Last week Julie and I went to Boise to see friends and for our spring pilgrimage to Costco and Winco and Lowes. As a result, our larder is stocked for at least half the summer, we have new nightlights in the kitchen and bathroom, our car’s undercarriage has been cleaned of the winter’s road salt, and we’re going back in two weeks to pick up the new gas cookstove we purchased. We also visited with our financial advisor and discussed the stock market (going down) and inflation (going up). We discussed Idaho real estate (cooling off) and the possibility of Julie and I running out of money before we die (not likely, given Julie’s skills, but subject to plagues, nuclear war, the breakdown of the Internet, and the end of cheap propane followed by the collapse of industrial civilization).

Our financial advisor’s mantra is, “If you guys starve to death, everybody’s going to starve to death.” It’s not as comforting as it sounds.

Fortunately, our advisor doesn’t know about our secret colony of tasty ground squirrels in the back yard, the nearby field of nettles that we could use for summer salads, and the pine needles that can be brewed for a bitter tea high in Vitamin C. In the winter, there are grouse on the high ridges, whitefish in the river, rabbits if you know how to snare them, and aspen bark if you collect the cambium in the spring, dry it and grind it into flour. It can serve as a thickener for soup, if you’ve got any soup.

(Take one rabbit, skinned and gutted, and place in a large stockpot. Add the pulverized cambium of one three-year-old aspen, an eighth bushel of nettles, one cup sagebrush leaves and one cup pine needles. Add six quarts of water and boil over wood fire for four hours, or until it reaches the consistency of wet concrete. Serves two.)

Before everybody starves to death, most of Boise will be here in Sawtooth Valley, following the dream of living off the land, which is what a lot of Boise people think we Sawtooth Valley natives are doing. In reality, we’re living off the leavings of tourists, Costco deliveries, money saved from city-equivalent jobs, profits from city-purchased real estate, and money the federal government gave us to preserve Sawtooth Valley as a pastoral museum full of marginal ranches and bankrupt homesteads.

There’s a reason that central Idaho is wilderness and not terraced rice paddies. The fifteen inches of snow we got in May are only part of it. Most years, it’s hard for even the deer and elk to make a living up here. If somebody comes up from Boise to live off the land, their best bet will be killing and eating other people coming up here to live off the land.

To live through the sort of collapse where famine takes a good chunk of the population, we would have to adopt the tactics of some of our neighbors, who, when they think of living off the land, think of nighttime raids over Horseshoe Bend Summit and down State Street, breaking through the cinderblock back walls of big box stores, dragging dairy cows and saddle horses and pet llamas into commandeered refrigerator trucks, emptying southern Idaho granaries and potato cellars and retreating, before daylight, back into mountain compounds defended by roadblocks, small children with AK-47s, and IEDs.

You’ll be relieved to know we’re not planning on living at all if we have to live off the land. We say that death would be preferable to living without electricity or hot water, but it’s really fighting over the last can of chili that we’re worried about. We don’t think we—or our chili—would survive an encounter with anyone desperately trying to feed their kids. We won’t want to win that bad. We won’t want to live that bad.

Outside of meetings with our financial adviser, we don’t worry about civilization’s end. Trips to Boise continue to overwhelm us with abundance. We see shelves of food, acres of new cars and recreational vehicles, vast lineups of appliances and tools, and station after station selling gas and diesel. Lines of full shopping carts crowd the checkout counters of supermarkets. Crowds of healthy-looking young people run and bike through the parks and Greenbelt, where kneeling volunteers plant native species and rip out even the edible invasive ones. New subdivisions—miles and miles of them—surround the city. Lanes of traffic stream in or out of downtown. Streetlights go on at night. Restaurants are open any time you’re hungry.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see a megalopolis—a Phoenix North—stretching from Mountain Home to Ontario, blindingly bright on the infrared spectrum, a vast machine with a million human parts, all of them eating and breathing and sweating, converting oil and food into a great throbbing island of plastic, concrete, engine exhaust, and shit.

But in a world suddenly short of fossil fuels, where do you find the energy to keep it running? Where do you find the water for its trees and lawns? Where do you put its people who don’t have first and last months’ rent and a damage deposit? How does it keep expanding? Where do all those groceries and building materials and sewage engineers come from? Why doesn’t the whole thing slow, stop, slip backward and finally crash down around all our ears?

No doubt it will. But please God, not now. I’d like to have Boise keep us alive until we die of something other than transplanted Californians bicycling up from Nampa and doing whatever they have to do to eat.

On our way back from Boise, we paid $5.19 a gallon for gasoline in Garden Valley. Diesel was $6.39. A guy with two kids in the back of his Dodge pickup started cursing when his pump hit ninety dollars. The pump kept going and he kept cursing.

It could be the beginning of the end. Already parts of the country are seeing shortages of diesel and, as a result, skyrocketing freight prices. Food prices are rising as the war in Ukraine stops grain exports and fertilizer imports. Even as oil prices rise, the fracking boom that made this country the world’s largest oil producer has ended for lack of fracking sand, lack of essential machinery, and the fact that a fracked well, to be profitable over its short lifetime, requires oil prices in the $125/barrel range. Consumers can’t come up with the money. The oil companies that still have had a steady supply of venture capital are looking for better ways to spend that money than drilling new wells.

Most of the country depends on diesel-powered trucks for goods and groceries, and if diesel continues to be in short supply, you can expect some sort of rationing so that the big tractor-trailers can keep moving down the Interstates.

What this means for the tourist industry remains to be seen. Tourism is not generally seen as an essential activity, and many of the tourist vehicles we see in the valley are diesel-powered pickups and motor homes. I don’t know how people with a quarter-million-dollar motor home will react to being told they can’t buy enough diesel to drive it anywhere they want. Driving anywhere they want is the reason they bought the thing in the first place.

Traffic on Highway 75 doesn’t seem to have slowed much in response to five-dollar gas, but that may be an end-days phenomenon. People might be maxing out the credit cards and taking the family on one last normal vacation before the repo men get dropped off at the driveway and the sheriff’s deputies show up at the door with eviction orders.

Will ten-dollar gas bring things to a stop? We will likely find out, as more and more countries find out that their energy reserves are finite. We’ve hit five-dollar gas simply because the oil companies are telling station owners to raise prices on gas already paid for, just so they can have enough cash on hand when the tanker trucks show up with the really expensive stuff.

Nothing we’re facing is as horrible as what countries dependent on imported grain and oil are facing. We need to pay attention to these countries, the ones that face the shutdown of power plants, the loss of transportation, the fall of governments, and the end of food, to understand what happens when all the money’s gone, along with the things you wanted to buy with it.

It’s counterintuitive, but economists like to point out that the cities are where wealth is produced. I’d like to think that wealth is either grown or mined, as the bumper sticker says, but economic theory says that agriculture and resource extraction only produce the barest raw materials for a great value-added economy, one that dwarfs anything the hinterlands can produce.

Our local economy tends to confirm the economists. Lawyers make more than farmers over time, and they bequeath more to their offspring. Stockbrokers and commodity traders make more than the people who mine or harvest commodities. A good chef adds more value to a tomato than a tomato costs in the first place. A computer chip maker adds more value to a fuel-injection system than the person who collects the silica sand for the chip. And so on.

All this begs the question of what an economy does when it lacks basic inputs. Chief among these is energy, and various reductive thinkers have stated that energy is the economy, mostly in reply to people who say that the service and knowledge economies have achieved an existence independent of coal and oil and hydro.

One can, of course, point to Irish monks during the Dark Ages and contemporary English professors as groups that have flourished in the absence of energetic and material resources. It can be done, and such groups might now and then save the essentials of civilization, but they create nothing like a system that can keep people from starving or even allow them to pay off their college loans.

Boise has kept Julie and me alive thus far, and we hope it continues to. We are a bit bothered by its resemblance to a vast parasite spreading over the skin of the earth, one that will grow exponentially until it runs out of room or nourishment.

But we wouldn’t be here without it and cities like it. Now and then we flash on the idea that cities have consciousnesses of their own. Maybe they come to the realization that they can’t help what they’re doing, and it causes them pain just to think about it. Maybe they know they’re unsustainable. Maybe they think they could exist just fine if people would quit pointing out they look like a planetary skin disease.

We’re about to test the idea that Boise and its siblings can continue to thrive independent of cheap fossil fuels and limitless resources. It’s a medical experiment.

Every summer, the Redfish Lake Lodge hosts concerts on its lawn. Julie and I, pre-pandemic, used to show up with our lawn chairs, order a margarita and sweet potato fries, and sit back and enjoy the show. We gave that up when we noticed that we were in the middle of three hundred people and we were the only ones wearing masks. Lots of Boise license plates were in the parking lots, and we realized that nobody wants to work all week and then drive three hours just to worry about sneezing or being sneezed upon.

This year we’re going back, masks or no masks, trusting in our vaccinations and thinking that if the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that when we do something, we can never be sure it’s not the last time we’ll do it. It lends a poignancy to most occasions, at least the ones you’d like to repeat. It’s time to stop being cautious and fearful, we’ll say. It’s time to face the music.