The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center, as of this morning, lists U.S. COVID-19 deaths at 110,514. World deaths have reached 403,267.

It’s not possible to grieve for every one of them—that would be beyond any human capacity—but you should not try to diminish them by comparing those deaths to bad flu years, or heart disease or cancer deaths, or auto accidents or overdoses. You should not say that we all will die of one thing or another. You should not quote Stalin and say that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic. You should not say Baby Boomers have lived their lives anyway, and they need to get out of the way. You especially should not say that to a Baby Boomer.

You should not say you don’t know anyone who has had the virus. You should not divide 329 million into the number of U.S. deaths to show how low the death rate is, because not everyone has caught it yet. You’re also ignoring the equivalent of 36.8 World Trade Center 9/11 deaths, which as we know can translate into 36.8 Iraq Wars. Keep it up and you’ll be forced to rate some deaths as much more important than others. You should not do that either.

You should not hope that Donald Trump gets the virus, or Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell or your 90-year-old wealthy widowed aunt, who has promised you’ll get all her money when she dies. You should not link death rates to race or economic class, because there are so many other factors involved that you’ll be tripped up by one of the things you haven’t thought of.

I’m not normally so generous with my should nots. But I’ve been rereading D.M. Thomas’s The White Hotel, a 1981 novel that begins with a shamelessly erotic poem, describing lovers in an isolated alpine hotel in pre-world-war Europe. It ends with the Nazis murdering a quarter-million people—one of them one of those lovers—in the ravine of Babi Yar, outside Kiev, in 1941. Thomas transforms his hotel—with its hundred whitened rooms, its thousands of guests and their tears and joys and erotic histories and tragic futures—into a metaphor for a single human psyche.

Each of us is a white hotel. Each of us contains chefs and waiters, maids and gardeners serving all those guests, whom we contain as well. Each of us features manicured gardens, dance floors, elegant restaurants, spas and sunrooms, endless doored corridors. Each of us is a life-packed structure of unimaginable variety and complex unrepeatable experience. Each human death is a loss beyond grief, and a million human deaths is the end of tens of billions of memories and moments, each of them the only one of their kind.

If you look closely, none of us qualifies as a statistic, whether we die in Babi Yar or intubated in an ICU.

You should not read The White Hotel during a time when death tolls are mounting, especially if you’re sensitive to the darker notes of human nature. Things get too unpleasantly resonant, as the excess deaths climb from hundreds of thousands to millions, and their causes go from viruses to starvation to murder.

I’m not saying that the future will follow that tragic trajectory, but the past certainly did, in Ukraine, in the twenty-seven years between 1918 and 1945. History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it will tell you what to watch for.

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Last Wednesday the house-bound weather prophets on Boise’s KTVB news station, broadcasting from their living rooms, told us our mountains would be sunny and in the 60s. Julie and I decided to park at the backcountry trailhead at Redfish Lake and hike from there to the third Bench Lake. We had never been to it, despite having been to the first, second, fourth, and fifth Bench Lakes.

The third lake is smaller, and off to the side of the other four. You don’t go by it when you’re circumnavigating Mount Heyburn, which has been our usual reason for hiking through the area.

Wednesday was a day of reduced ambitions, because to hike all the way around Heyburn, you have to get an earlier start than we did. You have to take the first shuttle boat to the end of Redfish, climb up and over the snowy saddle between Heyburn and Braxon Peak, and drop down into Monolith Canyon. A mile down the canyon, you have to turn to your right and climb over the ridge above the fifth Bench Lake. You have to glissade down through car-sized talus and pick your way along the beaten paths that link the lakes until you reach the trail that descends the moraine on the northwest side of Redfish. You then have to trudge—because by that point in the trip you’re trudging—five miles to Redfish Lake Lodge. When you get there, you will have climbed a vertical mile, what with all the ups and downs, and descended another. You will have gotten your ten thousand steps in, and then some.

Once at the Lodge, you get to order a margarita at the bar, secure in the knowledge that—to use the language of KTVB evening news ads for new gutters or remodeled bathrooms—you deserve one. You probably deserve two, if it’s a nice evening and you’re sitting in one of the Lodge’s deep porch chairs, watching—with the amused and pallid voyeurism of the aged—young lovers acting out their own erotic poems on the beach.

Julie and I thought a hike to the third Bench Lake would be enough for us to deserve to split a single margarita. Also, although I don’t seem to have suffered a loss of stamina, I’ve been feeling short of breath since February. We’re postponing the big hikes for a couple more months until we know what that’s all about.

We had to climb over and through a half-mile of downed trees to get to the lake, and posthole through the remnants of snowbanks. The lake itself is small and shallow. It sits in a dark hollow. It is surrounded by tall alpine firs. The skeletons of drowned trees point inward from the lake edge.

This time of year, the lake edge is flooded. Its beaches are made of last summer’s yellowed swamp grass, floating bits of wood, and drifting moss.

The fish in it are only an inch or so long. We did see one that might have been six inches. It was chasing the others, having apparently grown big enough to eat its siblings. We tried not to judge.

We sat on a big rock at the edge of the water and started going through our supply of chocolate. We wanted to stay awhile, to get to know the place by sitting quietly, listening to the birds in the trees and watching the sun on motionless water. But the birds and the sun had disappeared. Dense clouds started coming over the peaks above us.

The water, made opaque by sudden winds, turned dark green. The trees began to shade toward black. We heard distant thunder. Then we heard closer thunder. Lightning flashed above us. Then really loud thunder. Then rain. Then hail.

We hunkered under one of the alpine firs, using its thick branches as an umbrella, trying not to think of it as a giant lightning rod. I began to curse myself for trusting the KTVB weather team. Then I began to curse the KTVB weather team for making shit up. Julie had brought a rain jacket, but I only had a sweatshirt to go over my T-shirt. The hail started coming down hard. The temperature dropped thirty degrees. The peaks disappeared behind banks of fog.

During breaks in the storm, we scuttled from alpine fir to lower-altitude alpine fir, hoping that we weren’t going to pick the wrong one at the wrong time. We avoided the ones with lightning scars on their trunks.

It was an hour before we were back on the moraine trail, but the sun had come back out and steam was coming off wet trees, puddles in the trail, and us. By the time we reached the Lodge, we were mostly dry.

The Lodge bar, this season, has been relocated outside, into a trailer. Chairs on the porch have been spaced apart for social distancing. Tables in the restaurant are fewer than they used to be. There were lots of empty places. It’s too early in the season for a full house, but it’s become clear that even a full house won’t contain as many guests as it used to.

A few people were sitting on benches between the lawn and the beach. The storm had cooled the air. No lovers were frolicking on the sand. After sitting in the shade of the porch for a while, we started getting cold again, and we decided against the margarita. We suddenly wanted to go home, where social distancing can be measured in miles. An abundance of caution, as the phrase goes, settles over us at times we least expect it. We suddenly remember we’re not sure the coronavirus will go away.

Other people are way ahead of us in this matter. They already know it’s gone away. They’re so carefree they make us nervous. We get anxious about total strangers giving us hugs, having mistaken us for celebrities.

We made a pledge that if the virus ever goes away for good, we’ll have those margaritas, and dinner in the Lodge dining room. We’ll laugh and talk with Jeff and Audra, the incredibly nice people who are the owners and managers there, and we will all remember the summer of 2020 as a quick, intense storm of worry that was tough while it lasted but—thankfully—is over and done with.

________

The Salmon River Clinic has tested forty or so Sawtooth Valley residents for coronavirus antibodies, and everyone has tested negative. For most of this spring, Julie and I thought we had had the virus in February. We haven’t been tested, but everybody else’s negative results argue that we haven’t had it yet.

There is a problem. Some people who have had the virus show antibodies to it. Some don’t.

It’s a scientific mystery, and smart people are working on it. But it’s not good news. A chance now exists that once you’ve had the virus, you can get it again. It could be similar to the virus that causes dengue fever, in which first infections are occasionally mild enough to not be noticed, and subsequent ones painful and occasionally lethal. Different bodies react in different ways to the same infection, and we don’t yet know what makes that difference.

We will know more by next summer. That’s because this summer the country is conducting a massive experiment on our beaches, around our dining tables, in our restaurants and bars and grocery stores and hotels. Next summer, we’ll have results on contagion factors and lingering symptoms and lethality. We’ll know if we could have been carefree instead of worried, and whether or not worrying made the difference between life and death. We’ll know if reopening the economy did or didn’t cause a second or third spike in cases. We’ll know the names of the dead, and the names of people who have survived. We’ll probably know someone who claims not to have had it because it doesn’t exist. We’ll know a bunch of people, like ourselves, who will have no idea whether they’ve had it or not.

As always, everything we will know or think we know might not be completely true. It might be magical thinking. It might be flawed study parameters. It might be unusually persistent election-year misinformation.

But we live in an isolated alpine tourist community, and we’ll make do with what we can get. We’ll continue to stream news and weather reports, and we’ll try to keep up with the magazines we’ve subscribed to. Now and then we’ll sit on a café veranda and catch the eye of a person a few tables away. We’ll ask, because we’ve seen all the out-of-state plates in the parking lots, “What’s it really like out there, anyway?”