Another adventure, another storm.

My wife’s family had a thing. For decades they would meet up at Rendezvous Beach for a family reunion on the south end of Bear Lake. It was something her grandparents started, and it was something truly special.

I still remember the first year I was invited to come along. It was back in the summer of 2000. I had joined the Air Force a month after we were married at the courthouse, and Tara and I had been married for just over a year. We had our first wee one, a spunky daughter who was so determined to do all the things. She also had a tendency to resist sleeping at night. There were just too many interesting things she didn’t want to miss out on.

Needless to say, tent camping with a baby wasn’t easy.

With all of her family around, I was so eager to make a good impression. You see, Tara and I had to overcome a lot of obstacles to be together. She grew up LDS (Mormon), and I belonged to a different faith. It should come as no surprise, then, that there was some objection towards me becoming her permanent partner, and there was a fair amount of resistance as our relationship became more serious. Things did change once we were married, but I always felt like an outsider, and was I intent on earning their respect.

The military was hard on me in ways I often find difficult to express. I was a scrawny kid back then, twenty years old and under 110 pounds. If there was a paperwork snafu to be found, it was all but guaranteed to have my name on it. My security clearance, for example, was messed up for months because someone back east had entered a code wrong. My leadership hauled me into the back office to give me the third degree, demanding to know why I had lied on my intake forms. Of course, I had no idea what they were talking about, but they were insistent that I’d spent some time in jail. I hadn’t, and they wouldn’t even tell me what I had supposedly been charged with. Imagine my confusion.

That paperwork error, as uncomfortable as it was, kept me home from a deployment my leadership had been eager to send me on. It was also why I was able to go to Tara’s family reunion instead of sucking sand at PSAB in Saudi Arabia.

These details are important because they speak to my state of mind at the time. I felt like a failure. Nothing seemed to be going right with my choice to join the military as a means to support my young family. Money was tight, and I was miserable. There’s a special kind of shame a person feels when they’re called to serve on a deployment and someone else has to take their place. And that’s not even considering the bad blood that’s created between that person and the one who has to go instead, or those they serve under or alongside.

To say I didn’t feel very well liked at this point in my life would be a gross understatement.

Tara’s grandfather was a Navy man. His name was Keith, and he had a way of looking both stern and at ease all at once. I didn’t know what to make of the man at first, but I was determined to leave a good impression. I saw my opportunity in an axe and a pile of logs, but I might be getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up a bit.

Keith was an outdoorsman. He liked doing things the old ways. You didn’t buy pre-cut firewood. You split it yourself from logs you collected, whether from downed trees you helped your neighbor clean up or wherever else a man finds spare logs.

In this case, the logs had been collected, hauled the hour and a half drive, and then piled up at a spot near one of the picnic tables. No one seemed to have much interest in splitting wood, though. No one except Keith.

Now, I don’t know if it was due to old age or wisdom or some magical combination of both, but I noticed that Keith didn’t split the logs all at once. He would split a few and then sit, enjoying both company and conversation for a spell before splitting a few more. I remember wondering at the time if he wasn’t just waiting, giving someone (or anyone) of a younger generation the opportunity to step in. I felt the pull, but I didn’t know if my help would be wanted. I still felt very much like an outsider. So, I decided to wait and to watch as well.

It didn’t take long before it became apparent that no one had much interest in splitting wood. The dance continued while I built up the courage to ask if I could step in. When I did, Keith seemed thrilled. His smile twinkled in his eyes as he nodded toward the axe.

There’s another thing you should know about me. My dad was a plumber by trade. He owned a small business with his cousin, Tom, when I was a kid before giving it up for less hassle in submitting bids and a more stable career. The two of them were often running here and there, chasing work, but I remember several jobs where they installed the plumbing for houses in new construction.

My dad also loved free labor. In fact, he often joked about only having kids for the free labor and the tax deductions. It might have been a joke, but take your kid to work day wasn’t an official day once a year when he was plumbing, and meant that some of the work on your house was actually done for free by a kid who was just about to go into second or third grade. Whether it was soldering copper pipes, drilling a hole in your foundation for your outside hose line, or busting up the concrete floor in your basement with a sledgehammer so a drain line could be installed or the toilet could be moved because the framers were inconsiderate with where they put the walls… I was your man, errr… boy.

My favorite was the sledgehammer.

(See? I did have a point with all that.)

We also went hunting and camping a lot, and another thing I found that I enjoyed was chopping down dead trees with a hatchet for firewood.

You see, I was born in 1980, and I’ve loved to read for as long as I can remember. Two of my favorite books were Hatchet and Where the Red Fern Grows. Those books taught me many things, and among those things was the idea that I could chop down any tree, and that I was capable of accomplishing far more than I thought was possible.

They did not, however, teach me how to split wood.

I was horrible at it.

Imagine my horror when, as eager as I was to impress her family, I missed the log. Not entirely, though. My swing was too far out. Instead of sinking the biting head of the axe into the wood, the top of the wooden handle connected and sent a reverberating wave of pain up through my hands and arms. Instead of splitting the log, splinters jutted out of the wooden handle of the axe.

My cheeks flushed hot with embarrassment. I apologized profusely, but Keith just waved it off.

“Give it another go,” he said.

(Or something like that…)

So, I did. And, once again, I missed. More splinters jutted out from the top of the handle, just below the axe head. But Keith remained patient. Despite my burning embarrassment, I kept at it, and I hit the mark more often than I missed. But I did still miss from time to time. By the end of it, most of the logs had been chopped and the upper shaft of the handle was in pretty bad shape.

Looking back on it now, I think I understand Keith’s mindset a little better than I did back then. Where my father was, at times, quick to anger, Tara’s grandfather was a patient man. He could sit back and enjoy my efforts, not for the result, but for the journey itself. And the axe? Oh, I imagine he enjoyed replacing that handle. He was a handy man. A man who was good at seeing problems and quietly fixing them in his own time.

There were a few other things that happened that weekend that made it special for me. A husband of one of the cousins on the other side of the family lost his wedding ring on the beach. It was one of those simple little mistakes that can have a huge impact on a new marriage. It certainly felt big at the time.

I had recently gotten into metal detecting and had packed up the beaten up old detector I’d bought for about 20 bucks at a pawn shop. It wasn’t very pretty to look at, but it worked well enough to get the job done. I found the ring, and the day was saved.

Keith gave me a nod and a wink, and I can’t quite find the words to explain how much that act of approval meant to me.

I have tried to be more like Keith as I’ve navigated this life of mine, but I have, at times, been more like my father than I’d ever care to admit. I’ve probably made more than my fair share of mistakes. Some I learned or picked up along the way, some that I must have found entirely on my own.

The Bear Lake tradition has sadly died for my wife’s family in recent years, but this is one tradition that I desperately want to hold onto. Our kids love going, and I try to do whatever I can to keep the spirit of those old memories alive.

Things do change, though.

Instead of rented jet skis, we prefer to take the paddleboards. Instead of big family meals, we cook and eat together under the pavilion. Instead of roaring campfires and conversations that weave late into the night, we gather the kids and the dogs, hit the restroom for both (as needed), and head to bed at around the same time. It isn’t the same as it used to be, but it’s still nice.

In the picture above, the Frost kids try out a couple Wolf’em Marshmallow Roasting Sticks, slowly baking biscuit cups over the fire to fill with pudding and whipped cream.

You have to book your reservations eleven months out, and it seems to get more difficult each year. We almost missed going this year, but I was able to snag a spot the first weekend after school started. Of course, with that much time between booking and when you go, there’s no way to account for weather.

The conditions on the lake looked perfect for an after-breakfast jaunt on the paddleboards, so Tara and I set out. The wind had been pretty bad the day before, and instead of pushing you toward shore if you stopped paddling, the water wanted nothing more than to take you far, far away. Given this perfect opportunity, we enjoyed heading in and out several times before our son, Devlin, decided to join.

Not long afterward, we heard a sudden crack of thunder. A very large storm was descending quickly out of Logan, tearing down the mountainside like a dark doom heading our way.

We paddled fast and we paddled hard, making it to shore just as the worst of the storm hit. Lightning lit up the sky and thunder roared as we were pelted with both rain and hail. We rushed the boards and ourselves to safety and marveled as a family at the wondrous force of nature all around us.

This short clip doesn’t have much of the hail or any lightning or thunder, but it was certainly there. Tara quickly took charge of operation tea and hot chocolate to warm up shivering bodies while I dashed off to the tent to save my new camera and other electronics.

Despite the strong winds and pouring rain, the new tent we got just a week prior held against the storm. None of the sturdy poles snapped, and there weren’t any leaks. We haven’t always been so fortunate in previous years. I can now look back at that zipper that gave out on the old tent we’d had for over a decade and better appreciate the timing of its demise.

Going to Bear Lake was an enormous success this year. We tested out our new tent, overcame unexpected hardships, took time to reflect on old memories, embraced the changes that life brings, went paddleboarding, and we even weathered the storm. All in all, I think I’d call that a win.

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