What had been a cool, windy, and cloudy winter finally eased last week. The sun came out. The sky turned blue. Temperatures got above forty in the afternoons. In places, the spooky wind crust on the hill across the road had softened and had achieved the predictable consistency of soggy corn flakes. Going skiing seemed like a mostly good idea.
Skiing down, you had to read the hill, but parts of it were written in an unknown language. The long deep drifts on the north sides of ridges acted as cold storage for the three inches of powder from the last storm, so you could make tight quick turns until the terrain or downed trees forced you out on the south-facing slope and into three inches of slush.
If you started too late in the day, you could, even skiing the tops of drifts, punch through to the bottom foot of snowpack—last fall’s dry and cold powder, now a hollow blend of air and fragile flowers of frost.
If the tails of your skis dropped into that layer at the end of a turn, it was easy to fall backward and discover you were stuck in a hole, with the snow under you collapsing further every time you tried to get your skis under your center of gravity.
Your backpack turned you into an upside-down turtle. You had to wriggle free of shoulder straps, take off your skis, struggle upright in crotch-deep snow, and slowly boot-pack a platform you could stand on. In ten minutes or so, you were skiing again. Traverses and kick-turns, mostly.
These are avalanche conditions. In the late afternoons, the top foot of snow softens and compresses downward. It can get dense enough to collapse the bottom layer, especially if you’re skiing over it. Then an entire hillside’s snowpack can begin floating on a layer of trapped air. Once it gets going, it pushes more air under the snowpack below it. Given room, ten acres of snow can start moving at highway speeds, breaking trees and ripping up brush and rocks along the way. If you’re caught in a spring avalanche, you’re more likely to die of trauma than asphyxiation.
You ski the ridges, where you’re likely to be at the top of an avalanche if it starts. You keep an eye out for terrain traps, and you remember that people can die when their arms and legs are caught by deep wet snow and their heads are jammed into a drift or tree well. You don’t ski alone.
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I’m making skiing sound dangerous, but it’s less dangerous than going to Stanley without a mask these days, now that Idaho has decided it’s going to ignore the new, more contagious COVID variants. Snowmobilers are coming into the valley from towns that have eased all restrictions on masks and distancing, and they crowd into the bars and restaurants, treating Stanley like a sanctuary city for aerosol droplets.
We locals mask up for the post office and the grocery store. We do our best to stay out of the restaurants, although Julie and I have gotten takeout three or four times this year. When we’ve had to wait for our order, it’s been less than comfortable. Our masks draw what look like hostile stares from the maskless. You find yourself feeling guilty and defensive in your own town. After years of trying not to upset the tourists, you’ve upset the tourists.
This tourist season is starting out like last tourist season, with an influx of people who believe the virus doesn’t exist. Or if it does exist it’s no worse than a cold. If it’s worse than a cold it’s no worse than the flu. If it’s worse than the flu it won’t kill you. And so on. Tourists get together in Stanley, infect each other, and return to their homes. We locals, possibly because we have getting caught in an avalanche as a handy metaphor for catching the virus, try to maximize our odds of survival in a situation where there’s some risk no matter what you do. In that way, a mask is like an avalanche beacon, a kind of talisman that—if the worst should happen—tells the people who find your body that you weren’t being an idiot. Even dead, you were being as careful as you knew how to be.
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Vaccination will arrive too late for most tourists to have what they remember as a normal summer. But they’ll be back, anyway. Sawtooth Valley will seem less dangerous to them than wherever they live, if only because they don’t know people who died here. For those of us who have lived here long enough to have seen whole generations come and go, the tourist industry’s implied offer of a vacation from death rings hollow, especially in the face of CDC-predicted surges in infection.
For those of us who will have been vaccinated by then, plague-year habits will die slowly, if at all. Our days of casual, non-special-occasion restaurant dining are gone forever. Weddings are now in the same hazardous category as gender-reveal parties. Shaking hands is out. Costco on weekends is out. Even if it’s just a cold, saying, “It’s just a cold,” is out.
Going to see Steely Dan and Pink Floyd tribute bands in crowded basement nightclubs is a thing of the past.
Also, we fear getting on a plane and getting off in a city half a world away. The pandemic has shrunk our world, and where Julie and I once talked of flying to Vietnam or London or Portugal, we now talk about driving to Portland or Albuquerque or Seattle. We worry about the economic horrors coming as whole nations lose the ability to buy plastic shit to make themselves feel better, and housing bubbles collapse when people find that no matter where they go, there they are. We’ve imagined ourselves in the situation of the folks who got stranded across oceans when the pandemic closures hit. We comfort ourselves that we’re stranded at home.
Bad as they are, these scenarios assume that 2021 won’t deliver anything worse than 2020. No new and more lethal plague. Our damaged world economy will have enough resilience to keep a majority of humans alive and functioning. No major climate disaster. No earthquake a magnitude greater than the one last March. No screeching halt to the Gulf Stream and the subsequent icing of what’s left of Great Britain. No nuclear war. No Second Coming of Christ, or of Donald Trump, for that matter. No world leaders revealed as space alien lizards in lifelike rubber human suits.
In short, we imagined that the place where we’re stranded—physically and culturally—won’t change beyond all recognition.
Would that that were true. Our home has already changed beyond any happy recognition, and not simply because of this summer’s expected mass in-migration of Sprinter Van owners in lifelike rubber human suits.
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I don’t think there’s a human alive that doesn’t know, somewhere below the level of conscious thought, that things post-pandemic will never again be the same. But a lot of effort is being expended to keep that realization unconscious.
Rational human decision-making this summer will be constrained by a near-unanimous denial of humanity’s undeniable crises: economic inequality, racial conflict, climate tipping points in the rear-view mirror, starvation-and-torture inspired migration, the triumph of right-wing dictators, the malignant machine intelligences of Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, the decline of Energy Return on Energy Invested, a global corporate culture that has put an Inc. behind every country’s name—all manifestations of a world civilization whose mainspring has come unwound. When the energy that motivates civilization starts to flag, the everyday becomes the grotesque, the lethally imbalanced, the best of intentions gone wrong, the best of human beings gone bad.
The bottom layer has gone out of things, is another way to put it, and what looked like a solid structure can’t even hold itself up. The only thing left to do is pretend that memory is more solid than reality. It’s an exercise we’re doing a lot these days, and not just when we’re skiing.
Maybe you’re doing it, too.
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I did get two big days of memorable skiing in last week, warm temperatures notwithstanding. Both involved long climbs with long approaches, and both left me exhausted at the end of the day. Julie, who had to work while I went skiing with our friends Michael and Liesl and Sean, was remarkably tolerant about my coming home and immediately going to sleep on the couch.
I am discovering that, at seventy, you don’t bounce back from a day of intense exercise. It takes more than a night’s rest to restore muscles, more than a day or two to get excited about climbing another two or three thousand vertical feet. Aches and pains that used to vanish in the presence of blue skies and powder snow now persist through the long uphills. Climbs that used to take an hour still take an hour, but the hours are longer than they used to be.
It doesn’t help that my ski partners are youngsters in their fifties, who have spent this year hiking and skiing and otherwise getting in excellent shape. Still, I keep up the best I can, and they wait for me at the top. I’m grateful to be able to get there, but I’ve realized that big ski days won’t last forever, nor will my existence. Some of the futures I’ve worried about I won’t have to suffer through.
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Last Saturday anti-maskers held a demonstration on the Idaho statehouse steps. They built a fire in a barrel and had their kids—their young kids—throw masks into it. They made the national news. Commentators noticed that Idaho didn’t have a mask mandate, so it was a demonstration against a regulation that didn’t exist. I told Julie that some of those parents might regret dragging their kids to a mask burning once their kids turned into sullen adolescents taking high-school biology.
Julie said she didn’t think they would regret anything, because they were all insane. Looking at the photos of people tossing masks into the flames, it was hard to disagree with her. I said that we, as a civilization, have deliberately forgotten that all humans have an unconscious death-wish. “What you refuse to bring to consciousness, you have to act out,” I said. “They’re acting it out.”
Judging from the things people are refusing to deal with consciously, we’re in for a lot of acting out over the next few months. I would advise staying away from crowds, because we all will do things in a group we wouldn’t do alone.
It’s easy to get caught up in the bad craziness of others, especially as the mob mentality takes you far away from the things you don’t want to think about.
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Spring is the season of migratory mass movements, and sure enough, traffic on Highway 75 is increasing. After the snowmobilers will come steelhead season. Early season campers, usually with trailers and campers, will come next. By July, tourism will be in full swing, and the roads and campgrounds will be choked with people until school starts in September, if it starts. Our visitors will once again act like there’s no pandemic and maybe by September, there won’t be.
As mass movements go, the ones we’ll see this year will be relatively harmless. We may have superspreader weddings, a few hundred acres of forest burned from unattended campfires, and roadsides littered with beer cans and Styrofoam, but we don’t yet expect rioters breaking into the Stanley City Hall, or marching soldiers on Ace of Diamonds Street, or rifle-toting people bicycling out of the cities with bug-out bags on their backs, children in tow.
But one of these years, the spring equinox will see masses of people who aren’t here for recreation. When that happens, we will hope they won’t be bleeding from their pores. We will hope they won’t be in tanks. We will hope that they won’t be acting out death wishes.
We will hope they’re just traveling through on their way to Canada to see the Banff and Jasper Parks, not fleeing a country and a culture and a climate that has turned them into refugees who cannot remember peace, or health, or snow.