The Last Season Read Online Free

road trip instigated by some setbacks in his life, including marital problems. The introduction to Blue Highways reads:
    On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue. Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk—times neither day nor night—the old roads return to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.
    Sanger was curious about whether Randy had maintained the level of optimism he’d expressed in the frontcountry when he’d half-seriously, half-jokingly told Sanger that he had been thinking about trying something new: “Maybe I’ll try my hand as a river guide or a racecar driver.” Sanger and another backcountry ranger subsequently dubbed him “Maserati Morgenson.” But Sanger couldn’t imagine Randy as anything but a backcountry ranger—and, selfishly perhaps, wanted him to stick around for a while.
    True to his private nature, Randy hadn’t shared with Sanger, or any of his fellow rangers, the unwanted burden he had brought upon himself: the divorce papers his wife sent with him into the backcountry. He was a signature away from ending his marriage of twenty years.
    Perhaps that was what Randy was thinking about when he’d told Sanger at the White Fork, “Few men my age have the freedom I’ve been afforded,” following with “The sky’s the limit.” But he never brought up the divorce papers. “He seemed,” says Sanger, “to be exploring the options for his future—and using me as a sounding board.”
    When Heat-Moon got the idea to skip town, he wrote: “A man who couldn’t make things go right could at least go…. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity.” It certainly sounded romantic on paper, but it hadn’t been easy for Heat-Moon. He wrote of lying awake at night, tossing, turning, and “doubting the madness of just walking out on things, doubting the whole plan that would begin at daybreak.”
    Was it purely coincidental that Randy had been reading this book, and seemingly dropping hints about starting a new life, just two weeks before he disappeared?
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    ON THE MORNING OF JULY 24, Sanger was head down and pounding the switchbacks up 12,100-foot Pinchot Pass—hoofing it “big time” to make the summit by 11:30 for the morning roundup, when park headquarters checked in via radio on all the backcountry rangers. The Pinchot Pass ridgeline was the border between his patrol area to the south and Randy’s to the north, but this morning its lofty perch would serve as a craggy granite radio tower from which Sanger would send a signal—unimpaired—to the Bench Lake station 4 miles north and 2,000 vertical feet below in the mountain-rimmed Marjorie Lake Basin. Randy, he reasoned, might be having problems reaching park headquarters far to the southwest, but would nonetheless be monitoring during roundup. From the pass, Sanger’s transmission would be loud and clear for anybody in the area.
    Barely making it in time, Sanger transmitted, using Randy’s radio call number, 114.
    â€œOne-one-four, this is 115…114, this is 115…. Hey, Randy, you out there?”
    He persisted, trying all the channels used by the parks. When he was certain nobody was there, he contacted the parks’ dispatcher, who confirmed that Randy was still unaccounted for.
    The last time Randy checked in had been four days earlier, on Saturday, July 20, from Mather Pass, six and a half miles north of his station on the John Muir Trail. Eric Morey, the Grant Grove subdistrict ranger, had performed morning