I don’t normally eat dinner with federal judges, but one evening fifteen years ago, I did, with a half-dozen of them. The occasion was a Federal Judicial Retreat at a guest ranch near our home here in Sawtooth Valley. A dozen judges had gathered there for a working vacation, and I had been invited to read to them from my memoir, Traplines, and after that, have dinner with them and answer questions about my childhood.
Our family had moved to the valley when I was three. I had grown up in a place where the roads were unpaved, the power lines unbuilt, the air clear, the climate the closest thing the Lower 48 had to the Pleistocene. Enough of that past world remained, out the windows of the ranch lodge, that it could serve as a rustic retreat for people whose usual world ended at the walls of a courtroom.
One of the chapters in Traplines was about fishing in the Salmon River when salmon were still thick in the river, and it had gone over well with other guests at the guest ranch. I read it to the judges, who listened politely.
At dinner, the judges didn’t want to know anything more about my childhood or fishing. They talked shop, mostly. With relish, judges told about criminals they had sentenced, sentences they had decided on before the jury delivered a verdict, and people whose guilt had been fixed before they even entered a courtroom. They took much of their judicial identity from their former identities as prosecutors.
The idea of justice was less abstract than I had been led to believe. At this level of the law, it tended toward a gleeful pragmatism.
The judges were accompanied by two U.S. Marshals. When I finished my main course, I took my dessert and after-dinner coffee to their table and sat down, in the hope that the conversation would be better.
“How’d you get to join the party?” I asked.
“We’re protection,” said one of them. “Some people don’t like judges. Some people have relatives in jail, or have been put in jail themselves. I had to read your book to make sure you weren’t one of those.”
“Did you like reading it?” I asked.
“Not really. You’ve got a chapter on making bombs and shooting rock chucks for fun. It’s a good thing you were doing that when you were seventeen and not thirty-seven. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.”
“I have nothing against judges,” I said.
“If you did, we’d have to shoot you,” said the other marshal.
“We also shoot bad writers,” said the first marshal. “You barely made the cut.”
The judges were all males. A female judge was supposed to attend, but after she had flown into Sun Valley, she had driven her rental car to the overlook on Galena Summit and had stopped and looked down into Sawtooth Valley. The thirty or forty miles of air between the overlook and the Sawtooth and Salmon River mountain ranges had caused an acute attack of agoraphobia. She had turned around and flown home.
In the ensuing fifteen years, I’ve become more interested in the judge I didn’t have dinner with than the ones I did. I’ve wondered about controllable space, and how, if you’re a judge, your courtroom is a place where you can make reality behave the way you want it to. I’ve thought that being agoraphobic, if you’re a judge, means that you haven’t mastered the trick of taking your courtroom with you everywhere you go, hermit crab-like.
For the duration of my dinner at the guest ranch, the lodge was a court in session. The stories that were told there had nothing to do with a retreat in the mountains of the American West. Instead, they evoked the invisible structures of law and custom that dictate what is real, at least within the legal profession.
In a similar process, the marshals drew their reality in the shape of a gun. For them, control had nothing to do with the law. It lay in identifying a threat and eliminating it, and they lived in a world where that transaction was as natural as breathing.
But the judge who didn’t make the cut—the one who got back on her plane and went home because of the great authority-obliterating abyss that confronted her on the Galena overlook—must have seen, in our valley, a flash of the world’s vast chaos, and for a moment, must have lost her faith in her ability to defend against it.
I don’t think it was a matter of gender, unless women are better than men at seeing the world underneath its cultural overlay, and better at appreciating its power in the face of human intention. I won’t attempt to map that dangerous territory, but I do think that in various ways, the judges and marshals who made it to the retreat succeeded in turning the guest ranch into a courtroom, at the expense of entering the unfamiliar, seeing what there was to see, and listening to what there was to hear.
A couple of weeks ago, Julie and I left the snow and ice of Sawtooth Valley for the American Southwest. Two years of informal pandemic quarantine had made the valley too small instead of too large.
Still, my remembered agoraphobia victim was accompanying us as we headed for spaces that dwarfed our home. Distant dark mountains, barely visible through haze and dust, marked horizons we would never reach. Rattlesnakes and prickly pear, lurking just beyond the barrow pits, would kill you if they could. Gas stations were far enough apart that being safe meant filling the tank whenever it ticked below the full mark.
If there was a place where space could provoke panic, this was it. Even though we had been there before, the invisible structures of American culture had weakened in the interim, becoming less predictable, less able to reduce the world to a friendly dimension. It wasn’t scary, exactly. It just threatened to show again and again how small you were, even if you’d graduated from law school.
We made it to Ely, Nevada, the first night, and Cedar City the next, moving through vast sagebrush basins and between mirage-like ranges, past dry lake beds and the empty parking lots of closed roadhouses. The third night we made it to Page, Arizona, and were astonished when we visited the marina on the north side of Lake Powell. The lake was a hundred and eighty feet below the full mark. Where water had once been was a vast, tire-tracked stretch of gray dirt, dotted by a hundred dusty motorhomes—parked where they could see downhill to the water—and tiny, growing dunes on the lee sides of rocks and mummified driftwood.
A sign warned against going off the pavement, because you could get stuck in loose sand and gravel. Some of the motorhomes looked stuck, and we wondered if the people sitting beside them in camp chairs would still be there, motionless and desiccated, when the hot weather began to ease in October.
By the fourth night we were in Sedona, Arizona, staying with our friends Tom and Ellen, who had left their home in Sawtooth Valley for six weeks to rent a condo in a warmer place. Sedona is a tourist and retirement city now, in contrast to the hippie village it had been when I first saw it in the 1970s. It’s gone far upscale and has spread out into its surrounding canyons.
Sedona’s traffic roundabouts resemble circular games of chicken as more and more drivers have gotten less and less patient with the city’s deliberate lack of traffic lights. Still, a good many of its two- and three-million-dollar houses are empty. I wondered if the owners of second homes in Sun Valley had third homes in Sedona.
Sedona has been plopped down in an area of great geologic beauty. Parks and wilderness separate its suburban pseudopods. Strict zoning has given even its strip malls a tasteful pueblo look. Restaurants are plentiful and good, and from what we saw when we went out to dinner, packed.
Julie and I took a high trail in one of the wilderness areas that looked down on thousands of houses. The forces of tourism and financial planning have created a most improbable Shangri-La in a drought-stricken desert, and I found myself wondering how it all could last in a world running short of non-pragmatic justice. Housing for the help is becoming a problem in Sedona and every city like Sedona, and gasoline is set to become exponentially more expensive as energy supplies go from surplus to deficit. Water is already priceless.
Once, as a ski journalist, I visited British Columbia’s ski city, Whistler-Blackcomb, and was housed in a glittering slope-side hotel that contained a starred restaurant, a spa, and library, among other amenities. Every luxury an expense account could buy was available and I was wondering what it would be like to stay there for life when a local paper reported the arrest of a Whistler homeowner who had been caught with forty-nine service industry employees sleeping, in shifts, in his crawl space.
You wonder how many architects in Sedona and Whistler-Blackcomb and Sun Valley are incorporating the contemporary equivalents of slave quarters into their designs.
I’m making this trip sound awful, but remember we were traveling with an imaginary agoraphobic justice, fearfully glancing at geographic space that would suck your soul into a near-infinite void. Instead, the void that we experienced was ethical, centering on the sustainability of a civilization consuming too much water, too much fossil fuel, too much scenery.
That was a spiritual problem, one fortunately susceptible to workarounds.
We had a wonderful time. In Sedona, we relaxed and hiked for a week, visiting national monuments and old mining towns converted into shops, galleries, and ethnic restaurants. Once we got used to the idea of sharing every space with hundreds of fellow humans, life became an exercise in creative anthropology, a human Serengeti, where herds of migrating animals slept, danced in the sunlight, congregated around water holes, grazed, and when danger threatened, stampeded.
The weather was sunny and cool, occasionally windy in the mornings, always windy in the afternoons. We hit Mexican restaurants. Julie consulted guidebooks and planned our hikes. We looked at the displays of native artifacts in visitor centers. We walked across and back across the old Navajo Bridge below Glen Canyon Dam, and, further down the road, watched as the winds kicked up great walls of dust that moved across the desert toward our car. When they reached us, they blocked the sun.
Our way home took us through the Utah towns of Kanab, Escalante, and Boulder. We walked a trail in Bryce Canyon National Park with a couple of hundred other people, but after that, the crowds thinned out. In Kodachrome Basin State Park, we hiked a six-mile trail and saw six other people, and the landscape—a combination of slot canyons, towering hoodoos, striated hills, all blending into an astonishing, inhuman glory—revealed itself as something other than an artifact of the park system. On the road to Boulder, we got out of the car and hiked off-trail to a lunch spot where we could look down on a two-hundred-foot waterfall as it fell into a slot canyon, and it took us much longer to get there and back than we expected. I began to see that distances could expand as you walked, and that a sometimes-terrifying reality had precedence over all human artifice.
I have no doubt that a trail will soon be built to our lunch spot, to protect the crusted desert soil. It will end at a viewing platform, and from that platform, all you’ll be able to see is the human imagination made flesh. You won’t be able to leave trail or platform. That deep human inscription on the world is an unfortunate side-effect of a tourist economy, but it will become necessary, as the Escalante-Grand Staircase becomes more and more visited. Eventually, I suppose, U.S. Marshals will try to protect everything, and every one of us will be co-opted as deputies.
We left our agoraphobic judge somewhere out in the desert of southern Utah. When we got to the overlook on Galena Summit, the Pleistocene was back in full force. Snow squalls moved up the valley amid quick-moving patches of sunshine. But it was good to arrive at a place where the landscape was the hard straw-colored tundra of early spring, and where the mountains kept the air from escaping. Also, Arizona and New Mexico were burning. Humans were stampeding, probably in our direction.
We pulled into our snow-covered driveway, built a fire in the woodstove, and began to carry the stuff from our car into a house that was empty, still, and huge.
