COALVILLE — Mark Judd runs a dairy farm near here. He and his wife, Lareen, take care of about a hundred cows and five kids, including Kelvin, a 14-year-old son who this year got to hunt with his dad and carry a rifle for the first time.
Three weeks ago this past Thursday, Mark and Kelvin got in the truck and drove to Elkhorn Creek eight miles east of town for some late-afternoon hunting. In woods they have walked all their lives. Mark went high, Kelvin went low.
Three hours later at sundown, when Mark got back to the truck, Kelvin wasn't there.
An hour later, he still wasn't.
Mark Judd started to worry.
When he fired three shots into the air — the hunter's distress signal — and got nothing but quiet for an answer, he started to panic.
Mark called search and rescue and all the friends he could think of, and within what seemed like seconds an army was there with him in the dark.
For hours that seemed to Mark like eternities, they tramped through the forest, fanning out in a well-coordinated grid, accompanied by search dogs. Helicopters arrived from Salt Lake with spotlights.
Five hours later, still nothing.
It wasn't exactly balmly that mid-October night, but it wasn't life-threatening cold, either, for a sturdy North Summit High School ninth-grader. Mark Judd was less concerned about the weather as what might have otherwise happened to the son he'd let go of in the woods. What if it was something physical? What if Kelvin had hurt himself? Gotten attacked by an animal?
Worse than the worry was a foreboding sense of guilt. "You get to the point where you're questioning everything you've done in your life, especially yourself," Mark would say later. "Should you have been better prepared, why do you do these things, should you have even been there in the first place?"
A religious man, Mark Judd prayed. At first he prayed that they'd find Kelvin safe, but as the hours trudged by his prayers changed. "You come to the point where you just realize that maybe things aren't going to work out," he says. "I got to where I was wondering what we'd be doing in the next few days, a funeral or what. I finally said 'Lord, he's in your hands, don't let him suffer.' You get to that point, where you turn it over to the Lord and try to accept the consequences and the results."
It was just before 2 in the morning when the helicopter with the infrared heat-seeker flew over Elkhorn Creek.
It was maybe five minutes after that the pilot found Kelvin Judd — cold, scared . . . and just fine.
Two weeks later to the day, Mark Judd was out hunting when he heard about the lost 2-year-old boy in the south fork area of Chalk Creek, one ridge away from where Kelvin was lost.
He drove to the staging area and volunteered his services. "I felt like I ought to be there," he says. He didn't find the boy. Nobody did. Not even the heat-seeking helicopter. Until five days had gone by and finally they found a lifeless body.
Maybe more than anyone alive, Mark Judd knows how Paul Wayment, the father who lost track of his son, Gage, in the woods, is going to second guess himself. "I beat myself up for five hours," he says, "and I hope I never have to go through anything like that again."
"He's going to beat himself up for a long, long time," the dairy farmer says of Paul Wayment. "But my personal opinion is if what he did is child abuse, then each of us is guilty. I think each of us puts our kids in dangerous situations from time to time. We don't think much about it, and seldom does it turn out tragic, but we do it.
"In our situation we were fortunate," says the dairy farmer from Coalville. "In our situation it turned out all right."
Lee Benson's column runs Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com and faxes to 801-237-2527.