A popcorn vender stalked up the stairs past his seat and Matt paid for a super-sized bag. He grabbed a handful of the salty treat and held the bag out for his father.

“No thanks,” his father said. “Not much of an appetite.”

Matt nodded. The Cardinals were batting and had a runner at third with nobody out. The sky was a deep blue—as deep blue as Chicago got. Matt tasted the Lake Michigan water in the air. It permeated everything down here. The big lake always made its presence known. It was the giver of life in this area, and he often wondered why people didn’t hold church on its shores every Sunday, thanking it. It was the life-giver, and it was real. You could touch it, feel it, jump into it. If you were good enough, you might swim up to the even bigger Lake Superior. Hell you could swim to the shack if you wanted to.

His father turned to him. “Thinking about up north again, aren’t you?”

“How’d you know?”

“You always get that look in your eye. It’s easy to spot. And maybe I will have some of that popcorn.” His father dug out a handful and popped a few kernels into his mouth.

The Cardinals knocked in the runner on third with a sacrifice fly. The crowd quieted and the wind swirled across the upper deck.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” his father said, gazing out at the horizon.

“What’s funny?” Matt asked.

“How two places can be so different. Look around you, at all the buildings. Then think of up north, and how there are almost no people.”

Matt nodded and chewed.

“The Huron Mountains are about a hundred thousand acres, and that’s close to the size of this county,” his father said in between swallows of popcorn. “There are maybe a dozen people in the Hurons. There are a couple million here. Crazy if you think about it.”

He agreed.

“You’ve got people shooting each other here for pennies. Up there, you’ve got none of that. Which makes me think it’s all a people problem. All of it.”

Matt watched a seagull arc the field.

The Cardinals knocked in two more runs, and the Cubs manager came out of the dugout to remove the pitcher.

Matt’s father stared at the sky. A roar shook the stands, and an F-18 buzzed the field. The crowd applauded.

“I hate that jingoistic crap. Waste of gas, too. Are we North Korea now? Next thing you know, they’ll start parading missiles and tanks around.”

Matt chuckled and dug deeper into the popcorn. His father was on a roll.

Big John waited for the jet engine to fade. “Not everything is as it seems,” he said, turning to Matt. “Like the tall roadside trees in the national forest. How they chop the ones just out of sight.”