In 1964, as a freshman in high school, I sat in the Liberty Theater in Hailey, Idaho, to see Vincent Price in The Last Man on Earth, one of the first wave of germ theory living dead horror films. A plague turns the population into vampires except for Price, who’s immune because he was long ago bitten by a vampire bat. Price goes around pounding stakes into sleeping vampire hearts by day. By night he hides from shuffling mobs of vampires in his mirror-and-garlic-festooned house.
At the climax of the movie, Price is mortally wounded by the mob. Dying, he stands up and screams, “You have killed the last man on earth.” The line, with all its drama, is met with indifference, which is about what you’d expect from an audience of the undead.
What I remember most from the film is not the death of the last living human, but an earlier scene where Price, wandering the empty daylit streets of Los Angeles, comes upon a Ford dealership. He goes in, sits in the new Thunderbird in the showroom, notices the keys in the ignition, and drives out through the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window and onto the wide and empty boulevard.
At that moment, a mix of 14-year-old insecurities (my social life really could have used a Thunderbird) and a yearning for freedom without limits made me envy the last man on earth.
Still, by the time I walked out of the theater that evening, I had realized The Last Man on Earth was not about vampires or freedom, or even Thunderbirds. It was a film about loneliness. Vincent Price is a lonely man, especially once the female lead turns out to be dead.
________
The Liberty Theater in Hailey, Idaho is a much different place than it used to be. The actor Bruce Willis bought it and refurbished and repurposed it. A troupe of actors performs plays there now, or would if the whole town wasn’t under coronavirus lockdown.
Hailey itself has been repurposed and refurbished as a retirement home. The lower-middle-class town of my adolescence has been gentrified, and houses in the old part of town go for a half million to a million dollars. As a result, it’s become a place full of rich old scared people.
Two COVID-19 deaths have already occurred in the local hospital, and Blaine County—Hailey is the county seat—has, at this moment, more cases per capita than any place else in the country. Enough staff at the local hospital have been infected that any new coronavirus cases are immediately sent to the cities of Boise or Twin Falls. Until enough people recover, the local hospital is mostly serving as a coronavirus clearinghouse.
The Hailey airport is full of the private jets of people with second and third and fourth homes in and around the Sun Valley resort 12 miles north. These people, sheltering in what they thought was a safer place than Seattle or Los Angeles or New York, have caused anger and resentment among the year-round locals. Empty shelves in the grocery stores and the fear of imported disease have caused people who used to be welcomed here for their money to be told to leave. Go Back To Wherever Your Lear Jet Brought You From is the gist of the social media messages I’m reading.
But ironies multiply when you start deciding who has a disease—or the right to a roll of local toilet paper—and who doesn’t. Here in Sawtooth Valley, sixty miles north of Sun Valley, we have a population of Blaine County summer people, who disappear when the harsh weather hits in November and usually reappear when the snow melts in April. This year, these people are back early, fleeing the microbes brought by skier-packed jets that landed at the Hailey airport twice a day from early December on. Some of them, arriving in our valley as refugees, have been told to Go Back To Blaine County Where You Came From.
________
For half a million years or more, we lived in tribes, defined ourselves by our tribes, and submitted who we were to a tribal identity. People who thought of themselves as individuals were considered mentally ill.
Also, people in other tribes were Them, not Us, and if they threatened our tribe, they were expendable. As many tribes found out, it’s not good to be a tribe when a bigger, more powerful tribe is next door.
The tribalism that has marked our politics since at least the Reagan administration has divided and redivided this country. Absent a strong impulse toward the universal, tribes have gotten smaller and more defensive. Race has been a reliable marker for division, as has nationality. Also education levels. Political parties. On college campuses, membership or not in fraternities and sororities.
Blaine County people. Year-round Sawtooth Valley residents.
I’m especially sensitive to this latter distinction because for the first fifty years I lived in Sawtooth Valley, I spent most winters in Blaine County, where there was a winter economy and an accompanying job. I was told to go back where I came from by people who had spent one winter here, even after I’d spent ten years’ worth of summers here.
But I’ve been full-time since 2004, and I’m now getting to the age where I’m one of the older full-timers. I have seniority, enough to tell anyone to go anywhere, at least with Sawtooth Valley as a point of departure.
But I’m hesitant to tell people to go back where they came from, even if they show up with bats perching on their shoulders, or a hunger for brains, or with Blaine County plates on their cars. I remember what happened to Vincent Price, who made me realize that real horror comes with the realization that you’ve become a tribe of one.
________
Coronavirus is not just a physical contagion. It’s taken the self-image created by forty years of libertarian thought in this country—an image of extreme individualism—and has mutated it into a deep solitary scream, where people you thought were in your tribe or even your family can be instantly and invisibly transmuted into The Other. An infected spouse—there’s a phrase for you—can place you in front of a mob of people trying to kill you. You, The Last Human on Earth.
Of course, Julie and I—and Juno the dog—aren’t going to succumb to that particular psychic infection. We’re going to confront the coronavirus as a tribe, but we’ll be a peaceful and unobtrusive tribe. We’ll try not to treat the people coming into the Valley with camping equipment or travel trailers as The Enemy. We used to call them tourists, and we welcomed their dollars spent in local restaurants and motels and sporting-goods stores. We still have a little trouble seeing them as enemies just because a virus is raging sixty miles south of us.
Regardless of what happens, Julie and I will not leave each other. That’s the promise I’ve made to Julie, and that’s the promise she has made to me.
As for Juno, she knows something is up. If we’re reading on the couch, she walks up and rests her chin on one of our thighs. She waits until one of us rests a hand on her head. Then the three of us look at each other, and I like to think that then some tribal melding happens. It’s a tableau of constancy in an inconstant world, one still possible to imagine, at least for the moment.