The air is opaque between us and the mountains. A metallic haze has turned the trees across the river into shadows. Lots of tourists ended their weekends early. Nobody spent last night in the Sportsman’s Access just south of us, and since Nobody spends winters there, we welcomed him back as an old friend and neighbor gone too long.
Today, when tourists stopped at the Sportsman’s Access to fish, they didn’t leave their pickups. Instead, they sat and contemplated the grey and featureless horizons up and down the valley. Then they started their engines, turned around, and drove off, despite the thick hatches of midges that hover in the air above the floodplain.
Not that the bugs would make anybody’s fishing any better. Idaho Fish and Game hasn’t been dumping hatchery rainbow in the river this year, at least not next to us, and last year’s planters—the ones that survived the winter—are educated enough to tell the difference between a dry fly and a midge, especially if a tourist is using a big flashy dry fly. That’s what most of them use, judging from the ones stuck high in the trees back—but not far enough back—from the water.
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In the weeks before the fires started, the Salmon River was low and clear, burbling and beautiful behind our house. Julie and I got in the habit of carrying our lawn chairs across its shallow riffles and unfolding them on the shady, grassy slope above the far bank. Once seated, we would flip through a short stack of New Yorkers and show each other cartoons. We would doze. We would watch Juno swim after sticks. Or we would just sit, quiet and happy, and drink cheap wine from scratch-clouded polycarbonate wine glasses.
We’re easily amused, I know. But by the time we walked back to the house, most of what we sought across the river had been supplied by an hour of shade and tumbling water. We didn’t go home disappointed.
We haven’t been across the river for a while. California and Oregon are on fire. The products of their combustion swirl in a giant eddy that stretches across Idaho from the Oregon border to Yellowstone Park. We’re near the center of that eddy, and the fire-freed allergens of juniper, ponderosa, sagebrush, cheat grass, and crested wheat float in the valley’s air. Walking out to the river would start us wheezing and sneezing, and that sort of internal distress would outweigh the small joys we would be seeking.
We stay inside, but we have to leave the windows open at night to cool the house. Mornings, smoke lingers in carpet and corners, and causes the occasional three or four sneeze sequence, along with dry and itchy eyes. Taking a deep breath, even inside, causes a reflexive cough. We take shallow breaths. We put antihistamine drops in our eyes. We sneeze into our elbows.
“It’s the smoke,” we say. “It’s not COVID-19.”
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Of course, we don’t know it’s not COVID-19. Any sneeze, anytime, anywhere, by anyone, puts us on edge. Worldwide deaths from the pandemic have passed 800,000. Each one of those people had plans for what they’d be doing right now.
Going away from the river doesn’t help the situation. This time of year the rabbit brush is blooming. If we were to climb the hill across the road, I would be sneezing constantly by the time we walked back into the house. Julie would look at me with alarm. “No sore throat,” I would say. “No fever.”
Which wouldn’t necessarily be true. During fire season, I wake up with a sore throat more often than not, having breathed some seriously particulate-laden air during the night. My mouth is dry and so are my eyes. I stagger, sleep-drunk, to the bathroom, for eye drops, and then go to the kitchen for a glass of water. It helps.
Fevers are a different matter. Usually I experience overheating during the afternoons, when I’ve been sitting in a room where I too late remembered to lower the shades. The sun, hot and hazy, packs a wallop that it lacked in April, even though it’s in the same place in the sky.
I start feeling feverish, even if I’m on the couch streaming the Boise TV station. Usually it’s so much hotter in Boise that watching its TV weatherpersons complain can substitute for air conditioning, but this August the snow is gone from the Sawtooths. Our temperatures have reached the 90s. Schadenfreude doesn’t provide the comfort it used to, anyway, because on the hottest weekends—at least when the smoke isn’t making it hard to breathe—most of Boise is up here with us.
We have a digital medical thermometer in the house, but its battery is dead. Back when the battery was alive, I used the thermometer discreetly, worried that Julie would be worried if she caught me using it.
It might have been malfunctioning even then. Every time I used it after the pandemic had started, it read 97.2 F. regardless of how I was feeling.
“It’s not a fever,” I would say, “97.2.” I’d head for the ice cube tray in the freezer. I would fill a big glass full of ice cubes, cover them with the sun tea Julie’s been keeping in the refrigerator, and would feel cooler and less contagious after drinking it. Then I would check DuckDuckGo to see if a constant temperature of 97.2 F. was a COVID-19 symptom. It wasn’t.
So it’s not a fever, so far. It’s the heat. When I built this house three decades ago I didn’t give a thought to installing air conditioning. No one in the valley needed it then.
It’s just climate change, so far.
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So far is a phrase we’re using a lot these days. “How are you doing?” ask friends, calling from distant cities. Our answer is always, “Fine, so far. You?”
“So far, fine,” say our friends.
It feels a little wrong talking like this, jumping into the conditional tense simply because a pandemic has brought uncertainty into our lives. Uncertainty has always been in our lives.
Julie and I took up year-round residence in Sawtooth Valley in 2004, hoping that industrial civilization was going to last long enough for us to have a few more winters with gasoline and electricity. Industrial civilization has lasted far longer than we thought it would. We’ve done fine with a conditional life for sixteen years now.
For longer than that, come to think of it. When Julie and I got married, a lot of people looked at my history and her lack of it, and said that we wouldn’t last any longer than it took a couple of lawyers to unravel the knot. When people talked about how we were doing, they would say we were doing all right, so far. After some years, we began to realize that so far was a blessing. It was an expression of wonder, of rare happiness, of improbable durability in the face of an uncertain world.
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The world really is uncertain. We don’t set the conditions we live under. Tomorrow astronomers could discover the incoming comet that would collide with the Earth and snuff out all life. A novel-novel coronavirus could show up, only this time it would have an Ebola-level fatality rate. The Russian military could have another false alarm like they did in 1983, only this time they would take it seriously and launch a nuclear first strike against our cities. Global warming could continue to follow the rising curve that it’s been following.
There’s no need to get that dark about it. In five minutes or so, any evolutionary scientist can explain why it’s a trillion-to-one chance that your genetic material somehow made it here from the Eocene, much less the Triassic. Any quantum physicist can explain that you’re living in the (super)position of Schrodinger’s Cat, sitting in your box in the dark, listening to someone fumbling with the lid.
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We’ve been watching the news about California, and there are the usual August videos of burned houses, the hollow shells of cars and pickups in what once were their front yards. People tell news reporters that everything they’ve worked for their whole lives is gone, and you know that but for the grace of God, that person is you.
It’s not a big jump from listening to those people to watching Judy Woodruff narrate the obituaries at the end of the PBS Newshour. We see pictures of coronavirus victims, pictures of their grieving families. It doesn’t require a lot of empathy to know their grief could be ours.
But so far those things have stayed safe within the boundaries of our TV screen. The few small fires in the valley have been contained. And if we’ve caught the coronavirus, we’ve recovered, at least according to the Still Alive After Thirty Days metric that the Idaho public health officials use. If the air is a dull grey, it still contains enough oxygen for us to take shallow breaths and keep going. We’re surviving, and we’re still able to face each day of this dismal year and what it brings with it.
So far.