Last week a deer, a little two-point buck in velvet, was hit by a car on the highway by our house. It died instantly, on the fog line about fifty yards from our front door. We called the local Fish and Game to report it, but four days later nobody had come to pick it up. The local sheriff’s deputy had stopped and I thought he was going to take it away, but he instead pulled it down into the barrow pit and drove off.
Juno, being a dog, was intensely interested in the dead deer, which had begun to bloat. We started escorting her any time she was outside.
A half-dozen ravens flew up and over the road every time a car came by. They’re big birds, and they could shatter a windshield if they got in the way of a car. Drivers were braking and swerving to avoid them.
We have a bear in the area this summer, and we knew it was only a matter of time before it started feeding on the deer, and then it would only be a matter of time before dead ravens, a dead bear, and maybe a wrecked car joined the deer. Julie and I finally loaded the carcass in our pickup and took it to an old gravel pit downriver. We had to hose out the pickup bed to get rid of the liquids the dead deer left behind.
It wasn’t a pleasant job, but it didn’t take long and it’s over now. Juno is still interested in certain bits and pieces of deer in the barrow pit but isn’t hypnotized by them, and she’s mostly stayed in the back yard like she’s supposed to. In another week or so, thanks to the ravens, it will be as if the deer never existed.
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Every spring, Julie and I pick up litter between our house and a turnout a mile downriver. We’ve done it for enough years now that it’s an easy job—we don’t end up with bags of trash we can’t carry anymore. We follow the Broken Windows Theory of highway clean-up, figuring that if drivers see clean barrow pits, they won’t want to be the first person to toss a beer can in them. It works, for the most part. Now and then we see shiny cans decorating the roadside sagebrush, and if the traffic isn’t too heavy, we’ll stop on the way to town and pick them up. We’re civic-minded to the extent that we try to keep the valley clean if we can.
But we’re not so civic-minded as to imagine that Sawtooth Valley is a place of fellowship and mutual aid. It’s a center of Idaho’s tourist industry, and as such it’s hard on the human values of persistence, empathy, and community. Once the onslaught of tourists begins, bureaucracies like the Fish and Game or the Sheriff’s Department are more concerned with crowd control than the down-the-road consequences of dead deer.
Most of the people we see every summer go home after a day, a weekend, or a week. Workers are seasonal. Connections with other people are temporary for the most part. People are working or taking care of guests or getting away from the crush of recreationists, and most of the time aren’t relaxed enough to connect. Julie and I are used to having friends disappear in June and reappear in October.
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Traffic gets intense during the months of July and August. In a valley full of wildlife, that means that the deer Julie and I carted away from our front door isn’t the only dead deer we’ve seen this spring. Patches of blood stain the highway, and now and then we’ve seen cars and pickups with deer-sized dents in their front fenders.
A few years ago, a new Dodge pickup hit a deer next to our neighbor’s gate a quarter-mile up the road. The deer punctured the radiator with its antlers, and the pickup sat in the turnoff to our neighbor’s driveway for two weeks before it was loaded onto a flatbed and taken away. It looked like a repo, and it was easy to suppose that the new pickup had turned into an old one the minute the deer started across the road in front of it. An old pickup isn’t as easy to make payments on as it was when new.
When Julie and I clean up litter we ignore the skeletons of deer, elk, and antelope that have perished on the highway over the years, but the barrow pits from Stanley to Ketchum are avenues of bones.
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Facts about tourism:
1) The greatest human migration that has ever happened is happening now, and it isn’t because of climate change (that migration is mostly in the future) or political asylum-seekers. We don’t see it as a migration because tourists go back home at the end of their vacations, but what else can you call that many humans moving down the interstates in motor homes, campers, Sprinter vans, pickups towing fifth wheels, and SUVs stuffed with camping gear? We’re lucky they don’t all end up at the same place at the same time, although if you visit Yellowstone in July, you can be forgiven for thinking they have.
2) Tourism is a violent and environment-degrading business, if you count the noise, the trash, the dead animals, the fossil fuels burned, and the resources used to build recreational vehicles, hotels, and roads. The policy of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area has been to funnel its motorized visitors into Redfish, Stanley, and Alturas Lakes, and its backpackers into Sawtooth, Saddleback, Alice, and Toxaway Lakes. These have become sacrifice areas, where too many humans have been crowded into places that cannot withstand their impact.
3) Tourism destroys human relations. It divides humanity into locals and tourists, and further subdivides locals—in our neighborhood, at least—into summer people and people who stay through the winter, people who have been here a month or a year or a decade, people who earn their money here or who have brought their money here. Locals have a rigid caste system, with the Untouchables of that system being the tourists.
4) In any tourist economy, experience is manufactured, which means that authenticity comes at a premium. After a while, the most expensive experience becomes the most real, with the caveat that much care is taken to make that experience live up to the expectation of the paying client. Paying for whitewater rafting, backcountry skiing, mountain climbing, hunting trips, and fishing trips means that these adventures all eventually conform to rigid preconceptions, ones formed by government regulations, business considerations, and the litigation industry.
5) Manufactured experience seldom reaches the level of authenticity of loading days-old roadkill into the back of a pickup.
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Back when newspapers were made of paper, I used to take the first Back-to-School flyer of the summer into the Redfish Lodge Bar and give it to the bartender, who was cheered by it the way most people are cheered by the first robin of spring. It meant that very soon, the families with screaming children that crowded the Redfish facilities would give way to retirees, who tend to tip more.
But it’s important to remember that tourists are people, too. Last week I spoke to a group of naturalists who are interning for the summer at the Sawtooth Interpretive & Historical Association. I talked about writing journals, and about the necessity of witnessing events rather than applying preconceptions to them. “What you write on those blank pages is deeply important,” I said. “We’re at an exciting time in history, and it needs witnesses who tell the truth about their experience.”
Then, because I know that much of what they are asked to do involves dealing with our summer visitors, I talked about tourism and its enormous geological, geographical, and economic impact on the valley. I told them that they, being locals for the summer, would be tempted to dismiss tourists as unpleasant parts of their jobs, to be put up with until the end of the day when they could go out and enjoy the world.
“Tourists are the world,” I said. “For lack of a better word, they are ‘Nature’ in Sawtooth Valley. They will do things that will make you angry or contemptuous, but try to respect their simple human dignity, at least until they prove they don’t deserve it.”
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Julie and I enjoy the restaurants being open. We like listening to live music and the evening lectures at the Stanley Museum. We like going to the dog beach at Redfish Lake, where we try to convince Juno that she’s really a dog instead of a human. She never believes us.
We have better luck convincing ourselves we’re tourists instead of locals, at least for the summer, trying to see our world as new and unexplored, full of mysteries and surprises and authenticity and fun. It’s a simple reaffirmation that we’re just visitors here, bumbling through our days, getting things wrong, asking stupid questions, leaving messes wherever we go, thinking that everything is real but shying away every time reality threatens to get close.