Finally, late this autumn of 2012, as I was working on typing and annotating Jake’s many notebooks for this oversized MS—possibly for publication, although few publishers would touch a book (by an amateur, no less) of this size, and I’m not even sure I can get my own literary agent to read it all—I decided to drive over to Delta to see Jake’s grave.
Jacob Perry had asked to be buried not at the cemetery in Delta but in a smaller, out-of-the-way cemetery some forty-eight miles down Highway 50 and 550 at the little Colorado town of Ridgway in Ouray County, population 924 people in the 2010 census. When I arrived there at this remote hilltop cemetery on a cold, clear, blue-sky Colorado late-autumn day, I realized why he’d chosen the place.
Visible from the cemetery that day was Mount Sneffels and the entire Sneffels Range of high peaks, Mears Peak looming up white against the blue sky, and behind the last few dulled aspen leaves still clinging, the dramatic San Juan Mountains, Uncompahgre Peak and the entire Uncompahgre Wilderness visible to the west, Owl Creek Pass Road with its dolomite vertical slabs and ridges not far away, Teakettle Mountain with its frighteningly sheer north face, dramatic Chimney Rock visible along with various white-topped “fourteeners” in addition to Uncompahgre and Mount Sneffels—Mount Wilson, El Diente, Mount Eolus, Windom Peak, Sunlight Peak, Redcloud Peak…Incredible.
I’m not a religious man, but I’d brought a bottle of the Macallan twenty-five-year-old single-malt Scotch and two small glasses that day. I filled both glasses, left one on the small headstone that said only JACOB WILLIAM PERRY April 2, 1902–May 28, 1992, and lifted the other.
Long ago, just for the hell of it, I’d memorized the English translation of some of Virgil’s lines from his Eclogues. Now, holding my Scotch glass high toward the San Juan Mountain peaks catching the last slanting rays of the fall day’s sunlight beyond little Ridgway, I recited some of those lines as best I could remember them—
“As long as rivers shall run down to the sea, or shadows touch the mountain slopes, or stars gaze in the vault of heaven, so long shall your honor, your name, your praise endure.”
And I drank my fine whisky in one swallow, left the bottle and the other glass on the headstone, turned my car north and east, and drove back out and away from the snow-topped high peaks toward home.
THE END
Colorado
May 2011–September 2012
About the Author
Dan Simmons is the award-winning author of several best-selling novels, including Olympos, The Terror, Drood, and Black Hills. He lives along the Front Range of Colorado and sometimes at Windwalker near Longs Peak on the Continental Divide.
dansimmons.com
Books by Dan Simmons
The Abominable
Darwin’s Blade
The Crook Factory
Flashback
Black Hills
Drood
The Terror
Olympos
Hard as Nails
Ilium
Worlds Enough & Time
Hard Freeze
Hardcase
A Winter Haunting
The Rise of Endymion
Endymion
Fires of Eden
Lovedeath
Summer Sketches
Children of the Night
The Hollow Man
Summer of Night
Prayers to Broken Stones
The Fall of Hyperion
Hyperion
Carrion Comfort
Phases of Gravity
Song of Kali
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The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2013 by Dan Simmons
Author photograph by Karen Simmons
Cover design by Allison J. Warner
Cover photograph © Karl Maret/Corbis
Cover copyright © 2013 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First ebook edition: October 2013
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ISBN 978-0-316-19885-1
In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.