Today’s saw is lighter, safer and easier to use, says James Hale, Hale Engineering president. The thrust of the redesign was to abandon the hydraulic concept and change to a gasoline-powered unit. It now uses ten 24-inch, carbon-tipped blades, driven by a 40-horsepower engine. Total weight of the saw and 90-foot-long extension is about 650 pounds.

  Hale and Aerial Solutions partner Cox also developed a special sling for the attachment point underneath the helicopter. The sling combined two concepts critical to the company’s success: the ability to stabilize the saw at higher flight speeds and, at the same time, not interfere with the mechanism that drops the saw in an emergency.

  The last attribute mentioned—the sling—prevents the kind of accident that killed Randall Rogers: The saw got snagged on something and he wasn’t able to drop it, which caused the helicopter to crash.

  And I can’t not tell the story of Jay inventing the paintball gun.

  Jay worked on a lot of interesting engineering projects: He worked for Beechfield Aircraft developing cryogenic tanks for the Apollo missions; he worked in ultrasonics for a time; more recently he and Joyce were part of a team led by the Syrian American solar physicist Shadia Habbal that would travel to literally random spots on Earth to take high-resolution photographs of solar eclipses, work that took them to Syria, China, Australia, and most recently Idaho in 2017. In the early 1970s, shortly before leaving to start his own engineering company with Joyce, he worked for the Rogers-based Daisy Manufacturing Company, the maker of the Red Ryder BB gun immortalized in A Christmas Story (“You’ll shoot your eye out!”).

  In 1971, Charles Nelson, who owned the Michigan-based Nelson Paint Company, had come up with an idea. Forestry workers and cattle ranchers have to mark trees and cattle: ranchers with a paint marker or something like that, and foresters usually with a can of spray paint. This chore is particularly laborious and time consuming for foresters, as it often involves climbing over fences, crossing creeks, and hiking up and down bluffs to mark trees. Nelson envisioned the paintball gun as a time-saving device. He had the paintball figured out—he filled veterinary pill gel capsules with paint—and he figured that a BB gun manufacturer would be the one to ask about the gun. Daisy Manufacturing assigned the job to Jay. The delicate puzzle of engineering was to design a mechanism that would shoot the ball hard enough it would explode on impact with tree or cow, but not so hard that it would blow up inside the gun.

  The way Jay told the story, it happened on Christmas Eve 1971. Daisy had shut down early for the day and held a company Christmas party and dinner. When everyone had cleared out after the party, with the bullpen engineering office quiet and empty for once, giving him space to think, he sat down and sketched the first blueprint for the design in about an hour. The pistol he designed uses compressed carbon dioxide gas to propel the paintballs; cocking the gun simultaneously readies the hammer and loads a ball into the barrel; when you pull the trigger, the hammer knocks open a valve that lets the gas into a chamber, which fires the ball. Jay built a prototype that he would shoot against the wall of an abandoned building, fine-tuning the exact amount of compressed carbon dioxide the gun needed to work properly. James C. Hale is the only name on the patent, but of course Daisy owned the rights to use it. For many years, Daisy manufactured the Nelspot 007, which the Nelson Paint Company advertised in catalogs for forestry and agricultural equipment, making a modest profit selling it to cattle ranchers and foresters. Not long after, Jay left Daisy, and considered trying to buy the rights to the patent from them in order to switch the contract with Nelson to his own company, but he ultimately decided not to bother with it.

  The earliest proto-paintball games were probably played by ranchers or loggers fucking around on break or something, but in 1981, the godfather of paintball the game, a sporting equipment retailer named Bob Gurnsey, happened across an ad for the Nelspot 007 in an Agway catalog. He ordered a bunch of them, devised a list of rules with his friends, stock trader Hayes Noel and writer Charles Gaines (who wrote, among other things, Pumping Iron: The Art and Sport of Bodybuilding)—those three giants among manboys form the holy trinity of paintball’s foundational mythology*—and they invited nine other friends to participate in the first official paintball game on a 125-acre plot of rugged, wooded land near Gaines’s home in the White Mountains of New Hampshire: The great teenage war game was born.

  Sometime in the early 1980s, Charlie Nelson was in Northwest Arkansas for a meeting with Daisy and stopped by Hale Holler to visit Jay and Joyce, bringing with him some catalogs: An ad for the Nelspot 007, reworked for the new target clientele of recreational users, had spread from the agricultural to the sporting goods catalogs. “Have you seen what they’re doing with our gun?” Jay remembered him saying.

  Paintball exploded—ha—in the 1980s and became a multimillion-dollar industry, of which revenue Jay never received a nickel, though he felt no resentment; he had been a salaried employee of Daisy when he had designed the gun, the company owned the intellectual property, that’s the way it works. Neither he nor Charlie Nelson had ever once had the thought that humans might want to shoot each other with it for fun. In order to make the horse pills full of paint explode against the wall he was shooting them at, Jay’d had to make the impact velocity pretty high—much greater than that of a BB gun—and with a much bigger projectile—i.e., getting shot with one certainly wouldn’t kill you, but it would hurt like holy hell. “Shooting ’em against that wall,” Jay said, “always made me feel bad for the cows.”

  Another story: One time, when Kelly was a kid sitting in her father’s lap as they rode his Triumph 650 Bonneville, buttoned into the oversize leather motorcycle jacket he wore so he could zip her inside it to transport her—this would have been in the mid-1970s—they were riding behind a poultry truck (along with Walmart, Tyson is one of Northwest Arkansas’s biggest employers; poultry is big business there), and a chicken fell off the back of the truck and landed in the road. Jay stopped the motorcycle, walked over and picked up the chicken, and they rode, all three of them zipped into the big motorcycle jacket with Kelly on Jay’s lap and the chicken on Kelly’s, back to Hale Holler, where Jay built a coop for her and she became Kelly’s pet chicken.

  Anything else it might be helpful to know? That Jay and Clay Bass were students at Little Rock Central High School (the family hadn’t yet moved to Horseshoe Bend) in 1957, when Eisenhower invoked the Insurrection Act to override Governor Orval Faubus’s attempt to use the Arkansas National Guard to forcibly prevent the school’s integration and its first nine black students walked in under the protection of federal troops from the 101st Airborne Division. That Joyce baked the cake for the wedding (well, one of them) of the princess of Northwest Arkansas’s local royal family, Alice Walton. I should probably also mention that my father was born when my grandmother was in her forties, by far the baby of the family; Jay was nearly twenty years his elder. The family was very civic minded and active in politics. Jay served as the chief of Pea Ridge’s Volunteer Fire Department for many years. He even ran for office a few times. (I remember the slogan of one of his failed political campaigns—the pun works best when said with an Arkie accent: “Vote Democrat? Hale, yes!”)

  Catching crawdads in the creek at Hale Holler? My cousin Ike and I had developed a foolproof crawdad-catching technique: They have a fight-or-flight-type response to a sudden sign of danger, jetting backward, fast, maybe six or seven inches. So: Carefully place your net or bucket directly behind a crawdad, then jump into the creek right in front of it, and it’ll jet back directly into your net or bucket. There was one time when we caught a really impressive bucketful of them and took them back to the house to show the grown-ups. We were going to throw them back into the creek; we just wanted to boast about our haul. But our grandmother took the bucket, thanked us for them, and boiled them up for dinner that night. We intrepid hunters had caught the family dinner.

  That grandmother, Mary, was one of my favorite human beings to have walked the earth, someone I loved deeply. She taught me to play poker (and bridge, backgammon, cribbage, and dominoes—less important but still significant games in my life). After her husband—my father’s father—died of a heart attack in his midfifties when my dad was fifteen, long before I was born (there is a story my father sometimes tells about having to attend a “Fathers and Sons” Boy Scouts dinner alone a week after his father died), she and a close friend, also recently widowed, traveled down to New Orleans and hopped aboard a banana boat for a tour of the Caribbean and South America and back: remarkably adventurous for two single middle-aged southern women, and illustrative of Mary’s character.

  Christmases in Hale Holler from about 1987 to 1998 were some of the happiest times of my life. My father’s family was big and happy, and Mary was the axle around which the wheel turned. It was a great contrast to my mother’s parents, twenty minutes away in Rogers: bitterly unhappy people who hated each other so much that I am amazed they did not part unto death (his).

  As a child I had a stuffed rabbit that I took everywhere and left every­where, which more than once an obliging employee of some motel somewhere in Kansas or Oklahoma mailed back to our house. One time I left the rabbit at Mary’s house in Hale Holler, and Mary, an avid knitter (one of her shawls, a wedding gift from Jay and Joyce, is draped across the back of our living room couch), mailed him back—it was winter, shortly after Christmas—wearing a little blue sweater with white trim she’d knitted to keep him warm on his journey through the US Postal Service. He wears it still, on a shelf in my parents’ basement.

  I remember Mary sitting in her armchair, knitting, and me on the floor: watching Murder, She Wrote through the snowy reception that was the best that TV could pick up in the boonies, watching Jeopardy! Mary’s crush on Alex Trebek was a frequent subject of teasing within the family; she saw in Alex Trebek a last bastion of a certain kind of genteel mid­century manhood: his polished poise, his gray suits, his exquisite manners, and especially his dapper Clark-Gablean mustache—he was just about the last man on network TV to dare a mustache. Trebek shaved it off in 2001: the year Haley disappeared, the year I graduated from high school, the year of 9/11, the year Mary died. (Coincidences? Yes.)

  When I was a teenager, in imitation of Hunter S. Thompson (as a teenager I did a lot of things in imitation of Hunter S. Thompson, including a lot of acid), I started wearing Hawaiian shirts. Mary had dementia, which got really bad in her last few years. For a while the four siblings took turns taking care of her for several months at a stretch—the duty passing, in birth order, from Jay to their sisters Nancy and then Ellen, then to us—before her condition worsened to the point that she needed daily full-time medical attention and she had to go to a nursing home. But before that, she spent four or five months living with us in Colorado. There is a place near Denver called the Butterfly Pavilion, a lofty, light-infused glass cathedral of an indoor greenhouse, full of tropical butterflies. My mother, my grandmother, my brothers James and John (John was a toddler then) went to the Butterfly Pavilion that summer: 1999, maybe? It was a difficult summer; Mary’s mind was half gone, and her life was mostly confusion and terror in between increasingly rare moments of clarity. The look of childlike joy on her face when the dozens of bright, brilliant tropical butterflies with metallic flashing wings flocked around me as though I were St. Francis of the Butterflies, fooled by the bright brilliant tropical flowers printed on my Hawaiian shirt, is one of my last and my best memories of her.

  I think it was the next summer that my mother and I drove to Arkansas to pick up Mary’s old car—a tiny tan 1982 Toyota Tercel, which became my first car, with which I would deliver a lot of newspapers and pizzas in Colorado—from Ellen and her husband, Sammy, who lived in a house they were building in a part of the Ozarks even more backwoods than Hale Holler, who sold it to me for one symbolic dollar. While we were there, my mother and I visited Mary in her nursing home. Three factors—(1) it was unusual for Mary to see my mother without her son being with her; (2) her dementia had become very bad by then; (3) I look a lot like my father—combined to cause her to think that I was my father. (My mother taught history at public high schools for most of her career and had the summers free, as did I, at least for long enough for that trip to and from Arkansas; I think my father was away that summer, testing weapon-targeting systems in a secret location somewhere in the desert in New Mexico that he was not allowed to reveal even to his family.) Mary talked about the time “I” had made a tiny cage out of toothpicks and glue, complete with a hinge and a working door to hold captive the housefly I had caught. I realized that I was representing my father in her mind, and I had no idea what to do. We sat in the windowless, low-ceilinged, fake wood–­paneled, oppressively bleak cafeteria of the nursing home, and as it was midafternoon, we were almost the only people in it, except for a fat, well-dressed, clean-shaven guy in a wheelchair who wasn’t old, maybe in his fifties, who wheeled himself over to our table and starting talking to me. He had a deep concave dent in one of his temples—his head misshapen into an asymmetrical peanut—and one of his eyes lolled off in the wrong direction. The guy seemed starved for a very specific kind of conversation: the friendly but guarded shallow manly small talk between two straight middle-class men who have just met.

  “So, what kinda work d’you do?” he kept asking me. At the time, I worked part-time after school at an Einstein Bros. Bagels in Boulder, Colorado. However, my grandmother was right there, thinking I was my father.

  “I’m a laser physicist,” I said.

  Afterward, I asked one of the nurses what that guy’s story was, and he told me that he’d lost everything, shot himself in the head and lived.

  That was the last time I saw Mary. She died the next year, as it happened, on September 11, 2001. It was my second day of classes as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College, which is close to New York City—that was one of the reasons I’d wanted to go there—and a lot of kids from New York attend it. Some of my classmates knew people who worked at the World Trade Center who were missing and presumed dead, and I felt a little foolish telling people that my grandmother had died of old age that morning. I wasn’t able to attend her funeral because all the planes were still grounded.

  Mary was near the end and would have been in a very bad way four months earlier when her great-granddaughter Haley disappeared in the wilderness. She was by then always in a state of confusion and terror, and there’s no way she would have understood any of it. I hope no one told her.

  Mary had been the glue that kept the family together; those big happy Christmases at Hale Holler had been for her, and after she died, they quit happening. A few years later, Jay and Joyce sold their business, retired, moved to Fayetteville, and rented the houses on the big wooded property in Pea Ridge for a while before they eventually tired of landlording headaches and sold it. Mary is gone, the elevator is gone, Alex Trebek’s mustache is gone, Alex Trebek is gone, Hale Holler is gone, and the world around it is gone.

  Throughout the time I spent writing this book—I began in December 2022—Jay was suffering from cancer and a half-dozen other medical problems and the same dementia his mother had suffered. Back in the fall of 2022, he had been disturbed to find himself unable to do basic math: The engineering genius could not calculate the tip on a restaurant check; it felt to him as if he had forgotten his native language. Not long afterward, he plowed into a row of traffic cones on an interstate, and then the man who had built and ridden his own motorcycles and built and flown his own airplanes had to give up his driver’s license. His condition deteriorated rapidly in the last few months of his life, and he died on May 30, 2024. “He was just snowed under and asleep, so it was totally peaceful,” my father said to me that day. “He’s hopefully riding one of his 650 Triumphs as we speak.”

  3

  Cave Mountain

  AT ABOUT NOON ON A TEMPERATE, SUNNY SUNDAY IN APRIL 2001, Joyce, panicked now after losing about fifteen minutes of time searching for her granddaughter in what she now believed was the wrong direction, ran ahead back along the bluff and found Clay Bass on the trail. Heaving breath from the uphill run, she told him that Haley had disappeared. Together they continued running up the trail, where they found Jay, Dennis, and Michelle not far ahead of them. Once everyone understood the situation, Dennis and Michelle went back to the cabins to see if Haley had somehow made it there, and the others spread out up and down the trail, scanning the dense, dark springtime woods and calling her name. When Dennis and Michelle made it back to the cabins, they found Doc Chester still working in his yard, sawing up that dead tree. No, he had not seen the little girl they had come in with, but then again, he hadn’t been paying attention; he’d been concentrating on the work in front of him and had industrial earmuffs on to dampen the noise of the chain saw. Michelle remained at the Faddis Cabin, to be there in case Haley found it, and Dennis got into their car and started searching along County Road 406, the narrow private road that leads down from Cave Mountain Road; he also wanted to look at the small dirt parking lot at the trailhead to see if there were any fewer cars parked there than he remembered seeing earlier that morning, and write down their license plate numbers. Doc Chester went inside his house and called Tim Ernst, a close friend and neighbor down the road.