The Sawtooth National Recreation Area held a volunteer clean-up event the last two weeks. Julie and I signed up to pick up trash left behind in the undeveloped campsites in the valley. These are places where people can park a trailer or pitch a tent on National Forest land and not have to pay. They can stay for a couple of weeks, and many of them stay even longer. All summer our landscape has been dotted with tents, trailers, campers, and motorhomes, some of them out in the middle of sagebrush flats, some of them tucked away up creeks and gulches.
It’s safe to say that the Forest Service has a growing problem (in addition to the problem of having to rely on volunteer labor for essential maintenance), as more and more people purchase RVs, and more and more people retire or become unemployed, and more and more people are untied from the school year due to the pandemic. For the poor, camping is a decent alternative to being homeless or sharing too-small spaces with too many family members. For the construction workers on the new big houses in the valley, camping is a good way not to pay rent, assuming they could even find a rental to pay for. For the wealthy, whose motorhomes appear towing new Range Rovers—and behind the Range Rovers, boats or trailers full of four-wheelers—the informal camping sites offer them space for their toys and places to use them.
So far this week Julie and I have cleaned thirty-four campsites, if you count campsites by the number of fire rings we’ve taken apart and raked level. We’ve found fire rings built up against dry trees, in the middle of thick sagebrush, in thickets at the base of heavily timbered slopes. We’ve found broken lawn chairs, torn sleeping pads, stove tops, tent poles, tent flies, tent stakes, and tents. We’ve found new four-wheeler trails up steep hillsides. We’ve picked up smashed beer cans, beer cans pushed down squirrel holes, beer cans with frost- and fire-swollen tops, beer cans full of bullet holes, and half-melted beer cans in the fire pits. We’ve found—and left undisturbed—mounds of unmistakably human shit.
We await the advent of cholera. We await the outbreak of shit-flinging class warfare between the tent-dwellers and the motorhome dwellers. We await the moment when the Forest Service finally lives up to its responsibilities and becomes the central Idaho distributor for Porta-Potties.
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Last week’s news, should you accept it as having some relationship, however oblique, to the truth, has indicated that Donald and Melania Trump have come down with COVID-19. Trump has had enough trouble with his oxygen levels that he’s in Walter Reed.
Also, a recording has surfaced of Melania cursing Christmas and the donkey it rode in on.
Also, Donald Trump’s decompensation in last Tuesday’s debate has hurt him in the polls.
Also, David Brooks, for decades a reliable dispenser of Edmund Burke’s conservative platitudes, has redefined conservatism to exclude Trumpism. Brooks’s commentariat (which he claims not to read) takes him to task every week for evoking a smiling, deliberately obtuse brand of conservative (one whose avatar could be Brooks himself) that is willfully blind to the recessive line of descent that reaches from Ronald Reagan to Newt Gingrich to George W. Bush to Donald Trump.
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Contrary to what you might think, our volunteer camp-cleaning exercise has not destroyed our faith in the human animal (although it has reinforced our faith that humans are animals). In most of the campsites we visited, people had made an attempt to clean up after themselves. Most of the firepits were not filled with melted beer cans and aluminum foil. Most of the campsite perimeters were not littered with garbage (although Julie found a rotting pound of bacon that caused her to hold her garbage bag out the window as we drove away from the Iron Creek Transfer Camp, looking for a dumpster). We found places where people had dug holes and buried their shit and toilet paper, which gave us hope that they would use Porta-Potties if Porta-Potties were available.
It suggests that humans can be educated to take care of their camping spots, and that most people will do the right thing if given the chance. So far the Sawtooth Forest has not put much effort into education, choosing instead to enforce regulations on where people can cut firewood, or harassing people who park along the no parking signs on Redfish Lake Road, or waking up people at 3 a.m. in their tents, telling them move on to another National Forest. These incidents have been part of the Forest Service’s transformation from a service agency to an armed enforcement agency, and its change in management style from friendly requests to intimidation.
The worst incident of the week came when Julie and I passed by a camp that had been there a month, far in excess of the time limit. Whoever was there was also cutting firewood—there was a trailer containing a cord or so of cut and split blocks next to a pop-up tent and a fair amount of camp furniture. We could hear a boom-box playing rap music.
We didn’t go near it—we observe a strict don’t-bother-the-tourists policy, figuring that they don’t come to Sawtooth Valley to be around the locals, especially if the locals have caught COVID-19 from last week’s tourists. (This is not always the case. In past summers, lonely people have invited us into their campers, showing us well-organized miniature kitchens, with miniature utensils and miniature pots and pans, and dishes for four or more, everything in its place. These folks were widows and widowers mostly, and the campers had been furnished with plans and dreams for two.)
When we started cleaning the empty campsites next to the long-occupied one, a woman came over and said hello. I asked her if they’d had any trouble from the Forest Service for staying too long or cutting firewood without a permit. “They’re meaner than hell about those things,” I told her, because they are.
She said she hadn’t been camped there. She was just visiting a friend, who was leaving the next day. She grew visibly anxious, and I realized that she had seen us, with shovels, rakes, a wheelbarrow and a white pickup, as enforcers of government regulations. She immediately went back to her friend’s camp, and they started packing up. That night they were gone. I hoped they hadn’t been stopped and fined for cutting firewood without a permit.
It does not do your peace of mind much good to dwell upon what it’s like to camp in Sawtooth Valley and then have someone threaten you with a police action, especially if you were the someone doing the threatening, however benign your intentions.
They left their camp a mess. I assume they thought we would clean it up for them, and we did. I’ve been feeling bad about the whole thing ever since.
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Benign intentions almost always have unintended consequences. When my mother was in middle-stage Alzheimer’s, she grew confused about what day it was. She had been a churchgoer, at least in the summers, when the Sawtooth Meditation Chapel held Sunday non-denominational services. Julie, because she could play piano, had been drafted to accompany the hymns, and she would stop at my mother’s house and take her to church every Sunday.
A Baptist minister had come to town and was looking for parishioners for a church he was running in an abandoned motel. Someone had told him my mother lived alone and had a soul that needed saving. One Thursday afternoon we found my mother in her house, dressed in her Sunday best, waiting for her ride to church, frightened and confused. The minister had told her he’d be by to take her to his church—on Sunday, not Thursday. My mother wanted to know what had gone wrong to cause Julie not to take her any longer, and why church was no longer held in the morning.
We did our best to explain things, and both Julie and I were waiting when the minister and his wife showed up at my mother’s door the next Sunday. We explained the situation to the minister and told him my mother had her own church to go to, and that it was a bad thing to further confuse an Alzheimer’s victim, whether or not her soul was in the balance. “We’re trying to keep her in her own house as long as possible,” I said. “It scares her if you change what she’s used to.”
“We were just trying to help,” said the minister.
“You weren’t helping,” I said.
(Since that time, whenever Julie or I do something that really annoys the other, we say, “I was just trying to help.” Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.)
The valley clinic was between physician’s assistants at the time, and the clinic owned a house for its employees. The minister and his family had rented the house. When a new PA was finally hired, the clinic board told the minister he’d have to leave.
The minister’s wife went around Stanley telling everyone who would listen that the spiritual health of the town was far more important than its physical health, but the clinic board held firm to scientific materialism and got them out of the house. Due to Stanley’s chronic housing shortage, the minister and his family had to relocate downriver to Challis, which always has outranked Stanley in the need-for-salvation department anyway.
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Over the years I’ve come to think that all human beings have a Baptist minister in their makeup, and he comes out whenever any of us hits on an easy and simple solution to a complex and deadly problem. With the best of intentions, we decide somebody needs help, and we can help them. Instead, we make things worse. We reach beneath the surface of a life, and it’s tragic down there. People end up more damaged than we found them, and unless we spend a lot of time trying to figure out why, our best intentions blind us to the harm we’ve done.
Every time I read a David Brooks column, I decide that’s what he’s up to. That’s the way I look at every new Forest Service attempt to regulate the burgeoning numbers of tourists in Sawtooth Valley. I don’t doubt that Donald Trump once really did want to make America great again. I don’t doubt that Melania, as a small child, woke up to a beautiful world on Christmas morning, one where every choice was the right one.
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Deer and elk seasons begin this month. The campgrounds at Redfish and Stanley and Alturas Lakes are mostly closed. It’s been getting down to the low twenties in the mornings. Restaurants are getting ready to close for the winter. Traffic on the highway has slowed, mostly because of road hunters scanning the hillsides for targets. Once the shooting starts, the tourists without guns head for home if they’ve got a home to go back to.
Julie and I will continue our clean-ups until the snow covers the campgrounds. Our garage is getting crowded with the broken camping gear and garbage we’ve picked up, so eventually we’ll have to load it all back in the pickup and take it to a Forest Service dumpster. Our good deeds will be over for the year, unless we find someone who really needs our help.