Facing the Unknown

I wouldn’t need my coat in Tucson.

As I pulled my arm from my coat, my watchband broke.

Again.

This was the second time in two months that the watchband had snapped.

This should not have been a big deal – who wears a watch anymore anyway?

But I felt naked.

I glanced at my wrist, even with no reward of a grounded sense of time.

I wondered if it were time to abandon this old watch, buy a new one.

But my son, Will, had given this watch to me when he was a young boy, saying he wanted me to have something that would last a long time.

I slipped it into my pocket for the plane ride.

My daughter, Abby, and I were making a quick trip to Tucson to hug Will.

In two days, he would depart for a yearlong stint at an Air Force base near Gunson, South Korea.

The day before, North Korea sent missiles directly toward South Korea.

Will flies single-seat, F-16 fighter jets.

The chances of him landing smack-dab in the middle of fast action look ominous.

For the past three years, Will has practiced and studied diligently, taking in everything instructors threw at him.

Sometimes, he leaned on friends, other times he held them up.

He has been pushed beyond his capabilities.

I have no doubt he will be pushed even further while he is in South Korea.

I used to attempt to protect my son from danger -- not that I was ever particularly successful.

Now, I can’t control the threats he faces.

I can’t call the North Korean dictator and order him to be sane.

I can’t control the weather.

Or the mechanical soundness of the plane.

I can’t teach any sophisticated tricks of flying to my first-born.

I can’t feed healthy food so he will be stronger, physically and mentally.

I can’t force the world to utilize diplomacy instead of weapons.

I wish we invoked King Arthur’s adage that Right is Might -- and that Right included respect, equity and justice.

But North Korean missiles prove that our world functions within the Might is Right model.

So our military strives to be the mightiest.

I don’t get to change the rules so I need my son to be mighty.

I know he knows how to dig deep when he faces conditions he doesn’t yet have the skills to overcome.

With his flight training – and maybe a bit of regular ranch life -- Will has learned how to react to situations beyond his capability.

Will has brought limp, cold, orphan lambs back to life.

He has been double-barreled by a horse.

He has gathered and sorted uncooperative cows in the howling wind.

When – not if – he faces danger, he will do what needs to be done.

Our plane touched down in Great Falls, bringing us back home to below-0 wind chills and a forecast of more snow.

As Abby and I found our coats, I realized that this November snowstorm perfectly bookmarks the changes to our lives.

It delivers uncertainty that we can’t control.

All we can do is dig deep and face whatever it brings, even if we don’t quite know how.

So as I watch my son fly into danger, fly away from one way of life and into another, I wonder if this is an end, a change I won’t know how to face.

I wonder whether I should fix my watchband again.

I will, of course.

And I will wait for Will’s stories of narrow misses, Right and Might.

Some things always remain the same.