Today will bless us with one hour, two minutes, and sixteen seconds more sun than we were blessed with on December 21. It’s warmer and cheerier, too, thanks to a storm that has dropped eight inches of snow in the past few days.
The storm came in with wind. Saturday, I spent a half-hour blowing a big drift out of the driveway. Then I got the snowblower up on the deck and cleared it off. Then another squall came over the peaks and dropped two more inches of snow.
Juno had to be encouraged out into the drifts this morning. When the snow is deep, she tends to pee on the deck, which is one of the reasons we keep it cleared. Another reason is that sometime in February, the sky might clear between a couple of warm Pacific storms. We’ll drag the deck chairs out of the garage and sit outside to watch the sun go down. It will be the first day of spring, equinox notwithstanding.
Big wind slabs line the gullies on the hill across the road, and even though it would be fun to ski them, we’ll wait for the freeze-thaw cycles that begin in April. After a week of warm days and cold nights, the snow stabilizes. You can ski the fatal routes.
In spots the hill is steep enough that you can skim the snow with an uphill elbow while you complete your turns. A deep exhilaration comes from making forty or fifty windshield-wiper turns in two inches of new powder on a bulletproof base. Look back uphill and you’ll see your mark on the world, at least until the next snowfall.
But not now. Now, we’ll be getting windy storms all the way through March. The long vertical drifts that mark the hill will build up a few inches a day for ten days or so, and then cut loose all at once. The piles of snow at the bottom of the hill last into June. I always keep an eye on them to see if anybody’s skis or snowboard have melted out, or anybody’s arm or leg, for that matter. So far nobody’s been that unlucky.
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Julie and I and Juno did ski the hill before this last storm. Conditions were, in a word, difficult.
We had breakable crust and soft spots between the hard ridges of drifts, and we had to feel our way through four or five different kinds of snow on every turn. Julie got worried about falling, which in itself guarantees a fall. I’ve learned that she can fall three times and still have fun, but after the fourth fall, fun isn’t in the picture for either of us.
Nobody fell four times. One of us fell three times. Nobody skied with the slightest amount of grace. (Juno displayed grace. She charged down the mountain in six-foot leaps, disappearing when she landed, exploding into sunlight when she jumped again.)
We all ended up on the highway, walking back to the house, tired but happy. If our ski tracks were our mark on the world, it looked like we had gone through life as rank amateurs.
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This winter Julie and I have been arguing over living forever if we could. Here’s what I want:
We get to live in the here and now. Eternal youth is part of the package. Both of us living in this house, in this world, skiing and hiking and reading books. Stacking fall woodpile after fall woodpile, forever. Writing journal entry upon journal entry, book upon book, until our hard drives rival the Library at Alexandria. One of us cooking fabulous meal after fabulous meal. The other loading and unloading the dishwasher, forever, fabulously. Planning a hundredth wedding anniversary every hundred years.
“I like living,” I say to Julie. “I like this world. I like you. I’d stay in this life forever if I could.”
She disagrees. “I’d hate living forever, here or anyplace else. I’d get bored. All of our friends would get old, and sooner or later they’d all get Alzheimer’s, and we’d have to visit them in nursing homes.”
(This is a trap. She’s trying to get me to say that our friends would live forever, too, at which point she’ll say which friends, and I’ll say all of them, and she’ll say what about their kids, and I’ll say only if they behave, and she’ll ask who gets to decide what good behavior is. Ultimately I’ll have to concede that everybody gets to live forever, which would, within a few generations, make for a Sawtooth Valley overrun with entitled, non-empathetic, and disgustingly immortal tourists in Sprinter Vans. I don’t take the bait.)
But I am hurt that she, a couple of decades younger than I am, would choose to leave me by dying. I wouldn’t do that to her, if I had anything to say about it.
“Besides,” she says, “life without death would have no meaning. Death gives depth to life. Take away death, and life would get static and lifeless. Everything would happen over and over again, even January. Alzheimer’s would be a defense against the crush of memory.”
“It is a defense against the crush of memory,” I tell her. “A good one, from the looks of things.”
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A memory of a long-ago summer, no doubt brought to consciousness by the dark and the cold, and the mostly grim news of this discontented winter:
I’m five years old, and with my father, who is fishing for salmon on the river behind where our house is now, and he’s hooked a big chinook salmon. The river is high and the fish has run downstream and he’s come to a place on the bank where the willows are too high to get his line over them. He looks at me and tells me to climb onto his shoulders. He kneels down, holding his fishing rod as high as he can, and I climb up and hang on for dear life. He walks out into the water, which with his first step rises to his waist, and he starts running with the current, trying to keep up with the fish so his line won’t break.
The water reaches his chest—and my shins—before he is able to do an aquatic dance along the riverbed boulders to a gravel bar on the other side. He emerges with water-filled hip-boots onto solid ground, sloshing with every step. I won’t let go. He tells me to get down so he can land the fish.
The salmon finally stops its run. He plays it for another twenty minutes, finally pulling it exhausted into the shallows. He kills it by sticking the blade of his knife into the top of its head.
I try to lift the fish, but it’s too heavy for me. My father takes a loop of baling twine from a coat pocket and threads it through the salmon’s gills. He slings the fish over one shoulder. Its tail reaches the back of his knees, and then the ground, when he kneels again and I climb again on his shoulders.
We wander up and down the far bank, looking for a safe crossing. When we get home, my mother, who spends her Junes terrified that she’s going to lose husband or son to high water, wants to know why my shoes and pants are wet.
“He went wading,” says my father, not telling her that I waded on his shoulders.
He picks up a fish scale from a shelf beside the kitchen stove, hooks it into the loop of twine, and holds the salmon high. It weighs 22 pounds.
This June, that memory will be sixty-five years old. I can still walk to the exact spot on the bank where my father hooked that salmon, although now where my father was chest deep in water there’s fifty feet of gravel bar. Where that salmon died is now a deep swift hole. Where once the bottom of the valley flooded every spring, overflow channels lie choked with volunteer lodgepole. The river is empty of fish. My father is dead these twenty years.
I’ve changed a bit myself, but I still look at the big rocks on the other side of the river—their arrangement and their markings—through the eyes of an unsurprised five-year-old, taking it all in. If I sit on the bank on a summer evening—this summer, if I’m alive—I’ll see my father fishing across the river from me. He’ll be backlit by the sunset, a happy man in the prime of his life, one confident enough to carry a small boy on his back and walk the bed of a raging river while reeling in a big fish.
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I’ve told Julie more times than I should about Rutger Hauer’s death scene in the sci-fi movie Blade Runner. Hauer plays a near-future replicant, an artificial human designed with superhuman powers and a less-than-human lifespan. Hauer’s character starts remembering all the astonishing things he’s done and seen in his allotted thirty years of life. Then he says, just before dying, “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
That scene has haunted me ever since I first saw it, likely because tears in rain and ski tracks obliterated by new snowfall both evoke human mortality, and its sheer indifferent waste of experience, of moments and images once bright in memory, of perfect turns, of eyes on faces and the touch of fingers on arms, looks of alarm or love or both—all gone, lost in time, never to be part of anyone’s imagination again. Of all of death’s terrors, the loss of memory is the worst.
But as Julie knows, and I am learning, memory has heft, and volume, and when enough of it piles on the slopes of your life, it can all slide down and take you with it. You’ll end up buried, stuck in a terrain trap, unable to move or breathe, yearning to escape to sunlight.
Still, the next time I’m feeling like geologic time will erase me, memories, and everything else, I’ll tell Julie again about tears in the rain.
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Anti-mortality update: today I can sign up for my first vaccination jab, according to the St. Luke’s of Idaho My Chart web page. I’ll do it on the advice of Amy Klingler, our friend who runs the clinic in Stanley, but I’m not happy about it.
Instead of what I hoped would happen—getting vaccinated in Stanley—I’ll have to go to St. Luke’s Wood River, between Hailey and Ketchum. It’s a place I fear and loathe, partly because the St. Luke’s organization has become a brutalist, malignant, administration-heavy cyber-structured medical bureaucracy that has, Borg-like, gobbled up independent medical operations all over Idaho, and partly because my most recent memory from there is colonoscopic in nature. Resistance is futile in either case.
The Stanley clinic’s health district is headquartered in eastern Idaho. The Stanley clinic will receive vaccine shipments in proportion to the population it serves. It’s competing with Idaho Falls and Rexburg, the home of BYU Idaho, whose students, last fall, were caught conducting COVID-spreading parties so they could sell their antibody-laden blood for tuition. Stanley, with its official population of sixty-three, is going to be far down the priority list.
St. Luke’s Wood River is in the more tightly organized South Central District, but I’m not counting on getting vaccinated anytime soon. The Wood River Valley will get far more vaccine than we will, but it’s a community where seventy-five-year-olds outnumber children. There will be a long line, one full of people who have lawyers on retainers and whose only desire is for the process to be completely fair for themselves and their families.
I’ve told Julie I’d wait until we could get vaccinated together, a notion she rejected immediately. But I think that once vaccine production hits high gear, we’ll go from famine to feast all over Idaho, at least as far as vaccines are concerned. In that case, we could end up getting vaccinated on the same day.
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Nothing is sure, I remind myself. We could die the day we’re scheduled to get the vaccine, possibly by missing a curve on Galena Summit. I’d rather not, as I’ve explained above, but the irony of dying on the way to one’s own vaccination—the irony of dying on the way to anything—has the effect of literalizing the metaphors we sometimes confuse with real life. That’s a good thing. Literalized metaphors become real life, real tears, real turns in trackless powder, and they don’t always contain wide-ranging meaning. They do have a comforting solidity once you reach out and touch them.