On Sunday morning I leave for five days of archery elk hunting. My wife will stay here with our 4-year-old and the twins. What follows is a forecast. The real version, with corrections from my wife, will run in the next edition. 

Me: Awake before the alarm. Somewhere two basins over, a bull bugles. I lie still and listen, basking in nature's strange music.

Her: Awake before the alarm. One wall over, a baby screams. Then, out of solidarity, the other one. She doesn't fall asleep herself until 5:23, at which point the cats, who are locked in the playroom overnight, begin throwing their bodies against the door.

Me: Instant coffee from the Jetboil, and I want to be careful about how I say this, because I know how it sounds, but sitting on a rock with nobody around for what might be ten miles, watching the ridgeline go from black to gray to a color I don't have a word for—it is the best cup of coffee I have ever had. The smell of dew and pine sap drapes over everything like a soft blanket. Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me.

Her: Alarm. Coffee made in a rush and drunk in a rush, eggs cooked, the dishwasher unloaded one plate at a time so nothing clinks, a load of laundry started, all of it done in a crouch, because the whole point of the next 45 minutes is that nothing wakes the babies, because the babies will wake our daughter, and once she's up, she's up.

Me: Pack feels light. Legs feel strong. I look out at the expanse before me. It is vast and the high desert becomes gold in the first rays of sun. I say, to nobody in particular, "Time to cover some country."

Her: Eggs. Everywhere. On the high chairs, on the floor, in the boy twin's hair, which he has styled like Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary. She texts her mom to confirm 10:00am and my mom to confirm 2:00pm with one hand while the other holds a baby who wails for more eggs. The girl twin has a runny nose because school started on Wednesday and her big sister already brought something home. The cats watch from the counter like two small gods who have seen this before and will see it again. 

Me: Two miles in, wind in my face, which is exactly where I want it. I stop on a ridge and glass for twenty minutes. I see nothing, and it doesn't matter. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and the essential facts this morning are a meadow, a wind, and a man who has nowhere else to be.

Her: She loads three children into the Sienna for one drop-off. Twenty minutes earlier the eldest had decided that all of her pants should be shorts and had begun the conversion with scissors in the privacy of her room, and the only sign of it was a small song coming through the Nanit, snip snip, cut cut, snip snip, cut cut, which my wife listened to for a full verse before she understood what it was. Two pairs were done by the time she got upstairs. At school drop off when the door slides open the child turns.

You forgot to get me a snack.

I know it.

Are you going to get me one.

I dont know. Go on.

The door closes and the two in the back begin to cry as if on a signal and she pulls out into the road.

Me: A cow and a calf cross below me at 80 yards and I don't move, don't breathe, don't so much as blink. I have never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude, and it turns out solitude is even better with a cow and a calf in it. For a moment I am not a man watching a hillside. I am the hillside. They never knew I was there. I check my phone out of habit and find no service, and I put it away, and I understand that a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

Her: The twins are down for the morning nap and the house is silent in the way a house is silent after something has happened in it. She flips the laundry. She stands in the garage in the gray light and looks at the Peloton and the Peloton looks back at her with its one dark eye and she thinks, maybe, and she gets on it. Ten minutes later a cry comes through the monitor, forty minutes early, and she gets off and goes up the stairs and does not look back at it.

Me: I've just woken from a nap in the shade, the thermals are starting to switch, and the bulls are getting back on their feet. To be awake is to be alive, and I have been awake since 4:55, minus the nap. I make my way to a wallow I found this morning and sit above it.

Her: The twins wake from the afternoon nap in the same minute she must leave to fetch the eldest and so she takes them, the one with the runny nose and the one without, and straps them in and drives. She retrieves the child who watches the road.

Is Daddy going to kill something.

I dont know.

Why.

He hasnt killed anything yet.

The child considers this. They rode on.

Me: A bull answers my call from across the drainage and we go back and forth for twenty minutes, him getting louder, me getting quieter, until he comes to 60 yards and hangs up behind a screen of timber. I have ranged every tree in sight. Arrow nocked. I never get a shot. I am not disappointed. 

Her: The boy has gone over the gate. He is on the far side of it and moving toward the cats' raw food and he is nearly there when my mother, who has been in the house since two, and who is holding his sister, crosses the room and takes him up and he screams at the injustice of it and the cats watch him with their yellow eyes and do not move. My mother must leave early tonight. She will put two babies down with no help but the eldest, who is eager to help in the way that a fire is eager to help, and everyone in the house knows the shape of the evening and no one speaks of it.

Me: Dinner comes from a freeze-dried bag, and it's delicious, because everything is delicious when you've walked 50,000 steps. Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. I eat standing, reliving every moment of the day, planning tomorrow. 

Her: Bedtime for three, with one assistant. The assistant has questions. Why do the babies get a bath first. Why cant I hold him in the bath. Is Daddy sleeping in a tent. Does the tent have a door. What if a bear. Why dont we have a tent. Can the cats sleep in a tent. And she bathes the one and dresses the one and bathes the other and dresses the other and takes the one upstairs and lays her down and takes the other upstairs and lays him down, and the assistant is in the hall the whole time asking whether a bear can open a door, and then it is the assistant's turn, and the assistant requires four stuffed animals, never the same four as the night before, and the first four are refused and the second four are refused. She stands in the dark hall between the doors. She has not sat down since 5:30 in the morning and she will not sit down now.

Me: Knife sharpened to a surgical edge, ten pages of Lonesome Dove by headlamp, and then I step outside the tent one last time and stand there longer than I meant to, because there are more stars than seems reasonable. In my tent I realize that I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, and I am doing it, right now, in a $600 sleeping bag, and I regret nothing.

Her: Nanit. Two gray shapes breathing. Another off screen in a different room.

Me: Dreaming.

Her: The boy screams for four seconds and goes right back down. She lies in the dark with her eyes open. It takes her an hour to find rest again.

I walk in the door, having not showered in five days and having killed nothing. She is on the couch in the dark with the monitor in her lap. She does not get up.

Did you get one.

"Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. No.”

Okay.

"The bluebird carries the sky on his back."

I dont know what that means.

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer."

Your drummer is in his crib. He’s crying now.

***

The woods will turn any man into Henry David Thoreau. Five days at home with three kids will turn your wife into Cormac McCarthy.

Thanks for reading! Hope you laughed. See you next time.

-Will

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to your parent friends. If this email was forwarded to you, consider subscribing to Parental Advisory here. Outside of this newsletter, I run a financial planning firm that pretty much exclusively serves millennial families with 1) variable incomes from sales or sales adjacent jobs and/or 2) concentrated wealth (usually from a lot of employer stock).