Now that we’ve lost 800,000 Americans to Covid, it’s probably time to admit that all of humanity’s horses and all of humanity’s men aren’t going to put humanity’s business-as-usual back together again. We won’t go to our jobs again in the same way. We won’t look at catching a cold in the same way. We won’t travel to the same places. We won’t have the same faith in science and technology or other once-benign deities. Most of all, we won’t have the ability to say we control our own fates.
Most of us know that control is an illusion, but we believe in it anyway. We say things like, “I could be dead tomorrow,” but that’s easier to say when tomorrow is an abstract idea. When it’s the day that you’ll start showing Covid symptoms, it’s easier to remain silent and look for an arena where your actions have predictable consequences, where you can plan for imaginable disasters, and where, if anything goes wrong, it’s your own fault.
For Julie and me, at least this time of year, that arena is backcountry skiing. Snow is falling outside, to our great relief, and our future is shrinking down to the size of ski season. World events pale in significance. For the next few months—climate willing—skiing, getting ready for skiing, driving to skiing, checking to see if it’s snowing enough for skiing, sitting around the woodstove after skiing—these will be the pillars of the small world we live in.
A small world, but one in which it’s possible to protect one’s mental health against a screaming uncertainty.
In the top of our garage is a plastic boat-style sled. It has a tow rope attached in front, a tail rope in back. It contains a nylon tarp and a warm wool blanket. Wrapped in the blanket are straps to make sure a person in the sled won’t be able to get out, no matter how good an idea that seems once the sled starts moving.
The sled is there to rescue ourselves or anyone else while backcountry skiing. It makes it possible to get an injured person to a road, and eventually to a hospital without involving Search and Rescue.
Aside from the embarrassment of having one’s name in the Challis Messenger, and the long-haul pain of admitting you needed help from snowmobilers who get dopamine boosts from other people’s injuries, breakdowns, and lost children, there are good reasons for being able to self-rescue. For one thing, it takes time to assemble a team of rescuers. For another, group decisions tend to overlook the safety of the group. You can end up with more injured people than you started with.
Most importantly this time of year, a hurt person is a cold person, and a cold person can die waiting for help. The friendly wilderness that has backdropped so many outdoor gear ads becomes a frightening, inhuman, lethal world once the snow is on the ground and the sun goes down.
A lethal world, but a predictable one.
Safety precautions aside, there is a grace that comes with careful and deliberate movement. Practiced long enough, backcountry skiing, whether you’re climbing up or gliding down, results in an economy of motion, a deep situational awareness of the snow and trees and rocks and your path through them.
Julie didn’t know how to ski when we first were together, but over thirty years has become such a graceful skier you can identify her long, smooth telemark turns a mile away, even in a crowd, even in a crowd of telemark skiers. She’s a strong skier, and seldom complains, at least when we’re having fun, and when we’re climbing up or skiing down or eating lunch on top of the hill, we’re almost always having fun.
Early on, we concluded that our marriage wasn’t an arena where my relative age, sophistication, and wisdom counted for much, so I can’t say I taught Julie to ski. She learned, like I did, by trial and error, and by watching what others did, all the while fiercely ignoring anything I suggested she do.
Julie often reminds me that she might be an even better skier if I hadn’t started her out on cheap, obsolete, second-hand gear. I resist the temptation to say her description of her gear could apply equally well to her husband, and she learned just fine on that. I tell her instead that the reason she’s so light on her feet is because of all the micro-reflexes she developed with boots so flimsy that if she leaned forward, she’d fall on her nose, and if she tried to turn, her heels would slide off her skis.
“That equipment taught you to stay over your skis,” I tell her. She doesn’t believe me, but it’s true. A rigid boot will keep you in the right place, but it won’t force you to find the sweet spot of the ski, where turns happen effortlessly and skis find the perfect layer of snow to glide on.
You want to ski as if your boots are just resting on your skis, without bindings, held there by friction alone, which, as you might expect, involves a suspension of the laws of physics. You think it’s impossible until you watch Julie ski.
I’m going to snowblow the driveway after the snowplows finish clearing Highway 75. That may be days from now. It’s supposed to snow until Wednesday at least. If we get the amounts the National Weather Service has promised, we’ll be able to put a track up the old logging road above the Rocky Mountain Ranch. It’s on a slope that is just right for early season workouts, which means you can slog uphill for forty-five minutes or an hour, pull your skins off, turn around and start skiing down your up-track. In fifteen minutes, you’ll be putting water on for hot chocolate, and combing the frost out of your eyebrows.
We’re excited to see the world turn white. Fall lasted way too long. The last day of November, we hiked the Hell Roaring Creek trail. A couple of near-zero nights had turned the creek into a long cascade of icicles, but we still kicked up dust as we walked.
With a third of December gone, the days were still warm. The grass and brush on the hillsides, yellowed and sere in August, were sending up new green shoots.
We began to worry that we wouldn’t have snow all winter. We began to worry that if we were going to ski, we’d have to go to Canada, and Canada might not want us.
Last summer, a below-average snowpack in the Sawtooths started melting in April, and by mid-July, the last of it was gone. Long snow-filled couloirs turned into the grey crevices of desert mountains. The air was clouded with the smoke of forest fires. Temperatures, night and day, rose to fifteen degrees warmer than normal. The Salmon River behind our house dropped as low as I’ve ever seen it. Its waters turned green and tepid. Rock snot grew thick in its bed and made it hard to wade across without slipping.
Dolly Varden, fish that require cold water, started dying. Their bloated bodies washed up on the weir at the Sawtooth Fish Hatchery, an institution charged with bringing back the salmon—another cold-water fish—to their slimy spawning beds behind our house. It became possible to imagine salmon as a radically domesticated species, trucked to the ocean and back in refrigerated trucks, kept in chilled hatchery ponds until they could be spawned into buckets, all of it a kind of environmental Potemkin ritual, an exercise in denying the extinction of charismatic indicator species in dying ecosystems.
Looking out a Sawtooth Valley window in mid-December and seeing the snow come down might not seem like cause for hope and joy, but we’ve been joyfully and hopefully waxing skis and cleaning last March’s mud off our ski boots, recharging the glue on our skins, and going through our packs, looking for moldy peanuts and lost pieces of clothing. We’ve put new batteries in our avalanche beacons, sprayed silicone on our bindings and boot hinges, and bought granola bars whose eat-by dates don’t inspire nostalgia.
We’ve done it all with grins on our faces, because it looks like it’s going to stay cold for a storm or two. The relief is palpable, just as it was when the light rains in November meant we could stop worrying about fire scouring the valley of trees and houses.
Another wild hope: the next few years will be all rainy summers and snowy winters. But if that’s impossible, we’re happy to be skiing for at least one more winter. If Idaho turns into a desert, we will beg Canada to let us in. I’m sure they need people who can teach English and know how to irrigate.
Ten days ago, with a half-foot of snow in the deep spots, people skied on Galena Summit, on their rock skis. They pushed the season, but it’s hard to blame them. I can remember years when Galena had thirty inches of snow by Thanksgiving.
Still, when you’re slaloming between sagebrush and rocks on snow that is half slush and half thin ice, it gets dangerous. You can jam your ski tip under a low-lying log, or a sagebrush can grab the end of a ski and point you, at speed, into a tree.
We won’t go to Galena tomorrow, but I’m confident that the two feet of snow it got this weekend will attract a crowd of backcountry skiers. One hopes that the mounds of snow they poke their skis into will be deep drifts and not just camouflaged stumps.
In a couple of weeks, once this storm settles, we’ll drive up and ski the untracked north slopes of Galena. No jumping off rocks, no fast skiing through tight trees, no tracks down avalanche chutes. No skiing after four p.m. this near the solstice. No bad luck.
I recently completed a questionnaire about my late-life interests. I wrote that I was interested in the hard problem of consciousness; the even harder problem of human evil; and backcountry skiing. After a career of teaching writing, I’m also interested in eliminating the semicolon from written English, but it hardly seemed the moment to bring that up.
My three answers are related. As noted, backcountry skiing inspires a deep situational awareness of the world around you, which either requires consciousness or is consciousness. That’s a hard distinction to make, and it illustrates why consciousness is a hard problem. We may solve it someday, but not today.
We’re not going to solve human evil today either, but backcountry skiing, whether the snow is deep and cold or mushy and slow, offers long moments when human evil, for all practical purposes, is gone. Absent. Not there. Disappeared.
When you’re a normal human being, deeply embedded in normal human affairs, you don’t expect evil to go AWOL. You wake up to the morning’s news, which is such a chronicle of evil that good news is almost always set off by itself, in a not-quite-real category, with its own headline, and limited to Thursdays.
You eat breakfast, including sausage or bacon that you’re glad you haven’t seen being made. You worry about financial malfeasance, wars, famines, bioterrorism, destruction of habitat, the end of snow on favorite ski slopes, the end of cold water in favorite rivers. And you admit what hominid capitalism is doing to the planet is the closest thing we’ve had to pure evil since the Holocaust, even when it’s put breakfast on the table.
Somewhere in the trudge up the hill, in the middle of hammered heartbeats and hoarse drawn breaths, your awareness of the world begins to deepen, and you see an open door in the cage of words that you’ve used to construct a reality. Some academics assert that words are what we use to construct reality, but you find that reality still exists without words, and it’s a bigger place than words ever dreamt of.
With luck, you ski straight into reality, and stay there for a while. With luck, you make it back home alive, with your consciousness a little more aware, with human evil a little less depressing, and with your words more solid than they were at breakfast.
You have a reasonable expectation of being able to do it all again. That expectation stays in your heart like a still-warm ember.