Summer is the season of guests here in Sawtooth Valley. Guests of the Idaho Fish and Game Department, who look like Cabela’s poster-children, stand on the banks of the Salmon River, and flip flies at hatchery rainbow. Guests of the Idaho Highway Department roar by on whole squadrons of unmuffled motorcycles. Whitewater guests bob up and down on late-season riffles below Stanley. Backpacker guests of the Federal government trudge through the Sawtooths and the White Clouds. The guests of realtors inspect overpriced cabins and building lots, and retired white-collar and military guests trundle up and down the highway in motorhomes, only occasionally knocking over a deer or elk or horse or bicyclist.

The personal guests who come to our door have been told to show up with wine and hors d’oeuvres, and when they do we sit on the deck and watch warm and smoky sunsets. It’s easy to be generous hosts when the guests bring the provisions. Watching an orange sun through a fine pinot noir makes you think you’re drinking sangria without the awful sangria taste, and the smoke in the air and the cheese and the salami and the hummus give a relaxed International Scouting atmosphere to the evenings.

We try not to remember that the guests who arrive so eagerly in July cannot be coaxed here in any fashion from December to March, when it’s dark and hits forty below and the only people in the valley are Missoula-bound travelers who have stuck themselves in snowbanks. We pull them out of their cars, drag them through the front door and place them next to the woodstove with hot toddies, where after a while they thaw out and tell us news of the outside world. Some of them have become friends, and some of them have come back as guests, even though they’ve come back in June and July and August with everybody else.

We’ve thought of introducing seasonal rates, but that’s impractical when you’re not charging anything except food, or it’s at the very least impolite to tell somebody to bring gourmet wine and cheese in June when you’ve already implied you’d be happy with Velveeta and Thunderbird and their company in lonely January.

So we’re making do. Guests have thrown their summer-weight sleeping bags out on our river bank, in the sauna, and on the deck. Guests demanding creature comforts have been given beds with real bedding, and a bathroom. Guests demanding more than that have been referred to the more costly hostings of the Sun Valley Company, just over Galena Summit from us. Guests who show up unannounced to a house already filled to bursting have been referred to mean neighbors, who usually lack guests of their own and who have the unfortunate habit of putting their guests to work building fence or picking rock, something we don’t do until our guests have been here three days or so and the food they’ve brought has run out.

In any event, our deck is serving as a forum for lots of guests these days. It’s a kind of luxuriantly rustic politico-literary salon, due to the academic and professional nature of our acquaintances [Mom told me I’d come to a bad end if I kept hanging out with those kids].

The conversation tends toward conspiracy and national ruin. I myself have been guilty of talking about the coming economic darkness, social injustice, and totalitarian dictatorship, all the while making my way through a wedge of cave-aged Gruyere and a glass of some French guy’s gran cru. And little flat crackers that cost each one more than a whole fresh-pack of saltines. I could go on.