Guilty as charged on the coffeepot handle/clancypants-gun thing. Thanks for posting that IMDB thread, lat. Clancypants is quite a thinker. On the end of the lake scene, Annie Proulx spells it out more clearly than Ang was willing to do (as usual). She said that nothing new was said, nothing changed, nothing resolved. But Jack did make it clear that he couldn't get by on a couple of high-altitude f***s a year, so he was going to have to broaden his friendships. And because Randall was not hacking it as a substitute, he probably did what you said, David (I cannot bring myself to quote it, sob). What Jack told his parents was just talk, likely. He would have said about anything to please his old man. Though I love Jack more than myself even, he was, technically, a liar and a thief.