I have a five-year plan to replace the fences, but when I tried to buy a pole sale from the Forest Service this spring they said they’re not selling live trees anymore because there aren’t many of them left in the valley. I’m still adjusting to the idea that if I build a fence this year, it will be with poles that have already begun to rot. When we built the fences last time, my father was in his early 60s, and he said that this would be the last time he had to build them. He was right. He died at 82, about the time the elk started breasting through the sagging poles between the crossbucks.

A crossbuck fence is a memento mori with the authority to enforce its implications. If you build a fence up here, you’ve got a twenty-year chunk of your life deteriorating right before your eyes.

You can make jokes about selling fossil trees when you go into the local Forest Service Office to get firewood permits, but you’ll be the only one laughing. They’re touchy about the beetle-kill. People yell at them because of the dying forest in the Sawtooth view-shed. People behind the desks start dancing and singing when this happens, and their song goes like this:

Their song-and-dance might be fossil behavior, too. There were a number of large controlled burns planned for the valley a few years ago, just before the beetle population exploded. Then a controlled burn torched whole neighborhoods in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and a number of careers ended before retirement benefits had matured. The Forest Service might hate pine beetles as much as my neighbor hates sagebrush, but controlled burns pose an unacceptable career risk upon the people setting them.

It’s easy to think about fossil behavior when you deal with Forest Service employees. I think of some apocalyptic future when it hasn’t rained for years, the yuan buys as many dollars as a dollar now buys yuans, Social Security has gone bankrupt, President-for-Life Jeb Bush rules to the edges of the Beltway from a bunker, and there are still people in tattered green uniforms sitting behind broken desks in the ruins of the local ranger station, waiting to put out fires in timber that has rotted into the ground years ago.