The tree squirrels have been busy. We’re finding little caches of pinecones in low spots in the yard, and at least once a day we hear woody thumps from outside, as the squirrels pick them from the tops of trees and drop them on the front deck. If we park the pickup under a tree, the thumps are metallic and louder, as the pickup bed acts as a sounding board.
We haven’t seen a lot of geese and ducks flying south, but the other migratory birds—flickers, mostly—are gathering together and getting ready. The weather is summerlike—tomorrow the forecast high is 76—but it’s cold in the mornings. Frost gives a double meaning to my smooth-soled slippers if I head for the woodpile. In case you’re wondering, if you fall flat on the deck while carrying an armload of wood, it hurts.
We’ve finally brought in the wood holder that sits beside the stove, and I’m filling it with wood only a little larger than kindling. We have quick, hot morning fires that last until the sun rises high enough to come through our southern windows and then we shut the thermostat down. The fire goes away until the next time the deck is white with frost.
Thus far the dent we’ve made in the woodpile seems negligible, but—just in case—I’ve cut an extra half-pickup load of firewood and dumped it outside our fence. I realize this is a prelude to a diagnosis of OCD—subvariety hoarding—but it could be worse. I could have stashed away a whole load, or two, or maybe four. In fact, judging from the pinecone frenzy of the squirrels, four sounds like a good idea, even though today the sun is rising high in a clear and windless sky.
The local fires are mostly out or in the mop-up stages. The nights are cold enough to squeeze the moisture out of the air, and it dampens the ashes and embers.
Juno is lying on her side on the deck where the morning sun has sublimated the frost, panting already but apparently enjoying the warmth.
The Farmer’s Almanac is forecasting a brutal winter in the East and a normal winter here, but a normal winter here can be brutal. For the moment I’m trusting the squirrels and the climate scientists who say the polar jet stream is slowing and weakening and wavering and now and then heading south. If it heads south to Idaho, it can get to 30 below even in late February—it did, last late February—and that is enough to think a few extra loads of wood might be a good idea. By February, firewood is hard to find, and if you run out, it’s impossible not to think about ants and grasshoppers and what kind of a community you’re a part of, and what kind of social credit you’ve built up, and if anyone has a bad enough case of OCD to have an extra woodpile sitting around.
Juno is still lying on the deck, and I’m sitting in front of a bright window, drinking coffee. It’s getting to be a gorgeous fall day outside. Afternoons Julie and I and Juno go out to Redfish and walk from the Lodge to the boat ramp along the shore trail. The campgrounds are half full of RVs, and there are weddings and picnics and paddle-boarders, and the dog beach still has a few people throwing sticks out in the water for labs and golden retrievers. (Juno, being a cow dog, has let us know that she won’t chase sticks. She prefers squirrels as long as they don’t stop, turn around, and bare their teeth at her.)
We’re thinking of camping out for a couple of nights if the weather holds. The nights will be below freezing, but we’ve got stocking caps and sleeping bags and a tent to keep warm. We will both take two sleeping pads—one foam, one inflatable—to keep us an inch off the ground, which tends to be cold and rocky this time of year.
I have camped in the winter, and I know that with the right equipment, you can survive a night that is far below zero. You spend most of your time and energy keeping warm, however, and below minus ten, say, time spent doing anything else seems frivolous. A snow cave will warm up to thirty degrees if you’ve got a candle, but digging a snow cave takes a while and you have to be careful not to break a sweat.
Once the cave is dug, the candle lit, the sleeping pads arranged, the sleeping bags fluffed up and laid out, and you are warm and comfy on a bed of snow and the roof of the snow cave isn’t making little pre-collapse creakings, you realize you are in a quieter place than you’ve been in a while, and in the morning you’ll crawl out to a white and shining world that is awfully big and spectacular compared to you. It will stop you from thinking you have the slightest excuse to measure the world and find it wanting. It’s a salutary experience if you don’t screw up and freeze to death.
But I haven’t gone snow camping for a long time. I’ve realized I’m unspectacular in relation to the world wherever I am, and that the world is just as spectacular through a double-pane window, and quiet can be had for the price of turning off the radio, at least once the tourists go home and leave the highway to itself.
If they go home. Tourist season gets longer every year, leading to a suspicion that a lot of people don’t have a home to go home to.
It’s a question that comes up every fall: Can this early-fall world last forever, with its warm, sleepy afternoons, suddenly smokeless skies, and golden slanted light, and even its burgeoning tourists in their campers and motorhomes, asking why the restaurants and campgrounds are closing? Experience tells us it will temporarily disappear at sundown, permanently disappear in November, but might be miraculously resurrected again next September. It’s a vision of eternity, and it’s possible to stare into it and ignore the passage of time.
But time passes whether you ignore it or not. Enough of it passes, and fast enough, to make humans a species of mayfly, if you compare human moments to the movements of the continents, the wobblings of the earth in its varied orbits, the oscillations of polar ice. I know humans have interrupted the glacial cycles in the short space of a few lifetimes. The poles are melting, and it will be a long time—maybe never—before the ice comes back once it leaves. But most of us won’t see Antarctica melt or the Seychelles disappear beneath the waves. If old age doesn’t get us, the weather will.
As I write, a hurricane has hit the east coast of Canada, leaving a path of destruction through the Maritime Provinces, destroying the complacencies of a few hundred years of predictable seasonal weather. Drought continues in the American southwest and Europe. The part of Pakistan under floodwater is still the size of Colorado.
Even without these cherry-picked catastrophes, complacency is never a good response to the weather no matter where you live, and not just since the Yellowstone-area floods this summer, and the fire seasons that have come to the valley every August since the century turned.
Some of my recent conversations have been with people making plans fifteen years into the future. I’ve tried to remember a time in my life when I could have realistically planned fifteen years ahead. There aren’t any.
Winter is coming for you and me. It’s coming for a bunch of people who don’t have homes because the Russians blew them up. It’s coming for hurricane and flood victims, and for people who will lose their apartments to rising interest rates and unemployment. It’s coming for the people who are already homeless. It’s coming for people who have the firewood, or gas, or electricity to stay warm this winter, and for all the people who don’t.
Winter’s less of a threat to the people in the big motorhomes in the campgrounds at Redfish. They can leave when the skies get gray and the afternoons dark. They’ll head to the southern tier of states, to warm campgrounds where they’ll meet new neighbors, play pickleball with Canadians, and stock their larders and liquor cabinets at the local Costco. Those long sleepy golden afternoons will last all winter, and into the spring, until it gets too hot, when they’ll start the long migration back north.
Future historians (with the usual if-there-are-any caveat) will marvel that economic conditions were such in 20th century North America that a fair amount of Baby Boomers found themselves able to sell their houses for enormous 21st century profits and spend a half-million dollars on a motorhome and a Lexus SUV to tow behind it, and find public campgrounds in national forests to stay in, and little slices of eternity that lasted through sunset most nights. If the weather turned mean, they moved. If the weather turned beautiful somewhere else, they moved. No human had ever been as free, as able to live without an enclosing community, as divorced from the worries of place as these people.
Even so, they weren’t completely without care. Slices of eternity add up when you’re a mortal being, and they did get old.
When I was twenty-one—fifty years ago—I was a wilderness ranger responsible for taking care of Sawtooth, Alpine, and Goat Lakes, and the rest of the Iron Creek drainage west of Stanley. One of my end-of-week responsibilities was to contact all the people in the Iron Creek Campground, because most of them were camped there so they could hike up into the wilderness. I had a brief spiel, which was in essence a request to go easy on the wilderness. Don’t turn your camp into a homestead, don’t throw litter around, don’t burn the forest down.
I knocked on the door of a new camper sitting on a new pickup and a little old man opened it. I introduced myself and said my piece, and he invited me in and forced me to accept a beer. He showed me around the camper, which took longer than I expected because he opened all the drawers and demonstrated all the appliances and showed me a full pantry. He was self-sufficient and well-prepared to stay that way.
He had not planned on being alone, however. He and his wife had planned this retirement and she had filled all the drawers with cooking utensils and stocked the pantry and picked out the bedspread. Then she had died, before they had had a chance to travel. He was traveling alone, living her dream in her honor, lonely in a beautiful place, glad to have my company for a brief moment even if I was reciting Forest Service regulations to him. He showed me everything his wife had put together for them, holding her things up to the light as if that would bring her back.
He had left the campground when I returned after my weekend. Since that time I’ve wondered if eternity is something humans should look forward to. I’ve decided it won’t be much fun if you have to face it all by yourself, when everything you see reminds you of time lost.
A decade ago Julie and I visited the Salton Sea, whose shores are marked by the grids of abandoned subdivisions. The place had been marketed as a seaside vacation paradise, but the waters began shrinking and turning putrid. Fish kills marked the shorelines after heat waves. People who had built vacation houses eventually walked away from them.
There were still people living there, in spite of the heat and the stench. A lot of them were living in old motor homes and campers, some of which rested on flat tires. Some of them had been completely enclosed by patched-together buildings. Tarps served as roofs. Windshields were frosted with cracks. Junked cars marked the corners of lots.
“This is where RVs go to die,” I told Julie, and since that time I’ve joked that if we ever get a Sprinter Van, it’ll be from a Salton Sea used car lot.
It’s hard for me to go to Redfish without imposing a vision of the Salton Sea upon it. I know I shouldn’t do that, and I know that Redfish has a much better chance of ending up like Lake Louise—with its vast expensive hotel—than a slum that smells like rotting fish. But the shiny motorhomes and the military-style trailers and the 4-wheel-drive vans? They’ll be elsewhere, old and patched together, repurposed for survival, not recreation, because whether they can move or not, they’re still a roof over the head, a small space that can be warmed by the sun, shelter from the storm.