Snow is up to the second rail of our fence. I’ve burned through four tanks of gas in the snowblower. We have become used to the scrape of metal on pavement every morning before daylight as the snowplows go by. We dare to think that there might be water in the river next August.

But we’ve had cold, clear nights and warmer, sunny afternoons for a week now. Ice dams are forming on our roof, and this afternoon I’ll get up there with a shovel. I’ll remove the first four feet of soft snow from the roof edge, exposing the ice to the lengthening hours of sunlight. It will soften and shrink and fall off, with my help once the roof starts leaking.

My method involves leaning a ladder against the ice and pounding on it with a sledge hammer until large chunks fall to the deck below. Sometimes the chunks are too large, and they punch holes in the deck. I replaced four two-by-sixes last spring. I would prefer not to have to replace any this year, so will start breaking ice into smaller pieces before letting them slide off the roof. I would have more hope for success if I hadn’t tried the same thing last year.

Other tasks: We carry in a couple of armloads of wood every evening, preferably before dark. We’ve had a fire in the woodstove since late November. When I swept the chimney in December, I was happy to see that the new stove, with its new catalytic converter, had kept the carbon buildup to a minimum. But today I’ll climb up again with a chimney brush and stick to the old stove’s schedule.

I’ve also been shoveling out the ice that’s built up on the garage floor. It’s filthy stuff, having fallen out of the wheel wells of the cars. It’s saturated with the dirty, salty sand the highway department spreads on the highway. When I throw it out in the driveway it ruins the picture postcard appearance of our home.

The cars are filthy, too. Washing them will have to wait for a warm day in April or May.

 

We have been skiing every sunny day. Last week Julie organized a Women’s Ski Day. Fourteen local women, all of them expert skiers, spent a day climbing and skiing Julie’s Powder Palace, the next hill to the north of us. They trashed twenty acres of pristine powder.

Afterward, they all went up to the Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch and spent the afternoon in the swimming pool. Men weren’t invited there, either.

I spent the day skiing Ladybug, the hill across the road from us, with our neighbor Michael. We climbed it three times, accumulating 2400 vertical feet or so, skiing a foot of impossible-to-screw-up snow on a solid base before skiing back home and retiring to chairs in front of the wood stove.

We saluted Women’s Ski Day. Whenever there’s a Women’s Day in Sawtooth Valley, by default there’s a Men’s Day as well, even if we don’t get to go swimming at the end of it.

 

Yesterday Michael and Liesl (Michael’s spouse, one of the fourteen expert skiers of Women’s Ski Day) and Julie and I put a track up the north side of Gold Creek, a long ridge that towers over Ladybug. This time of year it’s a one-shot day, because it’s 2500’ vertical to the top, and by the time you’re down the sun is too low in the sky for a second run even if you felt like it.

It was a slog. Something was sucking energy out of the air. Halfway up, Liesl said she’d had enough, turned around, and skied back to the car. Julie said she was fine going on up if we took it slow. Michael was breaking trail and showed no signs of slowing, but he said he, too, was struggling. I kept up as best I could.

I was feeling the kind of deep-down tiredness that indicates a day off is needed. The top of the ridge was wind-packed and full of breakable crust. Caution was in order. We picked our way down to a line of soft powder in the trees.

Then it was good skiing all the way to the bottom, where Liesl was waiting. She’d gone home and prepared hors d’oeuvres and hot tea, put them and insulated mats on a sled, and towed it all back to the bottom of the ridge. She’d shoveled out an old picnic table, left there by long-ago summer campers, so we had a place to sit. For a low-energy day, she did herself proud.

The day got even better when we found out that clouds and wind were in the 24-hour forecast. We wouldn’t have to balance skiing the next day with the possibility of physical and emotional collapse.

 

Our pandemic winter existence in Sawtooth Valley: Ski. Stay warm. For dinner, make do with what’s in a dwindling pantry. Ski. Read a book. Nap on the couch. Shovel the roof. Ski. Read another book. Snowblow the driveway. Stay out of the wine because January is a dry month. Ski.

Were it not for the skiing and a subjectively rich inner life, life would be boring. It may be boring anyway and we don’t know it. We have so little to directly compare it to, these days.

We do hear murmurs from the outside world, streamed (and screamed) over the Internet. We’ve learned that Covid hospitalizations are reaching record numbers. We’ve learned that we’re about to have a cyber-war with Russia, a conflict that could turn nuclear, biological, and chemical once everybody’s power grid fails and nuclear plants begin to melt down.

We’ve learned that the pandemic has pushed to the edge of sanity our healthcare workers, parents, senators, truck drivers, flight attendants, teachers, and anybody who has anything to do with a restaurant.

We do not take the mental health of other people for granted. The news on the Boise television stations comes with extras—thoughts unbidden about the well-being of station personnel—and they seem to indicate some of us are under strain.

A new anchor person appears at the news desk, and he seems cheerful, aware, reasonable, free from pain, but then you wonder where he goes when the newscast is over. Behind his front door, you imagine, is dust, ashes, and mold, a kitchen table surrounded by naked department-store mannikins, a closet full of bowling balls and stolen lingerie.

You wonder what the weather reporter isn’t telling you, and if her grin isn’t the result of antidepressants or something stronger.

Believe me, if I were a local TV weatherperson, there would be no such thing as a dry January.

You may think these thoughts are all projection, but I note that the cheerful middlebrow meliorist David Brooks has declared in his New York Times column that America is falling apart and he can’t think of any way to fix it. Readers have informed him that America has been falling apart for a long time, at least back as far as Brooks’s support for Ronald Reagan’s smiling, corrupt presidency. I’m hoping that Brooks will, in a future column, admit that he might have had an enabler’s role in America’s disintegration, and that smiling and saying everything’s fine and going to get better might not have been the right thing to do in 1980, or 1988, or 2000, or 2004.

I’ve been watching Brooks’s Friday appearances on the PBS Newshour. He seems to have developed a nervous tic, possibly because the man he could have been is desperately trying to escape the man he was and is.

Madness is a contagion, too, one rather more dangerous than Covid. Yet if there were a vaccine for madness it might take the form of a pricey shot that would prevent empathy—a recognition that the suffering of others, if we allow ourselves to get too close to that suffering, will drive us over the edge. The cure would be worse than the disease.

 

We unplug the Internet and go skiing. It seems to be a sane if non-empathetic thing to do. Standing at the top of a hill you’ve just climbed up, with a mile of turns below you, focuses the mind wonderfully on things that have nothing to do with everyday human misery, much less extinction-level events. You read the snow for signs of wind-pack and breakable crust, and you listen for the sudden settling that means avalanches are cocked and ready. The sun is hot, the wind is cold. The trees act as friendly slalom poles unless you run into one. A long series of turns in unbroken powder feels like flying, even if when you stop, your knees are so tired you can hardly stand. But you know you’ll recover. You hope you’ll recover. You’ve always recovered before.

In the face of the world’s suffering, is focusing on one’s own fatigue a sign of moral apathy? Moral atrophy? Moral leprosy? I’m not sure. This second year of the plague has brought learned helplessness to more powerful people than Julie and me.

We stopped making plans in early March of 2020 and simply started reacting to immediate circumstances, and it’s been that way ever since. If the pantry was getting bare, we would mask up and make a pilgrimage to Costco. We would load up on impulse buys, mostly food. If summer skies were free of smoke, we went camping or took long day hikes. Julie, whose office has been the Internet since long before the pandemic, had more work than she wanted. She kept getting bonuses, though, and I turned seventy-and-one-half and had to start taking IRA payouts. She kept working and I did whatever the financial regulations told me to do.

We ended up buying a car with money we’d been unable to spend on travel or restaurants. The chip shortage made us believe cars might not be affordable when we really needed one. It seemed enormously expensive.

Our new car has heated seats. I have never owned a car with heated seats before. It has transformed the experience of driving in winter in Sawtooth Valley.

So we have hunkered down, saved our money, been frugal, followed the advice of our financial advisor, and we still have ended up feeling like extravagant wastrels. Our numbers are miniscule compared to the everyday finances of the wealthy people who have moved to the valley in the last decade, but we still face the guilt of having enough in a world where most people don’t. Guilt always has the potential of turning into survivor’s guilt.

At least our skis are thrift shop finds. At least we’re not wasting money on lift tickets.

 

Groundhog’s Day is coming up, and with it the possibility of an early spring. We hope not. We would like to see a big winter, one where I’m shoveling roofs more than once, and where the driveway gets narrower and narrower because the snowblower is hemmed in by tall vertical snowbanks. We’d like to ski Ladybug and Julie’s Powder Palace into April. We’d like to see the river so high in June that our backyard, an overflow channel dry for more than a decade, has to be waded rather than mowed.

We’d like to miss a fire season.

We control none of these outcomes because control and outcome don’t fit in the same sentence anymore.

I’ve been following the stories of parents screaming at school board trustees about masks, vaccines, distance learning, monitoring software, and critical race theory. It’s clear that people are trying to seize control in small arenas, because they have no control in the big ones. Unspoken laws divide the homed and homeless, Ivy Leaguers and high-school dropouts, readers and video-game players, binary and non-binary, those with dark skin and the melanin-challenged, people with children and the child-free. People don’t have the choices they’ve been told they have, even without public-health lockdowns to emphasize the point.

In such circumstances, I hope you can forgive me for thinking that pretty much everything, life and death and all of it, depends on snow conditions.