It’s Labor Day weekend. I’ve just come home from Stanley, which was as crowded and unmasked as I’ve seen it all summer. I stopped at the post office and picked up this week’s New Yorker and a couple of flyers from the Challis grocery stores, which I always look at to see how much cheaper their prices are than ours. They’re cheaper, but not Costco cheaper, and they’re fifty-five miles down the winding river road, and Challis folks sometimes get a little snarly at out-of-towners, especially if we’re from the upper valley. Vicious rumors go around Challis about people with post office boxes in Stanley, mostly about key parties and drug use and people who believe in the virus and outrageous requests to the Challis School District for a second or even third teaching position at the Stanley School.
So we go to the Nampa Costco instead, even if it means we have to plan ahead.
In Stanley, it was 90 degrees at four p.m. Smoke was drifting over the peaks from California and Nevada. The sun had turned a deep dirty red. The shadowed sunlight didn’t seem strong enough to make it as hot as it was. A line of people stretched from the takeout window of the ice cream shop into the middle of Ace of Diamonds Avenue, Stanley’s main street.
Clusters of tourists were wandering back and forth between the Sawtooth Hotel, which hadn’t opened for dinner yet, and the Stanley Bakery, which had been closed for two hours. The Kasino Club was open and busy and promised to get busier, with outdoor live music later in the evening. No one was in the post office when I went in, and no one came in while I was there. The wind gusted down the street, kicking up dust. The license plates on parked cars were from out-of-state, or from Boise, which these days is mostly the same thing. Town seemed busy but at the same time empty and alien. People’s bodies seemed too tall or too short, their faces curiously bird-like, rat-like, dog-like.
If a plein air artist, with easels and paints and brushes, had set up in the cordoned-off post office parking lot, I would have checked twice to see if it was Hieronymus Bosch.
You may think I’m running out of big things to write about if I’m reduced to describing hallucinatory trips to town. Not true. Instead, the pandemic has Marie Kondo’d our priorities.
We’ve become behavioral minimalists. We don’t do a lot, but what we do has meaning. Going to the post office has taken on the solemnity of religious ritual. The air there is heavy with the incense of disinfectant. Inside its double doors, masks are worn as sacraments. Each keyed mailbox acts as an altar of possibility, one that can answer or crush your prayers. One day you get a bill. The next day you get a stimulus check, one personally signed by Donald J. Trump.
If the post office is a church, even one dedicated to a savage and capricious god, it’s still a sanctuary from the surreal streets outside. If Stanley is starting to look weird, it’s because the tourist industry is poorly-rehearsed theater in the best of circumstances, and these times are not the best of circumstances. The local audience’s willing suspension of disbelief is wearing thin.
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Julie is not here. She’s down at her parents’ place in Vale, Oregon, helping again with her mother’s garden, which becomes a cornucopia every August and September. She will return home tonight with garden-ripened tomatoes and fresh basil and four pounds or so of fresh mozzarella. We will have caprese salads for a month, for lunch, for dinner, and sometimes for breakfast.
It’s what they eat in paradise.
January—the whole month—is the dark evil twin of a September caprese salad. The only tomatoes available will be petroleum products cleverly crafted to look like the real thing. They’ll be on cheerful display in supermarkets and now and then we’ll fall for the ruse and put one in a January caprese salad, which is a cruel trick to play upon one’s own self, especially when the sun holds no heat, the woodpile is shrinking, and it’s a day when the car, once you get it started, has to wait for a snowplow to even make it to the post office. Costco is out of the question. Summer, even as a concept, is out of the question. Gardens are glimpsed only in fever dreams.
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I wasn’t thinking about how hot it was last week, when I called up the office of our local energy co-op and ordered a new Blaze King wood stove. Our old Blaze King wood stove, which I installed thirty-two years ago when I built this house, finally burned through the top of its firebox, so it no longer directed smoke through the catalytic converter. It lost efficiency, and last winter we woke up to a cold stove a couple of times. That’s endurable but inconvenient, especially when it requires going out on a 10 below morning and cutting kindling in pajamas and flip-flops. We got better, last winter, at cutting kindling before the fact, but we still decided to spend our stimulus check on a new stove.
Blaze King stoves are expensive. The old one had cost me $1800 in 1988, which works out to $56.25 a winter. The new one is $2900. It’s not going to amortize out as well, unless it, and I, last another fifty-one years. The stove has a better chance at that than I do.
But the government wasn’t giving me money to keep the economy going in 1988. Now it is. Even if it weren’t, $2900 is easier to come by than it was for me in 1988. In 1988 I was out of a job. I had just spent my last dime on a woodstove, after spending my other last dime on an MFA degree from the University of Montana. I had learned to write but I also learned that to make a living as a writer you had to hustle 24/7, be a voracious self-promoter, and be a prominent member of the Dumb Luck family. Buying a good wood stove was a way of putting some warmth and solidity into a fragile future. I might starve to death, but I’d die warm. Friends had reassured me that I wouldn’t have to worry about staying warm after death.
But we won’t discuss their reasoning in this journal of the plague year, which, after all, is about survival and not eschatology. Even though I’ve written an end-of-the-world book, I’m more interested in what happens while you’re waiting for the end, not when it happens or what happens after it happens. I used to tell my students that if death is anything at all, it’s a huge loss of perspective.
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In that spirit, and in wanting to get up close to a stable substrate for reality, Julie and Juno and I went on a long hike last Tuesday. We got up early, packed a lunch, and headed for the parking lot at the end of Alturas Lake Road. The trail that goes from there forks almost immediately, and the right fork goes up Alpine Creek, a huge, and for the Sawtooths, a wet drainage. It contains thirty or so lakes.
The Alpine Creek trail ends in a swamp after two miles. After that you’re following broken and braided paths over logs and through bogs. The terrain steepens. Glaciated rock, some of it slick with moss, now and then obliterates all sign of any path. Finding one again takes some bushwhacking. When you do finally reach a lake, you find that it has a headwall above it, one that you have to climb up and over before you reach the next lake.
Up high, signs of other humans are reduced to thin beaten tracks through tundra. The climate changes. You start seeing spring flowers and square-toed mountain goat hoofprints. At the top lake, you’re five or six miles away from your vehicle. You’re also two thousand feet above it. You have climbed and descended another thousand feet getting there. You look around for a place to pitch your tent, roll out your sleeping pad and go to sleep until it’s time for dinner.
But you don’t have a tent. You remember you’re on a day hike, and what lunch remains in your pack is cracker crumbs, a couple of slices of weeping cheese and greasy salami, and a heat-softened granola bar, left over from a ski trip last winter. You’ve got a long way to go before you can sit on anything other than a rock or a log. It dawns on you that it’s going to be a longer day than the one you started out with.
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Julie and Juno and I went by eleven lakes in Alpine Basin. Each was surrounded by rock and meadow, and above them were rock spires. Above the spires were peaks, and above the peaks, a cloudless and smokeless dark blue sky.
We walked through mossy sunlit meadows and through dry streambeds, their rocks smoothed into cobblestone paths by the action of frost and spring water. Going down, we had to pick our way through near-vertical rock bands, but we found routes through them and didn’t get rimrocked. We walked by the tracks of baby goats in dry potholes. We walked under the clawlike branches of giant dead whitebark pines. We walked over lakes on rocks exposed by low water, grateful that we didn’t have to climb up and over the cliffs that formed the lakeshores in high water.
Every place we stopped, we would have liked to have stayed. We were deep in the midst of something solid, beautiful, and real. Once it must have been the whole world. Now it was confined to legislated wilderness. But we could experience it with all our senses, uninterrupted. After a summer of fighting through Sprinter vans to get to the post office, it was a relief. It was also a relief to see a bird head on a bird, a rodent head on a rodent, a dog head on a dog.
We saw grey jays and pikas and the occasional deer, which Juno has finally learned not to chase very far. No goats, but we knew they were watching us. On our way out, we finally saw other human beings when we caught up with another couple a mile from the parking lot. They frowned at us and only grudgingly let us pass, and when we did, they looked at us with the usual projected self-loathing of people who go to the mountains to get away from people.
Closer to the car, we met two people we knew, coming in. They had full packs and were going to stay out for two nights. It was late in the day, and we didn’t think they’d make it much beyond the first lake by dark. We told them where we’d passed by a tent at that lake and wished them luck in making it up the canyon to a lake of their own. When we reached our car we were tired but happy, and grateful to be going home to a soft bed. Juno slept for a couple of days.
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Our trip to the high country had demonstrated that the real is only a big day hike away. But it’s clear that humans can’t live in the real for long. Our new Blaze King’s imaginative engineering is solid evidence of that, and so is our carefully cut and stacked woodpile, which needs a couple of pickup loads added to it before we’ll make it through the winter.
Stanley and its post office and wandering tourists are all ideas made flesh—one doesn’t become a tourist without ideas of who one is and where one goes—and by that standard, I suppose that Julie and I are ideas, too.
It’s a good thing that ideas can come to life, and that a human being can have a decent time going through life as one. We just look a little scary when inspected up close, as Hieronymus Bosch, the old Dutch realist, knew. He painted people as he saw them, as creatures half-dream and half-flesh, running from demons. He could have spent all of this summer in Sawtooth Valley, painting away, and his new work wouldn’t be that much of a departure from his old, safe stuff.