stay behind and deal with the kid problem. The others headed back up the trail, though Clay stayed behind to keep Joyce company. Now it was three: Joyce, Clay, and Haley on the rock, unbudging. After many minutes of Joyce’s exhortations had failed to move her, Joyce and Clay resorted to the nuclear option of getting a kid to do something she doesn’t want to do: Play upon the fear of abandonment. “She was sitting there and pouting,” Joyce said, “and I said, ‘You sit right there so I can tell your mother where you are when she comes to get you. We’re going.’ Huff, huff.”
Then: Walk out of sight around the bend and wait. You have to wait kind of a while, because if this trick is going to work, it has to work the first time. If you come back too soon, she’ll know you’re bluffing. And eventually, Haley came—begrudgingly, defeated by the grown-ups, dragging her heels, saddest, angriest little girl in the world—her mood probably spoiled for the rest of the day, lunch and beautiful meadow full of wildflowers probably tainted with a petulant drop of poison. But she came.
Good, then—we have movement. Clay and Joyce started walking forward again. They continued up the trail until they were again just out of Haley’s sight. They stopped and waited again. Haley, again, pouting, dawdling, eyes downcast, face leaden with despair, emerged. Clay and Joyce continued up the trail around the next bend, stopped, and waited. And waited.
A long time passed.
Joyce told Clay to go ahead and join the others. She was going to have to go down there and drag Haley back by a rope or something. Clay left. Joyce went the other way.
Haley was gone.
I myself, having seen the place, am still a bit baffled as to how Haley got so lost so fast. At the fork in the trail, one way goes to the waterfall, one leads along the top of the bluff to Hawksbill Crag, and one leads across the creek and up the mountain to the trailhead on Cave Mountain Road. Granted, I saw it in the winter, when the nakedness of the trees affords much more visibility. They were there at the height of spring, when the leaf cover makes dark, narrow corridors of the trails, and a shout only carries perhaps ten or fifteen feet.
Joyce went back down the trail all the way to the waterfall: no Haley. She did not even begin to tingle with panic until she hiked back up from the waterfall, and saw the fork. Was this fork in the trail in between the last place Haley had shown herself and the last place where they had stopped to wait for her? She had thought they’d gone past it, but now she wasn’t sure. She went up the trail that leads up to the trailhead a ways, shouting her granddaughter’s name. From this moment on, Haley’s name was being shouted in the woods by ever more and more mouths, round the clock. Haley did not appear to be on that part of the trail. Eventually Joyce ran into two hikers who were coming down from the trailhead. They had not seen a little girl on the trail.
Soon Joyce and those two hikers and then in a short while Jay, Clay, and the Boleses had spread out up and down the trail looking for Haley, wildflower-viewing plans now definitely scrapped, shouting her name into the thick muffling foliage. What began with their frantic shouting eventually became the largest search-and-rescue mission in Arkansas history.
2
Hale Holler
I SHOULD TELL YOU A FEW THINGS ABOUT THESE PEOPLE, AND A few things about Arkansas. I grew up in Colorado, but both sides of my family are from Arkansas. My parents met when they were students at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville in the 1970s. My father grew up in a tiny town in the north-central Arkansas Ozarks called Horseshoe Bend, and my grandparents on my mother’s side are from Paris, Arkansas; my grandfather was a coal miner for a time; my roots there reach down deep, and far back. When I was growing up, we would usually drive across the icy brown flatlands between the Rockies and the Ozarks—eastern Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma—in December for the Christmas holidays, and we would often visit in the summers, too. My mother’s parents lived in Rogers, just north of Fayetteville, and Jay and Joyce lived about twenty minutes away on twenty-five acres of hilly, mostly wooded land near Pea Ridge: Hale Holler. That was where they had the office and machine shop they ran their mechanical engineering business out of—Jay was the head engineer and Joyce did the accounting, and they had a handful of employees—their own house, which had been on the property when they had bought it in 1970, and another house they built for Jay and my father’s mother. Usually when people say they “built a house” they mean “had it built,” but the verb is literal in Jay and Joyce’s case. The house they built for my grandmother had a pneumatic mechanical wrought-iron elevator in it, which would grunt and hiss in punctuated lurching harrumphs of energy on the way up and breathe a long smooth sigh on the way down. Almost immediately upon entering our grandmother’s house after that usually two-day drive across the barren winter prairie my brother and I usually managed to get two or three rides out of it before the grown-ups made us stop. The elevator—its floor was just a flat, treacherous wooden platform, no gate or rail or anything—was in fact the only way of getting between the first and second floors of the house, and I was a little heartbroken when, after my grandmother died, Jay and Joyce had to replace it with stairs in order to get the building up to code to rent it.
Most of my favorite childhood memories of Arkansas happened in Hale Holler: my grandmother, the elevator, the long spiral staircase on the outside of the house that Jay also wrought out of iron, catching crawdads in the creek that ran through the property with my little brother, James, and our cousin Ike, walking in the woods with Jay and Joyce, walking in the woods by myself.
Jay built that elevator, and he also built motorcycles, guns, and even the airplane he sometimes flew out to Colorado to visit my parents (I loved driving out to Boulder Municipal Airport with my dad to pick him up). Jay often visited Colorado, where he and Joyce had lived for a few years in the 1960s before moving back to Arkansas in 1970, shortly after Kelly was born, and up until a few years ago they still owned the land they used to live on, a beautiful spot on a secluded road up in the mountains west of Boulder in Fourmile Canyon. They had lived a very off-the-grid existence in Colorado, sleeping in a camper-trailer for a time, bathing and washing their laundry in Fourmile Creek. Their first child, a son, was born when they were living in Colorado, died as a baby, and he is buried on their land there. The weight of that tragedy, and its association with the place, was one of the reasons they moved back to Arkansas. Jay also had a few other good friends in Colorado, most notably Judd Johnson—another scientist/machinist/motorcyclist/mountain-man, who looks like Willie Nelson with Coke-bottle-lens glasses, another favorite character of mine when I was a kid. He still lives up there. Sometimes when Jay was visiting, he and my dad and I—sometimes with James, and sometimes with Judd if he was free—would drive up to their land in Fourmile Canyon to shoot Coke cans off a log: There was a .22 rifle my dad had, Jay often brought a classic Colt .45—“the gun that won the west,” the same model six-shooter that Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday would have brought to the OK Corral—and one year in particular (we shot it in subsequent years, too), I remember Jay presenting my father with the gift of an antique Spanish Mauser that he had machined new parts for and reconditioned himself. Developed by the German weapon designer Paul Mauser for the Spanish Army, the Mauser Model 1893 is a wonder of artillery engineering, a five-round bolt-action 7×57mm rifle that saw its most extensive combat action during the Spanish Civil War; it’s the gun the dying man in Robert Capa’s famous photograph Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936 (better known as The Falling Soldier) is frozen forever losing his grip on, and the same gun with which Ernest Hemingway shot elephants in the Serengeti—and regardless of my personal opinions on killing fascinating and endangered animals for fun, the thing fires with such thunderous power that one can easily imagine it stopping an elephant.
About twenty years ago, Jay started building another airplane, a Kitfox Classic IV, but the work was slow going as it was a purely extracurricular activity; old age caught up with him before he could finish it, and its half-fleshed-out chassis still sits in the machine shop in the basement of the house in Fayetteville they moved into in 2005, four years after Haley went missing.
One interesting complication of writing nonfiction is that reality is a moving target. Jay was alive for most of the time it took me to write this book, though he was sick with prostate cancer and dementia, and he died at the age of eighty-five on Thursday, May 30, 2024—five days ago as of this writing.
Jay was a mechanical engineer, my father is a laser physicist, and both of them were and are machinists. My dad uses his machine shop mostly to make very small metal parts for lasers, wherein precision is incredibly important; a mistake on the micrometer level could be the difference between the laser working or not. Though Jay usually worked on scales at least a decimal place to the left of that, my dad always had a reverence for his big brother’s wisdom on all things machining related. Until he retired, Jay’s machine shop was a professional endeavor, much bigger and better equipped than my dad’s home shop, and my dad often bought machines from him, including its pièce de résistance, a 1964 Bridgeport J-head mill that he outfitted with a digital readout that uses superfine graduated glass scales to get sub-thousandth-inch resolution/accuracy, which might sound a bit like installing a GPS system in a Studebaker, but: Jay and my father would adamantly insist that the Bridgeport models from fifty-sixty years ago and even further back, as long as they’ve been well-maintained, are still superior to most of the metal-working machines manufactured now. That was the machine our dad taught James and me how to use when we, at different points, worked for his micro–side business, Pathfinder Laser Products, which manufactured a device he invented for measuring the beamwidth of infrared lasers.
Anyway—Jay’s dementia steadily worsened over the year before he died, the fog around his mind thickening by the day, but one trick that could reliably bring him back to clarity for a moment almost until the end was to ask him about some sort of machining or engineering problem. The Proustian madeleine that takes me back to my childhood is the smell of machine oil. The machine shop: lots of tiny, spiky corkscrew slags of metal on the concrete floor if my father was working and had not yet swept them up (wear shoes); a framed print of Picasso’s Guernica on the wall; if it’s wintertime the Sauron-like great red eye of the kerosene space heater roaring on the floor; if it’s summertime the windows open and NPR on the radio; if morning or late afternoon, marbles-in-his-jowls Carl Kasell reading the news (blessedly boring 1990s news!); otherwise, classical music, the whirring of fan belts or shriek of mill bit biting metal, and the smell of machine oil.
If I have nostalgia for the world I grew up in—and I do—part of it is a forlorn pining for the way things were in that brief period of time bookended by the end of the Cold War (post-1990, a crumbly chunk of the Berlin Wall also sat on a shelf in that machine shop) and the constitutional crisis of the 2000 presidential election. Most would probably name 9/11 as the moment that ended that never-such-innocence-again era, but to me that election was the first event of bizarre, world-reordering chaos. I was born in 1983; I graduated from high school in 2001. I remember that time—about 1989 to 2000, my ages six to seventeen—as a time of boundless optimism, of genuine hope and excitement for the future. Much of that optimism was, in hindsight, illusory; from 1994 on, Newt Gingrich was already sowing the seeds that would bear poison fruit in the coming decades, and so, for that matter, was Bill Clinton, with some help from Joe Biden, too: For one thing, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would not, with time, prove the unqualifiedly splendid idea it seemed in 1992. But I remember it as the time Francis Fukuyama described in his 1992 book of now-famously-wrong projections, The End of History and the Last Man. The West had won the Cold War; liberalism, capitalism, and democracy had won; people lined up for blocks to eat at the McDonald’s that had just opened in Red Square in Moscow; apartheid had ended in South Africa; a peaceful compromise looked to be on the brink of possibility in Israel/Palestine. Borders were opening, trade walls—and concrete walls—were coming down; an exciting new thing called the Internet was somehow going to flatten the earth and launch us into a brave new world; and Tommy LeSavage and I huddled over his family’s Macintosh Centris playing Myst and marveling at the unprecedented quality of its graphics. Everywhere the twentieth century’s bad old demons were dying, and in 1992 and 1996, comfortably over half the country didn’t give a shit who was president. (My middle school teachers shook their heads at the shame of it back then, but I have since come to consider low voter turnout a perverse measure of a democratic nation’s good civil health.) The image I regard as the emblem of the era I saw on the front page of The Denver Post in 1993 the day after my tenth birthday (yes, I was a daily newspaper reader at the age of ten, and drinking black coffee, too—I couldn’t wait to grow up), of Yitzhak Rabin shaking hands with Yasser Arafat with the young Bill Clinton standing a head taller than both old men between them with his hands patting their backs, bringing them together. That was the way things were going to be now. In the beginning of the covid pandemic, during the long early months of lockdown, my wife, Caitlin, and I somehow got into a jag of rewatching 1990s action movies we’d seen in the theater as teenagers: True Lies, Face/Off, Con Air, Broken Arrow, The Rock (the IMDb.com descriptions of so many of the films begin with “Terrorists have stolen/hijacked a . . .”), and we spoke often about the general backdrop of peace, prosperity, economic and political stability against which these utterly absurd plots were set and that in a way made them possible. It saddens me to have watched that relatively stable, comfortable, and mostly functional world be destroyed by one thing after another over the last twenty-five years.
Soon after I began writing this book, Joyce had to place Jay in a palliative care facility in Fayetteville. It was a painful but necessary thing she had to do; his dementia and other comorbidities had gotten too difficult for her to handle, and he needed 24/7 access to professional medical care. She visited him there every day. On one of my visits to Fayetteville, in October 2023, she told me that some old friends of theirs, the brothers Bill and Cleve Cox, had come out to visit a few days before, and unexpectedly seeing old friends had brightened Jay’s mood and brought his mind into the light for an afternoon. That occasioned Joyce telling me about one of the many fascinating engineering projects Jay had been involved with. Bill and Cleve are the CEO and president/chief pilot of Aerial Solutions, a company that specializes in aerial tree trimming by helicopter. Jay designed the Air Saw, a stack of radial saw blades that dangles from a helicopter. If you are driving through a densely forested area and pass a row of power lines marching through the middle of a neatly cut corridor that looks as if a giant out of a Goya painting buzzed through the forest with a Brobdingnagian lawn mower, there’s a good chance those flat walls of vegetation were cut with an Air Saw. The invention was the brainchild of Jay’s good friend Randall Rogers, a helicopter pilot. Jay developed a hydraulic saw with Rogers, who tragically died in an accident while demonstrating the prototype in 1983. Jay was devastated by his friend’s death; he arranged for Rogers’s widow to have sole ownership of the patent, and then swore off working on the project any further. But the following year, two other helicopter pilots, Joe Harting and Bill Cox, formed the company Aerial Solutions, bought the rights to use the patent from Rogers’s widow for a significant sum, and coaxed Hale Engineering back on board, resulting in four more patents. This is from an article about the company in the Chicago Tribune, October 15, 1990:
