I say go through nihilism, as if I look back and see Donald Rumsfeld at press conferences, and the President, too, being deliberately folksy and obtuse, pretending a foolish literalism in the face of questions of conscience, and I can see the grinning skulls beneath those pinkish sheaths of skin. Then I see other grinning skulls conducting suicide bombings for the perverse promise of being able to despoil the virgins who live in Paradise, and the grinning skull of an eerily reincarnated Pope, the grinning skulls of the Let Terry Shiavo Live demonstrators and the endless grinning skulls in that shock-of-recognition cultural nightmare that has been the backdrop of the Terminator Movies.

And then I realize that I’m still in the Valley of Death. I haven’t escaped these things. I haven’t gotten through nihilism. I’m in it. I was drinking at a wine bar in Hailey just the other day.

So maybe you’d think that I’d start telling people to ignore nihilism, to find meaning in hunting-and-gathering at Costco and IKEA and Home Depot, or in having kids and in going to church or playing in a city soccer league or building an eight-thousand square foot house. But I can’t tell anyone that with a straight face, not even a writer.

Writing very quickly moves you toward a consciousness of everyday life as just the surface layer of reality. Once under the surface, avoiding nihilism is like avoiding oxygen. You can do it, but not for very long.

Let me give you an example:

I went to high school with a guy named Larry Rivers. His father, Ed Rivers, was a good and profane friend of my father’s. Ed’s wife was Ida Mae, who belonged to a religious group called the Followers of Christ, which still has members in the community of Carey, Idaho, a farming community about fifty miles south and east of Hailey. The Followers believed that modern medicine violated God’s will. God was in charge of sickness and would bring health if He felt like it. Doctors were in league with the One who would thwart God’s plan.

I don’t know how Ed and Ida Mae got together, but their marriage was one of those where the wife remained in her faith and prayed for the husband’s soul and the husband drank and gambled and stayed out late and in general assumed that his wife’s prayers would be successful without much cooperation on his part.

Then they had two girls and a boy, and Ida Mae’s family got involved with them, insisting that they be raised in the faith. And then the girls died. They both died of appendicitis, one one year and one the next, in the midst of praying family, and when Ed tried to take the second girl to the hospital for an appendectomy, Ida Mae’s father, a patriarch of the Followers, physically blocked the doorway and would not let him pass.

A few years later, Ed and Ida Mae’s boy came down with appendicitis and when Ida Mae got on the phone to her father for a prayer session Ed put the boy in the car and took him to Hailey Hospital. When the old man and a few of the Follower faithful came to the hospital to take the boy back home, Ed was standing on the front steps with a shotgun. He blew out the windshield of Ida Mae’s father’s car with it. Then he told them to leave and they did, prayer having been less than effective against military force since the time of the Albigensians and before.

So Larry was an only child when I went to high school with him, but he was a living one.

There’s a twist to this story. Ida Mae’s father, familiar by this time with the symptoms of appendicitis, one day discovered them in himself and disappeared. Ida Mae found him recovering in a hospital in Southern Idaho, where he had checked himself in.