King's Corner: Three Summers

Not often you get three summers in one year.

Mark King managed it before he turned 14.

His first was ending in New Jersey in August 1939. School was approaching, and doing nothing would make the decision for him. On his 13th birthday, Mark chose west.

By autumn he had worked harvest in North Dakota and reached Wapiti Valley, Wyoming, where he found the life he'd dreamed about. But summer was ending there too. There wasn't enough winter work for an inexperienced 13-year-old.

Another choice.

A rancher was sending cattle to Australia. Mark went with them.

He crossed the equator and found another summer.

For five months Australia taught him cattle, sheep and horses—and how much hard work lived beneath the cowboy life he'd romanticized.

He loved it anyway.

Then that summer began running out too.

An unlikely collection of people and circumstances eventually got Mark back to St. Paul. New Jersey lay almost a thousand miles east. Wapiti lay almost a thousand miles west.

Another choice.

Mark turned west.

By June 1940, he was back in Wyoming just in time for his third summer.

If a 13-year-old boy from New Jersey had been asked to invent the West, he might have included mountains, horses, cowboys, Yellowstone, Buffalo Bill and rodeo.

Wapiti had all of them.

Buffalo Bill Cody had helped open this country to visitors and built his lodge near Yellowstone's East Entrance. Theodore Roosevelt had ridden and camped in these mountains. In 1940 both were vivid memories.

Mark wasn't reading about the Old West anymore. He was riding through it.

Visitors came for horses and fishing, campfires and mountain trails, rodeo and Yellowstone—for a few glorious days inside the West they had read about.

Mark understood. A year earlier, he'd been looking for it too.

Now he was one of the people who made it possible for everybody else.

Mark did whatever needed doing, but some of his greatest responsibility came when he led guests on horseback into the mountains for several days. Once they left the ranch, the lanky 13-year-old was in charge. He knew the country and the horses. He made camp, looked after his guests and cooked for them.

The ranch chef had opinions about that last part.

Especially the coffee.

The two disagreed over which of them made the better morning cup. Mark continued making his on the trail, and his guests continued returning safely, which may be the fairest evidence available.

They simply knew their guide knew what he was doing.

The previous year had become part of him.

Ken could see it too. Rodeo was part of the entertainment at the ranch, and he began teaching Mark to be his hazer, riding alongside Ken as he competed.

A year earlier, Mark had sometimes needed Ken's help on horseback.

Now Ken was teaching him to ride beside him.

There is a photograph from that summer of Mark sitting on a horse beside the bunkhouse where he slept. Nothing dramatic is happening. No cattle are stampeding. Nobody is crossing an ocean.

Mark is simply sitting there.

And he looks as though he belongs.

Perhaps that was what made this summer different. Wapiti was no longer simply the place Mark had dreamed of reaching.

It was the place he had come home to.

June became July.

Then August.

The days could still be warm, but the mountain mornings began to sharpen. Coffee around the campfire became less something to drink with breakfast and more something to wrap both hands around.

Whatever the ranch chef thought of Mark's coffee, nobody complained that it was hot.

Around the ranch, firewood was stacked. Buildings and fences were readied for snow.

Mark began learning winter jobs too.

He already knew how to mend wire fencing. Winter made the same job different. Cold wire was less cooperative, snow complicated everything, and gloves made twisting broken ends together awkward.

Someone showed him how.

Then they showed him other jobs he'd need to know when winter came.

Nobody said anything about what that meant.

They just kept teaching him how to work in winter.

For almost a year, Mark had learned the pattern. Summer ended. Another choice appeared. Mark moved.

And now summer was ending again.

But nobody was teaching him how to leave.

They were teaching him how to stay.

Mark had spent a year working, learning, traveling and doing whatever came next. He had become so accustomed to looking ahead that it would have been easy to miss where all that following had brought him.

Scripture says, “Be still, and know that I am God.”

Winter was coming. Soon the mountain trails would quiet, the guests would leave and snow would slow the life Mark had been living.

Perhaps it was time to stop looking for where God was taking him and notice where God had put him.

Wapiti.

The place he'd dreamed about.

Home.

After three summers, Mark was ready for winter.

The future didn't have to look like the past.

There was no train to catch. No ship to board. No airplane to find. No road east or west that needed choosing.

There was simply tomorrow's work.

The West Mark had chased through three summers wasn't somewhere ahead of him anymore.

He was living it.

On Aug. 21, 1940, Mark King turned 14.

A year earlier, Mark had been told, “You'll be back.”

He was.

Just not where anyone expected.

Jeff Headley is pastor of the Dayton Valley Community Church, and a storyteller who blends humor, honesty, and hope. His weekly column reflects on resilience, grace, and the surprising ways faith shows up in ordinary life. Mark King, whose adventures are recounted in this series, was his father.