I’ve now written thirteen weekly journal entries. This is the fourteenth. A quarter of a year has gone by, faster than if I hadn’t been meeting Monday deadlines.
In a quick thirty-nine Mondays I’ll have a record of mostly internal events from March 2020 to March 2021.
If the town of Stanley ever buries a time capsule, I’ll include a copy. If the time capsule is exhumed after a thousand years, anyone who reads my words will say, “If only he had known what was coming, he would have relaxed and enjoyed himself.”
People in the far future feel free to give you advice. They tell you not to worry, because whatever happens, good and bad, has already happened.
Easy for them to say. I’d pay more attention to them if they were more specific.
________
Last Wednesday, June 17, Julie and I awoke to find four inches of soggy snow on the deck. The previous afternoon, we had gone for a walk along the beach at Redfish and had watched as a shuttle boat full of backpackers had headed for the trailhead at the other end of the lake. It was raining, but snow was beginning to obscure the tops of Mount Heyburn and the Grand Mogul.
“At least they won’t have to worry about mosquitos,” we said.
We drove into Stanley from Redfish, checked the mail, then came home and started a fire. I packed in enough wood to last the night. We ate dinner and watched protest marches on the news. We watched worried public health officials talk about clusters of new coronavirus infections. We watched a story about the dismembered and burnt bodies of two children being dug up on their mother’s new husband’s Eastern Idaho farm. We watched the weather, but not as intently as we would have if we were headed out for a few nights in the Sawtooths.
I awoke in the middle of the night, thinking that Julie had gotten up and was running the dishwasher, but it was rain hitting hard on the roof. Then the snowline descended to our level, the night became silent, and I went back to sleep.
________
It has been a wet and cold spring here. The few warm and sunny weekends we’ve had have seen lines of RVs, pickups, and bicyclists on the highway, but tourist season hasn’t really taken off yet. We haven’t had to wait five minutes to get out of our driveway.
Local music festivals and art fairs and foot races have been cancelled. Hiking has been hampered by mud and snow and wind. Restaurants have opened later in the season than usual, possibly because their outdoor diners would have had to wear winter coats and gloves.
Where it’s not snow-covered, the land has turned beautiful and green, but people who have strayed off pavement have gotten soggy and cold.
On days when the snow clouds come blowing down the valley, activities are limited. It’s like any other January. We read and write and watch the evening news to see what’s happening in warmer places.
_________
If you want your evening news calm and reassuring, it’s best not to watch stories from Eastern Idaho or interviews with economists. Economists do not seem to be able to relax and enjoy themselves. They worry that the current plague year might turn into two plague years, or a plague decade. They worry that a safe vaccine might never be developed. They worry that a lockdown-triggered economic depression could result in millions of permanently lost jobs and repossessed homes and uneducated kids.
The only economists who appear to be relaxing and having fun work for the Federal Reserve. Jerome Powell, its chairman, periodically makes an upbeat speech where he talks about the future as though it will continue to resemble the past. We’ve got things under control, he says. Let us do the worrying for you.
Non-Fed economists point out that if the Fed’s Board of Governors keeps keystroking zeroes into existence, the dollar will lose its status as a reserve currency. We can look to Zimbabwe to see what will happen then, and it’s hard not to worry about that.
________
Last year, before the pandemic was on anyone’s worry list, the mother whose children have been exhumed from an Eastern Idaho farmyard declared that the world would end this July. She also declared she was going to save humanity from becoming zombies. Salvation required the soul being freed from the body that had become zombified.
In addition to her children, three other people close to her or her husband died last fall and winter, a small cluster of death now in search of a super-spreader.
She’s in jail now, charged not with murder but with child abandonment. Her new husband is in jail, charged with withholding evidence by burying it in his farmyard. Bail has been set at a million dollars for both of them. If they’re charged with murder, which seems in the realm of possibility, you can imagine a plea for both of them: not guilty, by reason of saving the human race.
________
If you find it hard to believe that a mother would kill her own children, even as the world is ending, you probably aren’t a family therapist. People whose job it is to peer under the slick packaging of families discover murder and incest and deliberately stunted lives. Parents will bring a child to therapy, claiming they don’t know what’s wrong with the kid. What is wrong is that the family story needed a problem child, and the kid drew the short straw.
Problem children die by accident or suicide more often than murder. When they don’t die, their lives are hollowed out by spiritual and physical poverty, or they’re exiled from any experience of intimacy. If they disappear for any reason, a replacement is found. Therapists’ shorthand for this phenomenon is, “The players change, but the play goes on.”
When the title of the family story is If One of Us Isn’t Dying, None of Us Are Living, it becomes the therapist’s job to change it to something boring, like Live and Let Live. It’s a challenge. Most families will refuse to perform such a dull script.
________
Idaho has made the international news with the children-in-the-farmyard story. People have assumed that whoever buried them is an insane monster. But if you look at the story—which contains the end of the world and a person who leads humanity to salvation—you find that the monster is depressingly human and familiar. It’s recognizable as Abraham’s story, central to Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. It’s the story of Lenin and Hitler and Mao, the story of Jim Jones ladling out purple Kool-Aid in Guyana, and the story of the United States of America right now. It’s a story that makes killing possible the minute you believe in it.
Other lethal stories are out there. Cops who choke unarmed civilians to death believe an old tribal story called Us Against Them. Nazi youth believe a story called We Are the Surviving Remnant of a Warrior Race. Physicians who addict other people to opiates believe a story, originally spread by pharmaceutical companies, called This Won’t Hurt a Bit. People who betray the people who vote for them believe a story called The Suckers Deserve What They Get.
All these stories are lies. They can destroy you. One of the ways they can destroy you is to convince you that you can destroy others.
________
It’s a beautiful world this Monday morning, chill but getting warmer as the sun moves above the mountains. Last week’s snow has melted. Julie and I will be working outside today. I’ll mow the grass, which has gotten so tall I have to drag the lawnmower through it backwards or it gets clogged and quits. I’ll also trim branches on the trees, and wheelbarrow a few more loads of dirt into the low spot in the yard.
Julie will continue staining the house. She’s already finished the garage and is lobbying for a third five-gallon can of stain, which she will use on the deck. She loads podcasts on her phone and paints away, steadily, until she covers the wall of the day.
In a week or two I’ll have the lawn under control and ready for fire season, if it’s possible to be ready for fire season. I’ll have completed a course of Deck Yoga, which involves crawling under the deck with a shovel and my carpenter’s tools, in order to replace a couple of pilings that have rotted off at ground level. It’s cramped and dark and wet under there. You end up attempting positions that would take years to master. What would take fifteen minutes in the open air will take an hour of painful effort, punctuated by profanity.
________
Our story, these days, is called Being Good to Each Other. It’s not really a story. It’s more like a heavy Russian novel, of the type used as doorstops and sleep aids, able only to be read on quiet mornings after a good night’s rest. It doesn’t promise to save anybody. None of its characters shakes the world. The plot has a tendency to repeat itself, and nobody dies—at least we hope they don’t.
The characters have flaws, but those flaws are foolish rather than cruel. Their virtues are a bit plodding, but persistent. They believe in friendship, although getting together with friends has become difficult in a suddenly vast country. Internal events have become more numerous and more important than external ones.
They worry rather more than is necessary. They brood over things they wouldn’t have done if they’d known then what they know now. They determine to make new mistakes rather than the same old ones.
They worry about the enormous quantity of pain in the world. They worry about the stories that drive people insane. They worry that the world really is ending but people still go about their lives, jobs, and routines, even as they develop a hunger for brains.
They worry about worrying too much.
________
Julie and I do solicit advice from people in the near future, a couple of whom look suspiciously like older and wiser versions of ourselves.
“Don’t spend energy getting upset about things you can’t do anything about,” they say. “If you have to worry, worry about us. You think we want to look back and see that we could have had a good time but didn’t? That we got tired of counting our blessings? That we got overwhelmed by the evil that stains the fabric of the world? Stop that, right now.”
These senior versions of ourselves must have gotten through to us before. For twenty-eight years now, when we’ve argued, one or the other of us has mostly cheerfully given way. I’ve learned to tell Julie she’s right even when she’s wrong. Julie has learned to tell me that I’m right even when she thinks I’m wrong. Someone from the future must have made it clear to both of us that in our marriage, any judgment about who was right and who was wrong was premature.
Deciding what this pandemic means is no doubt premature as well. It’s tempting to blot out uncertainty with a blanket statement of fact, but fact is in short supply, and will be for a while.
Our older selves insist we can live with that. This too shall end, they say. We will rise from this interlude, and greet each other, and tell each other, with joy and gladness, all that has happened.
They’re quoting from Dostoyevsky, and that means they must have read his last big book again, and finished it, and been cheered by it. It’s a sign that there are far more years in the future than it sometimes seems there are, and that there is more good in this world than it sometimes seems there is. That’s the good news, for the moment.