Julie is on the other side of Galena Summit this morning, shopping for Thanksgiving Dinner. Juno and I have the house to ourselves. I’m sitting at my desk with an electric heater on one side of my feet and Juno on the other. Warmth, whether from Juno or the Salmon River Electric Co-Op, is welcome, now that it’s November.
The creeks and ponds have finally frozen over, but not well. Yesterday Juno and I tried to hike up the steep moraine on the south side of Iron Creek and didn’t make it.
We needed to cross the creek on an ice-glazed log. I made it across, wobbling one way and then the other, making it to the far bank with one last off-balance lunge. Juno watched me and decided to try the ice instead. She broke through immediately. She had her front paws on the ice in front of her, but I didn’t know if she’d get sucked under by the current. I did a high-speed wobble back across the creek. By the time I made it, she’d managed to turn around and climb back up on solid ground.
She didn’t want to try the creek again. Neither did I, so we drove on up to the Iron Creek transfer camp. From there, we walked to the pale, snow-streaked meadow a mile up the trail, arriving just in time to watch the sun go behind the peaks. The temperature dropped twenty degrees. Juno was still damp and was still shaking and rolling in the snow to dry off. We needed to get moving.
On the way back we walked a hundred feet off trail to the spot where my wall tent had stood during the summer of 1970, when I was the Forest Service wilderness ranger for the Iron Creek drainage. The tent frame was long gone, but I found the corral of rocks I had built in the creek to serve as my refrigerator. It looked the same as it had fifty-one years ago. For an instant I stood above it, looking down at milk and eggs and beer and bacon glimmering beneath the water, knowing I was not yet twenty years old. Juno suddenly looked like the wrong dog.
It was a frightening hallucination, not least because it came overlaid with darkness-inspired memories of what lay ahead of me when I was nineteen: careers aborted, wrong turns taken, friendships gone sour, more than one dog dead and buried. All these pale in comparison to the joys that continue to leaven my days, but for a moment, I didn’t have the energy or the need or even the patience to live my life over.
Heraclitus says we never step in the same river twice. Juno suggests that’s because it’s cold, and scary, and the ice might break over deeper, faster water next time.
A note to everyone reading this journal: writers aren’t writers without an audience. Writing is a tree-falling-in-the-forest phenomenon, where the event is in doubt until someone witnesses it.
I am deeply grateful for all you who read Ghost Dance. It would be considerably more ghostly without you. I wouldn’t be sitting here with nice warm feet if I didn’t think you would click on the link on Monday mornings. I wouldn’t try to make meaning if I was making meaning only for myself. I gave up on that a long time ago.
That sounds nihilistic. It’s not. It’s just that meaning exists in the spaces between people, not within people, and people can’t live without meaning. Solitary confinement is murder when it’s not suicide. Writing is a way to break out of solitary confinement, at least as long as someone is out there reading.
I insisted that my writing students be able to describe their readers. Most of them discovered that they were writing for a group of teachers that stretched in memory all the way back to kindergarten. “Don’t write for your teachers,” I told them. “They’re a bad audience. They just read your work to see if they’ve taught you anything. Write for people who like to be surprised by what they didn’t teach you.”
I’m lucky enough to know many of my readers, and I’m lucky that even the ones who have been my teachers still like to be surprised. The biggest surprises come for me when I sit down to a blank screen and try to figure out what I’m thinking while a bunch of people are looking over my shoulder.
Last week’s journal had a new reader, Phil G., who found my website through a book recommendation from Paul Kingsnorth, formerly of the Dark Mountain Project in the UK. The Dark Mountain Project is dedicated to what they call Uncivilization, the dismantling of global systems of production and distribution and a return to simple, organic, local-centric ways of life.
In outlook, Dark Mountain is Druidic and utopian. Cynics have said it promotes a world that is ideal for Hobbits, ignoring the fact that if humans were a bit more like Hobbits, they and the world would be better off. I have contributed to many Dark Mountain anthologies, usually in the spirit of irreverent good will. My ideas about utopias come from George Orwell. I tend to point out such things as the dystopian logistics of population reduction in a world of eight billion people.
In any event, Phil G. commented on last week’s post and on my book, A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World. He had nice things to say about my writing, but said I was wrong to be such a doomsayer. He pointed out that there have always been doomsayers but we’re all still here, bumbling along. It’s a compelling argument.
I am happy to welcome Phil G. to the audience, and to say to him, and to the rest of you, that I hope I’m wrong. I’ve spent lots of time trying to figure out how to be wrong. I’ve read Stephen Pinker and Thomas Friedman and David Brooks. I’ve looked at Ray Kurzweil’s idea of a cybernetic Singularity, the point at which artificial intelligence will begin to program ever better versions of itself and usher in an age where material limitations—including mortality—will be overcome. It will be humanity’s Golden Age, as long as the machines remain grateful we brought them to consciousness.
I’ve tried to sympathize with the meliorists, even when they appear to be magical thinkers.
After much non-magical thought, however, I’ve concluded that industrial civilization is a temporary phenomenon, and it’s going to end by 2030, give or take a few years. Climate change will be a contributing factor, but angry hungry people will kill most of us before the weather or dry oil wells do. I base this perception on the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth, and a companion volume by Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth. Both books have made predictions, and those predictions have kept coming true. I very much hope what they say happens next doesn’t come true.
There’s only one way to know the future, and that’s to live long enough to get there. I hope Phil G. and I can sit on a bench in Hyde Park in London on a blue-sky day in April of 2040 and be two old guys gazing out on happy, laughing families celebrating the coming of spring. “I was wrong,” I hope to be able to say. “Spring is still a thing. I’m so completely happy it turned out that way.”
I read comments on my blog carefully. When they spark my imagination, I throw them into the mix as I’m writing. Sometimes it takes a few weeks to fit them into my thinking. Other commenters last week brought up the endless piling up of grief, three other now-extinct human species, another lifelong friendship with Mr. Dumb Luck, and the sepia overlay that, oddly enough, was missing yesterday when I stared through a half-century at my rock refrigerator in Iron Creek.
Now I’m going to have to think about the relationship of light and time, and if the missing species of humans offended Mr. Dumb Luck or just homo sapiens, and if grief has an angle of repose.
Another audience is out there. When I started writing End Notes in March of 2020, I had Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year in mind. Defoe based the book on his uncle’s journals from 1665. He published it in 1722. Fifty-seven years separates the book from its primary source.
I tried, last year, to write about daily life here in Sawtooth Valley, if daily life included thinking about pandemics, the end of civility, and climate change. My journals are primary sources, raw materials for historians. For this journal to achieve the status of Defoe’s work, it will need narrative continuity and temporal perspective. They’re hard to supply in a first draft.
But like the boy who knew there was a pony under the pile of horseshit, I know there’s a book in here somewhere.
It goes without saying: people in 2078 will be unrecognizable to us. I’m writing for all of them, too, even though I don’t have the slightest idea of what they’ll be like, or if they will even know how to read.
But assuming at least some of them can read, I’m hoping they will wonder about Julie and Juno and me, our hopes, dreams, and laughter, and the quality of light that we moved through on the way to our future and their past.
I wish these folks well, usually in the form of hoping most of their calories don’t come from cannibalism. I hope they’ll be living honest, frugal, non-violent lives, even if they’re prone to think bad things about those of us who used up the world’s resources before they were born.
Since this is the second journal of the second plague year, let me note that as of this morning the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center lists 770,804 Covid deaths in the U.S. and 5,144,680 in the world.
No figures on the pile of grief these numbers represent.
No figures on the pile of grief climate numbers represent either, but if present trends continue it’s going to dwarf the one for Covid.
Today’s a sunny day. We’ll try not to waste it, which means Juno and I will be hiking the mountains this afternoon. We’ll try to stay away from the creeks.
We’ll still have to be careful, because Sawtooth Valley in late November is more dangerous than it is other times of the year, even in a year when it’s rained instead of snowed, even when the hunters and other armed tourists won’t be back until next summer.
Without snow to insulate high-mountain seeps and springs, hundreds of feet of trail are covered with weeping marbled ice, too angled to provide a foothold. The landscape that was safe—if dusty—in August can be lethal if you’re out alone, slipping and sliding, when the nights are this long and dark and cold.
Juno and I will want to be home when Julie gets back from her shopping trip. Julie will be expecting a warm house and a dry dog, and maybe the overture to Beethoven’s Ninth on the stereo, turned up a little too loud, and a glass of wine by the chair next to the stove. She’s been talking about buying new winter equipment for herself, and if she comes home with it, we’ll start looking forward to the deep snow. In the meantime, we’ll make do with what we’ve got.
When the deep snow comes, the backcountry will seem safer, softer, and more benign. By January, we’ll be on wide skis, wearing heavy-duty boots, and we’ll be packing the things we need for a longer-than-planned stay.
A little preparation can save your life, and it’s easier to prepare for winter when there’s snow on the ground. Remember that, even when there’s been nothing but rain, and prepare for winter anyway.