Bad things happen every day. Most of the time we try and slide by them, the way we unconsciously quicken our pace to get away from street people and drunks. We don't want to be touched by these things lest we become somehow permanently contaminated. But the horror of some events is so immediate and clear that we can't help but take notice. The video footage from a mall in Britain that shows a small child being led away to his death by two boys. The lonely and savage death of Rodney McAllister. These stories cut immediately through our defenses, leaving us to wonder at how wickedly sad the world can sometimes be.

Now comes the story of Paul and Gage Wayment.

Brenda Harrison had already had several marriages and children by the time she met Paul Wayment. He saw something in her, though, and they were married in 1998. They had their own child together, a son named Gage. But whatever it was that Paul saw in Brenda didn't last too long, and the couple separated. He took Gage after Brenda lost custody of her other children.

Paul and Gage were inseparable. The only other love in Paul's life was deer hunting, which is how he and Gage came to be high up in the mountains of northern Utah on a late October afternoon. Paul wanted to scout a deer trail, so he parked his truck along the side of the road, checked to make sure that Gage, who was sleeping in his pajamas, was okay and then took his keys, locked the truck and went off into the woods.

A couple of hunters happened by a little later and saw Gage laughing and smiling in the truck. I would love to ask those two hunters how it is that they could come across a 2 year old child alone in a truck in the middle of nowhere and not stop and make sure nothing was amiss. I hope they haven't been sleeping too well. We can never know for sure what happened next -- 2 year olds aren't always good at following directions -- but when Paul returned about 40 minutes later the truck was empty. Two days later, after an intensive search, Gage was found frozen to death under 4 inches of snow.

The initial public response was divided but mostly hostile to Paul. Many asked the obvious question: How could any parent leave a 2-year old child alone in the wilderness? The unasked question was whether maybe Paul hadn't done it on purpose. But the sheriff's office said there was no indication of foul play, and Paul's family stood by him. His sister, Valerie Burke, said of Paul that Gage ''was absolutely his whole life. He's not the irresponsible terrible person that a lot of people are concluding.''

Paul was eventually brought up on charges of negligent homicide. The prosecutor felt he had to press some sort of charges lest people think ''that you can take a kid, leave them in a vehicle with their pajamas still on, and go deer hunting.'' The jury found Paul guilty and the prosecutor recommended 30 days of home confinement.

District Judge Robert Hilder disagreed and sentenced Paul to 30 days in jail. Paul stood before the judge and accepted responsibility for his actions. He agreed to return the next day to begin serving his sentence. Instead, Paul Wayment took his deer rifle and went up into the mountains he loved so much and shot himself.

Every time I read stories like this I am reminded that we are constantly skating on the thin ice of contingency, and it is only that thin layer that separates our seemingly ordered lives from an abyss of chaos that can swallow us up in an instant. A moment's inattentiveness. A single foolish decision. Suddenly everything that went before matters not at all. The judgment of a life comes down to that one event, the small pebble that once dislodged starts the landslide that inexorably wipes out everything in its path.

Paul Wayment emerged from just such a cataclysm, and after surveying the wreckage he decided that there was nothing left to live for. And who can really question that choice. His carelessness led directly to the death of his only son, his firstborn son. His pain is of an order of magnitude that slices through the bravado, that makes the knees buckle and the stomach go queasy just at the thought of it.

The poet John Donne wrote ''never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.'' I hear the bell toll for Paul Wayment, and I understand perhaps for the first time what Donne meant. I selfishly wish that Paul Wayment had found a way to ride it out, for we are all sinners in varying degrees, and we all have to soldier on under the weight of our mistakes. Any time one of us stumbles and falls, unable to carry on any further, it leaves the rest of us to wonder if we too will eventually fall or will we somehow endure to work our way through to a moment where the sun once more shines on us.

July 22, 2001

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