Next Wednesday is all twos. Dates made up of a single repeated number excite numerologists, astrologists, and psychics, who will sit through the day waiting for Russia to invade Ukraine, an alien light sail to be discovered heading toward earth from Tau Ceti, or a new and highly lethal Covid variant to start spreading in Boise.

Chances are that nothing out of the ordinary will happen, because our calendar is Pope Gregory XIII’s attempt to reconcile drifting equinoxes with, among other things, the birth and resurrection of Christ. The pope also disappeared thirteen days from the old Julian calendar, and decreed the year to be 365 days, five hours, forty-nine minutes, and twelve seconds. It’s still apparently twenty-six seconds out of whack, but it wasn’t bad cosmology for 1582.

It was an arbitrary imposition of numbers onto time, but it got Galileo excited enough to start looking for the Mind of God in the physical universe. For a while, the Catholic Church supported his efforts. But what he saw with his telescope got him in trouble with Pope Urban VIII, who thought the Mind of God resided in the intrigues and treacheries of the 17th century Vatican.

Anyway, the year 2022 and its components are only one of a bunch of calendars. The year is 1943 for the Balinese, 178 for the Baháʼís, 70 for British monarchists, and 7530 in the estimation of the Byzantines, if any of them are left. The Chinese are celebrating 4659 shortly, the Coptics 1739, the Hindus (some of them) 5123, the Javanese 1956, which makes you want to go to Jakarta and buy a brand-new 1956 two-seat Ford Thunderbird, which will cost you $3,150.

That’s not to say that 2/2/22 won’t have whatever meaning humans give to it. If Vladimir Putin is consulting an astrologer like Ronald Reagan did, next Wednesday morning may well see the start of World War III, with an easy date for 22nd century historians to remember—although World War III will probably result in a calendar reset. Pol Pot’s Cambodian revolutionaries declared Year Zero on April 17, 1975, erasing all previous human events. All of civilization was to be built from the ground up, starting with the murder of all educated Cambodians.

World War III will likely pull off a deeper reset than the Khmer Rouge did, which means that there might not be any 22nd century historians at all.

 

The meaning I give to 2/2/22: anything that happens on that day will be science fiction. In 1960, I was reading stories in the Ketchum Community Library to discover what would happen in the future. According to my research, by the 1990s corporations would take over all the governments on earth and advertising would be the highest-paid profession. People would be homesteading Ganymede in 1992. By 1997, soldiers would be armed zombies, deep-programmed to kill generic enemies on sight. Human immortality would be a reality by 2018.

Bio-industry would produce superhuman android slaves by 2019. Religious conservatives would take over the U.S. government in 2020, the same year that in another novel, American cities would turn into starships and leave the planet. A world government would regulate each human’s calorie intake by 2023.

As a ten-year-old, I devoured these books and found much wonder in their myriad possibilities. In my heart, however, I was alternating between two other far more likely futures.

The first future would have been evoked if you’d asked me how long I was going to live. I would have said I would live to be a hundred, because it was a nice round number, easily reached by a ten-year-old. If you’d asked me what the world would be like during those hundred years, I would have said that it would be pretty much like science fiction said it was going to be, except for Sawtooth Valley, where I hoped to live my long life.

Sawtooth Valley would remain like it was in 1960. If you’d asked me what I was going to be like during those hundred years, I would have said I’d pretty much be me—a ten-year-old boy—during all of them, except bigger and stronger and with more money. Maybe a girlfriend, although I would have had to refer to the covers of pulp science fiction magazines for her details.

The only part of that future that has come true is that Sawtooth Valley is much like it was in 1960, thanks to the establishment of the Sawtooth National Recreation Area, an administrative body dedicated to turning Sawtooth Valley into a museum, one that would defend fences, cows, and hayfields in the face of real estate agents, home builders, and purveyors of recreation. They didn’t entirely fail. Some of us who live here have become museum pieces. Only lately has the valley seen the addition of houses inspired by the brutalist architecture of small regional airports, a near-constant stream of tourists from June through September (except when forest fires obscure the scenery the tourists come to see), and a change in residents from poor people to the thoughtlessly cruel rich.

I’m not going to live to be a hundred. Don’t want to, if I extrapolate the progressive aches and pains of a seventy-one-year-old body over another three decades. And I don’t think like a ten-year-old anymore, even one in the body of an adult. I don’t have a girlfriend, but I do have a wife, one I can describe without having to refer to Astounding cover art. The stars are no longer my destination. I do like it here on earth, health and cognitive dissonance permitting.

The second future was much darker. It was the one that we heard on the news in 1960. In it, nuclear war turned the planet to radioactive ash. John F. Kennedy, before he died, stated that if the war reduced the human population to one man and one woman, he wanted that future Adam and Eve to be Americans, not Russians. Then he said the living would envy the dead.

Atomic tests grew larger and larger. Theoretical physics indicated no upper limit to how powerful hydrogen bombs could be, and in a couple of years literal-minded Russians would detonate a 50-megaton bomb in the atmosphere at seventy thousand feet, wrecking Siberia’s electrical systems, setting fire to Inuit villages because of atmospheric lensing, and blinding their own military observers.

So as a ten-year-old, I couldn’t expect to become a teenager. The Ketchum Community Library had a stack of civil defense pamphlets on a table in the children’s section. I read them and learned the area of total devastation for a ten-megaton bomb, the area of flash burns, the area of eventual death by radiation. They were all too large to run from.

In the Sun Valley Garage, where my father washed his ski bus every afternoon after his shift, walls of olive-drab steel canisters containing water and C-rations lined the walls from floor to ceiling, blocking the windows, providing protection from blast and flash as well as making it possible that we’d have a postwar existence, however short.

 In response to a civil defense questionnaire, my mother described our A-bomb preparedness as the basement of our house in Hailey. She got an official evaluation back in the mail that said we had no preparedness at all.

 

So next Wednesday is going to be a bit weird and science-fictiony, no matter what happens. A bunch of futures are missing, and that’s a good thing. Julie and I and Juno are here, not headed for Alpha Centauri in a city that was ripped out of the ground. We’re not sixty years extinct due to some Russian submarine captain’s decision to launch a nuclear torpedo. We’re not in a world-covering city of three hundred billion souls, and we’re not suffering under a religious dictatorship that makes Oliver Cromwell look like Santa Claus. We’re not artificial humans, property of a corporation that confers life and ends it according to a business plan. At least we don’t think so.

But it is 2022. We do live in a reality that’s mostly virtual. The pandemic has transformed everything outside the valley into streamed information. We order our groceries online, and a week later FedEx or UPS delivers them, turning them from ones and zeroes into real food, and taking ones and zeroes in payment. We spend a lot of our days in front of screens. We do try to get out and backcountry ski in the afternoons, but lately the real world has been so cold that we simply go for a cross-country ski up toward the Redfish Lake Lodge until we start shivering. Then we ski back to the car, go home and drink tea.

These forays into the outside remind us that there is an outside, and the things you do in it have consequences. Last week, a half-mile up the unplowed Redfish road, we found a Toyota 4Runner stuck in a snowbank. The driver and his mother had caught up with some cross-country skiers who had refused to move out of the packed center. They had tried to go around and had quickly high-centered in the soft snow. The skiers had continued on as though nothing had happened.

The 4Runner was still there when we got back from the lake. Two people on fat-tire bikes had stopped to help, and we stopped, too, because it didn’t look like they were going to get out on their own. We all took turns shoveling for a couple of hours. Somebody called the local search and rescue people.

A tracked Bobcat from Stanley finally showed up and pulled the 4Runner out after its driver had yelled at all of us, telling us how stupid we were.

“You drove right past a closed sign,” said the driver of the Bobcat to the driver of the 4Runner. (I’m paraphrasing. He used humiliating language, made worse because the 4Runner driver was a young guy working in Wood River Valley. His mother had flown in to visit him, maybe to see how he was doing in his first job, and it was her rental car he had driven into the snowbank.)

“I didn’t see any closed sign,” said the young guy. “I was following my GPS.”

He tried to back up all the way to the highway, but slipped off the road again before they got there, and had to be pulled out again. Julie and I skied back to our car, not wanting to watch a one-sided fight.

We had just been trying to help, and the last two hours had proven we couldn’t help. We went home and contemplated the new-to-us concept of mean and nasty cross-country skiers.

 

When I was teaching English Composition, I used to open the semester by asking my students to figure out the portion of their lives that was real and the portion that was virtual. I told them not to overestimate the real.

“This classroom was once blueprints,” I’d tell them. “It’s an ideal imperfectly reconstructed in reality. It’s only real to the extent the architect and the builders fell short of what they wanted.”

By that standard, Julie and Juno and I aren’t real at all. We’re androids living in somebody’s idea of a ranching museum. The ranches are there but the ranchers are not. We do a good job as part of the scenery. Julie does a better job than I do.

I spent a good portion of my life treating words on a page as objects in a solid system of arbitrary laws of grammar and structures of narrative. My students were objectified as English majors or baseball players or probable dropouts, and the reasons they were in my classroom had as much to do with their grandparents’ expectations as their own ambitions. 

The skiers who refused to yield the right-of-way to a trespassing 4Runner believed in closed signs and an open-ended punishment for the people who ignored them. The driver believed in the choice of looking out the window at a plastic sign or looking at his GPS screen, which showed a good and open road to Redfish Lake, which he had promised to show his mom.

Many futures. Which one would you believe in?

 

It’s possible that the Mind of God resides in numbers and their manipulations, which makes Wednesday a day we should study as intently as Galileo studied the moons of Jupiter.

In a few months, God willing, we’re going to get a string of numbers streamed from the James Webb Space Telescope, numbers that come from a February not long after the universe flashed into existence. NASA will translate those numbers into photographic images. We’ll have to decide, then, if we believe what we’re seeing, in NASA photos and anywhere else.