[Note: John will be leading a Zoom reading and discussion this Thursday, June 4, for the Stanley Community Library. Click here for more details.]

In 1953, my father quit his job as a hard-rock miner and became a fishing and hunting guide in Sawtooth Valley. Our family moved from company housing to a forty-acre homestead nine miles up the Salmon River from the town of Stanley. My parents paid a hundred dollars an acre for the homestead. The purchase price included a working sawmill and a twenty-by-twenty-foot lodgepole homestead cabin and eight sway-backed outbuildings. There were people in the valley who said my parents paid too much for the place.

From the standpoint of their finances, my parents had paid far too much. The seventy-five-dollar monthly mortgage payment almost broke them. I remember my father chasing construction jobs in the winters, going from one layoff to another. In the winter of 1955, we moved five or six times. I remember the year because at a Thanksgiving promotional event in Buhl, Idaho, I was given movie tickets to The Creature from the Black Lagoon and my mother wouldn’t let me go because she thought it would give me nightmares. She was right. It would have. I was a sensitive little kid. I still haven’t seen that movie.

I digress.

Guiding was an unregulated industry in the early 1950s. Anyone could hang out a shingle and start taking people fishing, hunting, skiing, or floating the rivers. A lot of men, wanting to live a life that recalled the freedom of a vanished frontier, tried to make a living that way. Almost all of them failed.

My father made it work because he didn’t want to go back underground—mining had a fatality rate, and he had packed dead men to daylight as part of his job. My mother, understandably, didn’t want him to go back either. She was a registered nurse, and she could find employment wherever his winter job took us. The two of them worked and scrimped and saved through the winters until they could get back to Sawtooth Valley every summer.

They fixed up the biggest outbuilding so they could have a bigger house than the homestead cabin. My father told his clients to show up for breakfast there, at 4 a.m. He needed to get them fishing before daylight, because all the salmon holes would be claimed by other fishermen if he didn’t. It helped that the river ran through our backyard, but it was elbow-to-elbow fishing in those days, with anger as a subtext. More than once my father had people try to run him off his own land.

He charged his fishing clients ten dollars a day. He guaranteed a chinook salmon on the line. Often that meant he would hook a fish and hand the pole to a sleepy client, and then coach the man (usually it was a man) through a half-hour of fighting the fish and maybe landing it. He guaranteed his hunting clients a good shot at a deer or an elk or a mountain goat.

His guiding business prospered. By 1960, he was able to charge his clients twenty dollars a day. Eventually he got a winter job driving ski bus at the Sun Valley Resort, while my mother worked in the Sun Valley Hospital. They were able to pay off their mortgage early. They bought a modest winter home in Hailey. My father had made it in the tourist industry, contracting to supply the same experience, over and over and over again.

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My family did not call my father’s clients clients. We called them dudes. We referred to the Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch, a lodge and cabins just upriver from us, as The Dude Ranch. Dudes came to Sawtooth Valley every summer. They left when the snow came.

Dudes needed to have their fish hooked for them, their elk pointed out to them, their packs packed for them. They had to be shown the sights, and driven to trailheads, and told what lakes or mountains those trails led to. Often, they wanted to know the best places to eat or sleep, and the answer you gave depended on how well you got along with the owners of particular hotels or restaurants, and whether or not they had suggested their dudes spend time as your dudes.

Dude was not yet a term of endearment between adolescent males. You never called dudes dudes to their faces. Dudes were people, of course, but they were also a commodity. They didn’t like to be referred to by a term that divided experience into the authentic and the staged, the autonomous and the herded.

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Apologies to Tennessee Ernie Ford, but I owe my soul to the tourist industry, if the soul contains where you are in the world, your origin story, the sensibility you bring to the passage of time, tragedy, work, love, and your sense of what’s real and what isn’t. Without the tourist industry, I wouldn’t be sitting here on the same forty acres my father bought so he’d have a base of operations and a place to feed breakfast to his clients. I wouldn’t have become a mountain manager for Sun Valley when I was twenty-three, and I wouldn’t have quit—no longer wanting to groom ski runs and herd people onto them—when I was twenty-four. I wouldn’t have become a writer of travel and wildlife and ski stories.

I wouldn’t have skied a glacier in Greenland. I wouldn’t have spent a week at Amanpuri, a boutique resort on the Thai island of Phuket. I wouldn’t have bungee-jumped off a four- hundred-foot-high bridge in New Zealand. I wouldn’t have gazed out the open window of a tundra buggy into the face of a Manitoba polar bear. I wouldn’t have been wined and dined by the Andorran Chamber of Commerce. I wouldn’t have used helicopters as ski lifts. I wouldn’t have gotten paid for making those experiences real to my readers.

Bungee jumping is not a real experience. But it’s hard to convince yourself of its unreality when you’re two hundred feet below the bridge you just jumped off, still accelerating.

If you’re a travel writer, you look like a tourist and act like a tourist, but you’re also a quality control officer for constructed experience. Whatever you’re doing—skiing or boating or eating the national cuisine or watching a treed cougar killed by an arrow—you’re also judging how your visit is staged, how well the sets are constructed, and how professional the actors are. You assess how much self-consciousness it will take before a façade crumbles, and then you check what’s behind the façade in case it’s another façade. Then, if you can, you report back to all your readers that here’s a situation they can pretend is real.

You don’t have to worry that your occupation isn’t real. There’s plenty of reality in the low-grade anxiety of approaching deadlines, the luxury of rooms you could never afford on your own, your two-hour lunches with mountain managers and directors of operations. Your privileged look behind the scenes is real, as is your obligation to support the advertisers in the magazine you’re reporting for. Mentioning rats in the shower or illegal payoffs to Olympic athletes or last winter’s avalanche fatalities could be real, but it’s a bad idea. Even so, it’s a bad idea you better believe in if you ever want another assignment.

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Two realities exist in every tourist economy. One is what the tourists see. The other is what the locals see. The more time and effort it takes for the locals to give tourists what they expect, the bigger the gulf between the two realities.

Local reality becomes more real at the expense of the tourist reality. As prices and expectations rise, what you see as a tourist becomes a tiny slice of what you see if you’re guiding that tourist.

In the end, nobody wants to be a tourist just like nobody wanted to be a dude. In a spectacular display of counterproductivity, people start buying vanity plates and T-shirts that read LOCAL. Tourists start asking about secret spots where they won’t meet other tourists.

Locals start keeping quiet about tourist-free ski runs, hidden lakes, picnic spots, places where the elk hang out on opening day. They distinguish between good tourists and bad ones, and sometimes the dividing line becomes the size of a tip. They use acronyms like AFSV—which I won’t spell out completely, but the SV stands for Sprinter Van.

There is a third reality in Sawtooth Valley, and that is the one occupied by retired persons who have been both tourists and tourist workers. Retirement has given us the time and the opportunity to reconcile what it means to be one or the other. We try to minimize the distasteful aspects of each. We try to forgive our own sins on either side of the divide.

Sins remain sins whether you forgive them or not, and the tourist industry itself has more to answer for than any of the humans in it. It creates artificial experience and presents it as the real thing. It’s terribly polluting. I’m not talking about jet exhaust, or the noise of a pack of eight or ten motorcycles as they go by on Highway 75. I’m not even talking about the smoking dark-windowed diesel buses that carry Allen & Company conferees to daytrips on the Salmon.

I’m talking about spiritual pollution, which renders its victims unable to tell the real from the unreal, and unable to see why the distinction is important, even when their souls are in the balance.

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Lately we retired people in the valley are being threatened by young visitors who won’t wear masks, who won’t social distance, who assume they’ll just get the coronavirus and survive it and maybe even have a career if enough old people die. We worry about that attitude, but we can’t do much about it, hunkered down in our houses as we are.

We note that the stores and restaurants in Stanley are opening. We hope the best for business owners. We fear the worst for ourselves and our weakened immune systems. We wear masks even if it upsets the tourists.

We worry that we’re too sensitive for nightmares, even if they don’t feature creatures from black lagoons. We fear the second wave, even as the unreal first wave of clients, dudes, tourists, and the past washes over us. God knows what else it’s carrying with it.