6:30 a.m. Minus eleven-point-four Fahrenheit. Dark, except for a distant waning moon. It’s thirteen days until the solstice, and it will be another thirteen days after that until we’ve regained the same lack of daylight as we had this morning when I got up and started the coffee.
In another week the moon won’t even be visible. By the solstice, chances are good that nighttime temperatures will have hit twenty below. By the new year, if we haven’t kept a sharp eye on the pantry, we will have run out of coffee and died.
They will find us in the spring, our empty cups clutched in hands gloved by frost.
These worries occupy my mind these mornings, usually when I’m placing fresh wood atop the still-glowing coals in the woodstove. One look outside the ice-glazed windows and it’s easy to imagine the days growing shorter right past December 21, getting even shorter into January and February, shorter yet into March and April. By June, the oceans will freeze.
Never mind that the house is warm and soon to be warmer. Never mind that Julie is up, and the kitchen will soon smell of bacon, sourdough, and high-caffeine coffee. Never mind that the size of the woodpile has been carefully calculated to outlast the winter.
Something cold beyond reason starts gnawing at your awareness when you know you couldn’t live through the night without the house, the woodstove, and Costco.com.
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I am old enough to remember Sawtooth Valley before it had power lines and before Galena Summit was kept reliably open in the winters. I can remember when the highway was a dirt road. I can remember when there were salmon in the river.
I remember our neighbors up the valley—Harry and Martine Fleming, Bill Sullivan, Stubb and Vella Merritt, Ted and Phyllis Williams, Morgan and Tiny Williams, Margie Shaw, Jim and Verna Decker, Sandy and Rosie Brooks. All of them are gone now, but for a while they formed a community of shared hardship every winter, one that helped each other cut firewood and shovel roofs and move cattle and pull each other’s vehicles out of snowdrifts. When Phyllis Williams played piano at the two-room Quonset Hut that was the Stanley School, the whole valley showed up to dance if the snow hadn’t yet closed the roads. There was no TV. The phone was on a party line, and not everyone could afford to join the party. The people who kept animals through the winter couldn’t let them out of the barns for weeks at a time, and in deep snow years they didn’t leave their houses for months, except to keep their animals alive.
Our family was not a part of that community—we left every fall for the Wood River Valley, where my parents had Sun Valley jobs that came with Sun Valley paychecks—but here, every summer, we were welcomed as the exotic summer people we were. My father was a fishing guide, and he visited the ranches up and down the valley, making sure he could take his clients along the Salmon River where it went through their pastures. I remember going with my father to a house-raising for Ted and Phyllis Williams—probably the last house-raising in the valley, because the Sawtooth social contract and its communitarian traditions were fraying even then—and afterward, I overheard my parents talking about Ted and Phyllis’s daughter, Mitzi, who had left the valley and had been vocal about not ever coming back. My mother said it was because Mitzi had gotten a college education, which allowed her to have wider ambitions.
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Most of the people I’ve mentioned stayed too long in the valley. They finally left when their physical or financial health broke or was about to break under the weight of age, or long winters, or bad beef and hay prices. The kids had escaped as soon as they could. If they ever changed their minds and wanted to come back, the ranches had all been sold.
My parents retired here and eventually became the oldest year-round residents in the valley. But old age makes for hard winters. My parents stayed too long, and our memory of their last difficult years cautions Julie and me against doing the same.
Of course, old age isn’t easy no matter where you are, and wider horizons bring with them agonizing decisions about where to go to feel at home and thoughts about the people you would miss terribly. Julie and I have gotten to the age where we miss people terribly, even when they’re alive and in the neighborhood.
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The winters are easier here than they were when I was a kid. This is a statement of fact, not some walk-both-ways-uphill-to-school old man foolishness. We have electricity, and a propane furnace to keep the house above freezing if we leave for a week or a month or even longer. We have broadband, and Julie, with her college education, edits sales materials for Hewlett-Packard, writes grants for non-profits, and proofreads books for East Coast writers.
Between her paychecks and my savings, we keep ourselves in groceries, and, until this year, cheap airline tickets. Before the pandemic, we used to be low-rent travelers. We could just get in the car and drive all the way to Boise on a plowed road, board a plane and walk out into the 3 a.m. heat of Bangkok or Saigon, wide awake and ready for adventure.
We’re a long way from that scenario these days. This fall has taken us back seventy or eighty years, to a world where hunkering if not hibernation is essential for survival. It has put us in too-close touch with long-ago Sawtooth Valley adolescents, who spent miserable Januarys and Februarys trapped in too-small houses, stuck with carrying buckets of creek water to cows and horses in too-small barns, swamping out manure-choked stalls, re-reading Great Expectations because they knew just where Pip had come from and where he was going.
That’s why the woodpile looks so healthy, and why we spent our stimulus checks on the new woodstove in the living room. That’s why there are a couple of extra cases of chili in the crawl space. But it’s also why the vehicles in the garage have full gas tanks.
It’s why the To Read shelf is packed with books, and why I’m halfway through Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s fine-print 1877 doorstop. If you’d like to leave the world you’re in and enter fully into another, even if it’s one full of gossip and intrigue and doomed people saying awful things to each other, a Russian novel will do the trick.
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The winters are also easier because of climate change. We still see twenty below. It still snows enough some years that roofs need to be shoveled. We still ski the peaks in May if we’re not tired of skiing by then. But it’s been a long time since we’ve seen two weeks of forty-below nights and ten-below days. Fifty-five below, the coldest temperature I’ve experienced, hasn’t been reached since the 1980s. It’s been decades since I’ve watched a late May snowstorm come down over Williams Peak from the picture window in the Sawtooth Hotel dining room and listened while the cook padded out from the kitchen, looked at the same frozen view I was looking at, and muttered, “I’m sick of this shit.”
Now, spring comes early. Fall comes late. We worry from July to October that a mega-fire will sweep through the valley, destroying everything.
The earth is 2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in 1712 when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine. Recent headlines note that we’ve gone beyond the target set by the Paris Climate Accord, and a number of exponential feedback loops are in full swing. That means this climate phase change isn’t the last one that will blindly transform our world.
Blind transformation is what phase changes do—they’re a little like black holes, where if you get close to them time gets all wonky and the past doesn’t make it intact to the future.
It still doesn’t feel warm in the darkest twenty-six days of the year. It still doesn’t dispel the feeling that sometime in the next few years you might look at the world we’re in now as a fat Russian novel, full of doomed people who had no idea what was about to hit them.
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COVID-19 is not the only plague to have hit Sawtooth Valley in the past few years. A blight of giant houses has appeared in spots that have iconic views of the Sawtooths.
The law that established the Sawtooth National Recreation Area specified that the rural/rustic/agrarian values of the valley be maintained as they had been since homesteading days. But what has infested the land of our vanished neighbors consists of great angled mansions, inspired, apparently, by airport terminal buildings. Walls of windows face the mountains. The spaces inside are designed for fundraisers rather than for small, intimate dinners. Who will live in them, and for how long?
Given the climatic, epidemic, and political variables in the air, it’s an unanswerable question. I don’t look to Anna Karenina for answers, even as our country permanently divides into what might be called nobility and what might be called serfs.
I don’t think we’ll have the kind of revolution the Russians had, and that’s a good thing. If some future Trotsky were to lead a proletariat army out of the foreclosed suburbs of Boise, I’m certain that Julie and I would be mistaken for capitalist bourgeoisie and murdered, no matter how poor we are in relation to our new neighbors.
I hope, rather, that we’ll have a revolution in ethics. At some point people will start thinking that building ten- and fifteen-thousand square foot homes in a world where more and more people are homeless is flat-out tacky, ugly, selfish behavior. I can remember touring great mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, built the other time we had robber barons running the country. They had become what in the UK are known as piles, objects of architectural entropy that had become prisons for the heirs of the people who built them. They had begun as hopes for the future, but had ended as burdens from the past, in the form of vast echoing mausoleums for lives of questionable taste.
Meanwhile, in Sawtooth Valley, more of them are going up every time one of the old ranches changes hands. Of them, my friend Bruce says, “There must be giants living in those places.”
“They’re just trying to make a statement,” I say.
“I’m not sure I’d make a statement like that about myself,” says Bruce, “even if I was one.”
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I’ve read a big chunk of Anna Karenina, but still have 543 pages left. I hope to finish it by the shortest day of the year, and then start on something cheerier, like The Pickwick Papers or Best American Science and Nature Writing. I’ll read on the couch for a month or so, until the sun stops sinking behind the southern horizon at four in the afternoon. When there’s a little more daylight, and a little more snow, we’ll start skiing the backcountry.
That’s as much of the future as I feel confident to predict. In the meantime I’m spending evenings with a bunch of Russian nobility. I worry about their ability to access French fashion, and who of them is sleeping with whom, and whether or not their serfs should be given land, and which of the Tsar’s army officers are good for their gambling debts and which are not.
You can get caught up in these matters, especially when you remember Anna Karenina is a cultural artifact. It’s not really fiction. It was based on real people, ones careless, pampered, and cruel. They ignored the signs of their times: the pain of the poor, the waste and useless luxury of their social lives, and the criminal injustice they were a part of. They turned away from anything unpleasant in their lives, even when they caused it, and the generations that came after them paid dearly for it.
We hope nobody has to pay for anything Julie and I did or didn’t do. We didn’t mean to end up in a world that is less just than we were told it was in high-school civics class. We didn’t mean to live in a country that has failed to take care of its least fortunate citizens. We didn’t mean to end up in a small warm house with a pot roast in the oven and skis in the foyer and feel guilty every time we see three-hour food lines on TV.
We didn’t mean to end up in a valley full of third and fourth houses, but we did. In these dark days of December, with an election still threatened by martial law, with COVID vaccines still awaiting distribution, our valley seems meaner and colder than it did sixty years ago, a warming climate notwithstanding.