This morning we awoke to a couple hours of soft rain. The temperature was 50 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and, because we’d left a bunch of windows open all night, 60 degrees inside.

It was a happy and unexpected change. Record warmth and smoky sunshine has been making the house uncomfortable during the July afternoons and evenings despite our strategic openings and closings of doors, windows, and blinds. For the moment, we’re enjoying normal nighttime temperatures. The rain is an unexpected bonus. Excessive heat and dry weather, day and night, will return by the weekend.

Last summer, in response to a warming climate, we purchased a small swamp cooler that can cool a hundred square feet to bearable temperatures. We roll it from room to room, depending on whether we’re cooking, eating, or watching PBS Newshour. On really hot days, we turn it off and walk out to the river and jump in.

The Bench Lake fire, a mere three miles by air from us, is in the mop-up stages and no longer threatens our peace of mind. The rain will help. It may get us through the first week of August without another fire. But we are in a warming world, with more summers to come.

We had three days when blackened pine needles and white ash fell on the deck, and more than three days when the fire produced a tall pyrocumulus cloud at 5 p.m., raising the number of fire vehicles on the highway and in the sky and causing us to check which way the wind was blowing every few minutes.

Two nice young men from the Forest Service came by to advise us on our fire readiness. They pronounced us “very defensible.” They said that if the fire came our way we would be asked to evacuate, but a fire engine would be parked in our driveway, and it and its crew would try to save the house and garage. They said our winter woodpile would get soaked, but our buildings would still be standing after the fire came through our neighborhood. I didn’t believe them.

I asked if we would be legally compelled to evacuate, and they said no, but if we did leave, we wouldn’t be allowed back as long as evacuation orders were in place. It was an idle question, because if 200-foot-high flames start moving through the forested foothills across the river, we’ll take a minute or two to toss clothes, computers, and photo albums in the pickup. Then—quickly—we’ll head north or south on the highway, depending on where the fire is coming from, and how fast it’s moving, and whether downed trees are blocking the road.

Photos of the last decade’s worth of fiery destruction are burned into memory: the blackened towns of Paradise in California, Lahaina in Hawaii, Lytton in British Columbia, the charred shells of cars on ash-covered highways in Portugal.

The empty square miles of once-towns, once-houses, and once-forests are too much to wrap our minds around. We do understand that when another fire comes to the valley, we’re at the mercy of drought, humidity, wind, and bigger and more important fires elsewhere taking personnel and equipment away while we still need them.

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In the face of a firestorm, we make defiant Bambi-versus-Godzilla gestures. We’ve been keeping the lawn mowed and trimming the lower branches from the trees, cutting down bushes and making sure that we run the gas-powered sprinkler system for a half-hour each morning and evening. The lawn is getting soggy and has started sprouting mushrooms, but looks safe. The house and trees, not so much.

Our efforts won’t save anything in the worst case, and won’t be needed in the best case. There’s a narrow middle ground where they might do some good, but we don’t want to find out where it is.

The Forest Service has implemented a Stage 1 fire restriction for the valley, so campfires, thankfully, are banned in undeveloped campsites. Redfish Lake Lodge was opened for Lodge guests on Sunday and the lakeside campgrounds to campers with reservations on Monday. Everybody else can return today.

We are looking forward to eating dinner at the Lodge restaurant, but we won’t go until they’re up and running smoothly again. We don’t want to cause more problems than we’re worth. The employees have had a tough enough time this month.

Tourist numbers probably won’t return to normal levels even with the Lodge and campgrounds open, because back-to-school sales are already happening.

Also, the fire and evacuations have at long last brought an unsettling fact to public attention: there is one narrow tree-lined road in and out of Redfish Lake. If a fire started at the junction of Highway 75 and Redfish Road, several thousand campers, Lodge guests and employees, and beachgoers would be trapped behind the flames.

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In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, Julie and I tried to figure out what we could realistically do to prevent the tragedies that surrounded us. We concluded we didn’t have the power to change the course of Covid or end war in the Middle East or put a stop to any of a half-dozen other slowly unfolding evils.

We wanted to leave the world better than we found it. We got vaccinated, and we wore masks before that. We voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election. We contributed to Planned Parenthood. We generally behaved ourselves in public and tried not to ruin anyone’s vacation by making fun of tourist behavior. We recycled cardboard, aluminum, and plastic. In the fall, we cleaned up local undeveloped campgrounds and got rid of fire rings and litter. We tried to come in on the low end of the petroleum and electricity consumption spectrum.

Ever helpful, I began writing essays pointing out that civilization wouldn’t last much longer if it kept on with business as usual, because the climate had reached tipping points and all bets were off as far as weather, agriculture, economies, social stability, and human decency were concerned. My warnings, once posted on my website, were supposed to go viral, infect the consciousness of millions, and spur massive planet-saving changes in human behavior. They didn’t.

Our most notable accomplishment was changing the state of our consciences from guilty to semi-smug. Looking back 3 years, we can say that history proceeded according to its own logic, which seems to be indifferent to human plan or purpose, or at least our plans and purposes.

History does seem to be interested in us where the Law of Unintended Consequences is concerned. Over the years, we have watched our minor actions cause huge down-the-road effects, some of them best characterized as good luck. That doesn’t mean that bad luck isn’t a possibility.

If the flapping of butterfly wings can eventually cause hurricanes, it may be that one more trip by Julie or me to the Stanley Post Office to pick up another New Yorker and/or Planned Parenthood fundraising letter will spew the exact amount of molecules of CO2 into the atmosphere to induce a cascade of physical changes that will, within a year or two, result in human extinction.

Unfortunately, the trillions of individual causes having individual effects means that nobody will ever know for sure what or who caused what or whom. No one can be blamed for even the most blatant evils—not even Donald Trump—because they may simply be acting out the unconscious of their grandparents, or refining and extending the pleasures of bullying that they learned in 3rd grade, or manifesting the brain damage they received from brutal parental beatings or Pop Warner Football.

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In 1959, the British author William Golding, contemplating his success and fame after the publication of his novel Lord of the Flies, published Free Fall, a semi-autobiographical narrative that explored, from the standpoint of authorial middle age, the question of free will. Specifically, Golding tried to find the point in life when free will is irretrievably lost.

Golding’s first-person narrator begins to examine his history, looking for the incident that set his life in stone.

At first he blames women as the agents of claustrophobic fate for him. If he had stayed away from women, he might have had a life that retained a semblance of freedom. (One suspects that there are a good many women who feel the same way about men.)

But once Golding and his narrator start exploring the past, freedom recedes away from them. Fate ignores petty affairs and mindless crushes, and travels back, generation before generation, until it winks out in unnavigable darkness. The novel ends with the conviction that nothing was ever at stake, as everything was determined before the narrator was born.

That’s the way I remember Free Fall, as anticlimax. I read it in college and have kept it in my library for 50-odd years. I could choose to read it again, I suppose, but I’m mostly sure, given the way my life has turned out, that the issue is settled for me: I seem to have an unlimited amount of free will but little or no effect on the world. The poet John Keats said it best, specifying that his tombstone be inscribed with the words, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Lots of people who visit Keats’s grave when in Rome would disagree. But here in Sawtooth Valley, a quarter of the way into the 21st century, it’s easy to see that the giant forces of global warming, human nature, pandemic disease, and economic decline will erase all traces of individual human existence—mine included—given time. Probably not very much time.

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The Bench Lake Fire is no longer a worry. The hot and—this morning, anyway—slightly wet forest that lies between its fire lines and us is still a threat, as are windy dry-lightning storms. With luck, we will live with them until October or so, when we can revisit our other carefully curated and ranked worries: avalanches, new Covid variants, bird flu, the presidential election, nuclear war starting in Ukraine and spreading.

In the interim we embrace the welcome distraction of the Olympics.

There is something joyous in watching athletes compete in their prime, something joyous about young humans willing to defy long odds, put their own will up against fate, and reach for the peak of their lives in a young instant rather than attempting, like most of us, a deathbed apotheosis.

It’s also symphony season. We’re going, as often as possible, to the summer concerts of the Sun Valley Music Festival. Last night we met friends there, and shared a sumptuous picnic and good wine. We laughed a lot when we weren’t listening to the music.

Driving home through golden, smoky light, we wondered at the beauty and fragility of our lives, and the good fortune that allows us the pleasures of weeks of concerts ahead—good health and good ears came to mind. We listened to the music still echoing in our heads, dodged deer and antelope playing on the road, and got home at dark.

We parked the car in the garage and opened the front door and walked into our home, which was still there, solid and intact. More good luck.

We greeted Juno, who had been waiting patiently for her evening meal, followed by her nightly meditation on the deck, when she sits and listens for coyotes and other dangers, and gives us warning if they’re headed our way.