Patrick Johnson likes to sit on his brother's deck in tiny Sunburst, Mont., where he grew up, and stare out at the Sweetgrass Hills.
"What do you see?" his family asks. "There's nothing there.""Exactly."
It's the highest compliment Johnson, director of the Utah Health Policy Commission, can pay a piece of land. He misses the prairies of his youth and the rare windless nights when it got so cold he could hear the air crack.
But city - specifically Salt Lake City - has been home for more than a quarter-century. And Johnson can't really imagine changing that.
He came to Utah to woo the woman who became his wife, part way through his college education. He graduated from the University of Utah after transferring from Carroll College in Montana.
But he's only half joking when he says he really came here because Utah has an effective mosquito-abatement program. "No bugs," he says, grinning. "That's one thing I don't miss" about Montana.
He rattles off dates that are life markers: He knows exactly when he started work for the State Health Department as an epidemiologist. And when he changed assignments, winding through years in the Salt Lake City-County Health Department, a stint as a policy analyst in Gov. Scott Matheson's Office of Planning and Budget and - this one makes him laugh - his time as a disaster coordinator for the state, where he did a little flood control and a lot of bleeding chickens to look for disease.
In 1989, he became government relations and legislative specialist for the state's health department. In October 1995, he was tapped to head up the health policy commission, the body that has shaped Utah's health-care reform policy.
His best job ever, though, was pumping gas near Yellowstone Park. He earned $1.50 an hour, had "lots of kids to hang out with" and met people from around the world.
"They'd pull in and ask directions and I'd have to explain that we take the Tetons down every night at 6 p.m.," he says.
He once wanted to be ambassador to Afghanistan; he never lost "that sickness called politics." It permeates his reading - he rereads DeToqueville's "Democracy in America" every year "to stay grounded!" - and his work. "I watch the political scene with great interest."
He also loves sports, both as a spectator and a participant.
But the thing that he will point to as his life work, he says, is his family. He and his wife, Terry, have managed to enjoy every stage of development of daughter Meaghan, 11, and son Matt, 16, by avoiding labeling those stages. Labels can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, he says. "I've liked my kids at every age."
And he's tuned in to them: "I remember seeing a hairy leg on the coffee table that wasn't mine and realizing Matt is growing up," he jokes.
It's not a process he envies. Cities aren't friendly to kids, he says. When he was growing up, all the kids lived at each other's houses. He had dates where he had to drive 150 miles "and our parents never worried about what we were doing because it took so long to get anywhere."