Last Thursday Julie and I drove along the east side of Redfish, past the signs reading “No Entry: Sockeye Campground Full,” over the speedbumps, past the camp host’s RV next to its stack of ten-dollar firewood bundles, and past a dozen new camp trailers, each with a shiny diesel pickup or two parked in its paved camping spot, until we found a space in a small end-of-the-road parking lot that’s not part of the campground. The lot serves a small and secluded beach that marks the end of the trail on that side of the lake. Go beyond it and the trail becomes two trails which become four and then eight and then disappear altogether.

We didn’t go to the beach. Another trail leads out of Sockeye Campground and climbs up to the high east moraine above the lake. We had planned a short hike to the top of the moraine, one that would get us a little exercise before the afternoon thunderstorms cut loose. We reached the top, then left the trail on the way back to the car, cutting down through deadfall and pine thickets and the jumble of rocks the glacier had left behind when it disappeared twelve thousand years ago. We were back at the car two hours after we had left it. Any longer and the day would have been too hot for hiking.

On other days we’ve gone off trail and have gotten lost, which means a longer hike and maybe a warmer or even a wetter one, but locally you can’t stay lost for long. The peaks are intermittently visible even in the densest forest, and the sounds of jet skis and outboards reliably indicate the direction of the closest motorized lake.

Julie prefers to travel on trails, but I’ve told her that we’ll never find the mythical Gingerbread House of the Sawtooths or the nice old lady who built it if we don’t head out through the underbrush. She says that from what she’s heard about gingerbread houses in the middle of trackless forest, we don’t want to find our local one. I say I get bored traveling on trails I’ve been on fifty times. She says she gets tired of climbing over logs. I say it’s deadfall yoga and it’s good for you.

Ours is an ongoing conversation.

 

The afternoon thunderstorms did cut loose. By the time they did, we had already made it back to the house. Julie had given me an overdue haircut, and we had cleaned up for a trip to town.

No mail at the post office, but we stopped at Sawtooth Spirit to sit on their balcony and have a glass of wine. It was raining lightly when we got there, but by the time we had picked out a bottle, opened it, and sat down with a couple of glasses, lightning strikes were hitting the foothills north of Stanley and thunder was shaking the building. Water was streaming off the metal roof over our heads. It was a pleasant interlude.

Across Valley Creek, a couple of horses, inspired by the weather, were chasing each other around a pasture. The tourists that had invaded the valley during July and the first week in August were waiting out the storm in the campgrounds or sheltering in the bars and restaurants. Town was quiet. We could hear ourselves think.

Possibly because of the price of fuel, we’ve seen fewer people in town this summer than in the first two summers of the pandemic. That, in our local opinion, is a good thing.

Also, we’ve cheered every time a thunderstorm has dropped a half-inch of rain in our backyard. It’s rained enough to keep the hills green and the wildfires from getting out of control. The one nearby fire was in Warm Springs Creek, above the Robinson Bar Ranch, but firefighters hit it hard and controlled it within a day.

 

When I worked for the Forest Service in the 1970s, the green foothills of the Sawtooths were called “the asbestos forest,” because the peaks remained snow-covered, even in hot summers, even in low-snow years, and kept the place cool, wet, and non-flammable. But Braxon Peak, our usual snow gauge, lost its last patch of snow this weekend. It will be a big dry sandpile—hard to climb, easy to descend—until the snow flies. What snow is left in the Sawtooths is in deep northside couloirs, mostly. It doesn’t cool anything.

Once, as a wilderness ranger, I sat on a rock above Sawtooth Lake and watched a man who had packed in a tiny inflatable boat sit for a couple of hours in the middle of ice floes, pushing them one way and then the other with his oar. He had paddled out in the middle of a lake half-covered with big comma-shaped pieces of ice, and the wind had shifted and the ice had closed in around him, making it impossible for him to get back to shore. If the wind hadn’t shifted back, he would have spent the night there. It was the end of July.

Now we worry about the forest burning from Banner Summit to Smiley Creek. The valley’s aquifers are still low. Shallow lakes and potholes are already dry, and the river is low enough and warm enough for rock-snot to have covered the river-bottom. Across the river, the forest floor is dusty-dry one sunny day after a hard rain.

Sawtooth Lake loses all its ice, some years, in June.

Far downriver, the Moose Fire, outside of Salmon, has reached 75,000 acres. It’s burning in difficult terrain and probably won’t be out before November. It’s a constant reminder of what could happen if our monsoonal moisture stops for a week or so. The biggest local fire I can remember, the Valley Road Fire, started on September 4 seventeen years ago, and lasted until it snowed, burning 250,000 acres over two months.

I have a gas-powered water pump, a hundred feet of fire hose, and a misting nozzle stored in the garage. If fire comes to our neighborhood, I imagine myself refusing evacuation orders, staying here, and keeping our house from burning once the flames sweep across the flat from the river. It’s more real to think that when the fire comes, great rotating clouds of fire will roll down the valley, making it obvious that the thing to do is to throw some clothes and the laptops in the car and run.

 

Wildfire worries keep the August doldrums from turning into boredom, but I should note that the doldrums, which come every year, in return make worries less intense. Losing everything but what we can stash in the car in thirty seconds doesn’t seem as much like death as it did in January. Other, less immediate worries—the war in Ukraine, worldwide economic crashes, the sudden disappearance of affordable fossil fuels—get further away still. What can’t be seen on the evening news goes away, and we’ve stopped watching the evening news.

Another year has gone by, but we’re still here. So much has changed, but we’re still here. All sorts of younger people crowd the obituary columns, but we’re still here. Our own existence, in these quiet, heat-ridden mornings, becomes a marvel, and it’s hard to worry about something you’re marveling at.

Also, a little later in the day, when the sky has turned black and you’re in the middle of lightning and thunder, it’s hard to worry about anything but lightning and thunder.

The start of school marks the end of one tourist migration and the beginning of another. Families disappear along with 4-wheelers, ski boats, motorcycles, giant trailers, boomboxes, paddle boards, generators. They are replaced by retired couples, smaller trailers, tents, books, headphones, bicycles. The campgrounds become cleaner and quieter. You imagine legislation banning under-fifty-fives from Sawtooth Valley.

 

Such legislation isn’t necessary. The economy has already made it so only the wealthy can visit our valley, and the wealthy are disproportionately older than fifty-five.

The families that can afford to come here also can afford the two-story fifth wheel trailer, the giant four-wheel-drive pickup, motorcycles, and so on. They’re a vanishing species, I think, due to exhaust fumes.

In Sockeye Campground, Julie and I witnessed one campsite that had eight internal-combustion motors in it, and a boat on the beach (we assumed a boat on the beach) made nine. Those purchases add up. It’s not hard to assemble a quarter-million dollars’ worth of motorized recreation even before you buy the trailer. Not many working people can afford that rich a vacation. If gasoline prices spike again next summer, not many people will be able to feed the beasts, and I’m not referring to their children.

I once asked our financial advisor how much of the recreational equipment that went by our house every summer was paid for. “None of it,” he said.

Which makes the prospect of an economic downturn all the more serious. Higher unemployment and interest rates and prices of essentials are not kind to people accustomed to maxing out their credit. They are, however, kind to the people who have the cash to extend credit to people who cannot resist their children’s pleas for new 4-wheelers. It’s an inherently unstable situation for both groups.

In a few years, the campgrounds may resemble the socially-distanced flockings together of oligarchs at Davos, Sun Valley, and Jackson Hole. The traffic on Highway 75 will be quieter and more sparse by then, being battery-powered and mostly purchased with cash.

Where are the children in this picture? When a family hits a certain level of affluence, the children tend to disappear. They stay home with nannies or go to Swiss boarding schools or IT summer camps, Outward Bound, summer theaters, internships, SAT coaching, football clinics run by ex-NFL players.

I’m exaggerating, of course. Ridiculously affluent families do exist, and they occasionally do things together for fun.

I think. There does seem to be a generational rift opening between the tourists that visit our valley and the children they bring with them. If Julie and I, at a restaurant, see a family at an adjacent table where everyone isn’t staring at a phone, we point them out as flaming anomalies, probably from France.

 

One of the pleasures of age (I’m counting it as a pleasure) is waking up at 3 a.m. and thinking about all the mistakes I’ve made in life and how differently I’d act if I had it all to do again. I won’t bore you (especially in August) with those details, but I will say that lately, Highway 75 is as quiet at 3 a.m. as it is in January.

In past years, that wasn’t the case. It brings up ideas of plagues of much higher virulence than COVID-19. What if the death rate had been 30%, like with SARS-1? What if the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant’s containment vessels had been breached by Russian shelling? What if gasoline and natural gas stopped being available at any price? Would we be celebrating the decline in tourist numbers if they had declined to zero? What if everybody suddenly decided they liked the idea of doing nothing and going nowhere in more months than August?

It’s a lot easier to wonder these things at 3 a.m. than it is at sunrise, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid questions.

 

We’re enjoying the doldrums. By the end of them we will have seen six concerts at the Sun Valley Music Festival. We’ve been hiking two or three days a week. Our 26th anniversary is coming up, and we’re hoping to celebrate by climbing a peak. We’ve been having dinner with friends. I’ve been getting chainsaws ready for firewood season, which is coming up once it starts frosting in the mornings. We’re reading books. Now and then I call up friends I haven’t talked to for a while. I know they won’t be busy because it’s August.

We do wonder, and not just at 3 a.m., if we might be in the same position as Europe’s bourgeoisie in August of 1914, at the end of a long era of peace and stability, during which deep tectonic forces have been moving, grinding against each other, slowly building up tensions that will release all at once. Then we wonder if the world hasn’t already changed completely, and we’re simply stuck in a small green geographical cul-de-sac, isolated from what’s really happening. Because of that isolation, we’re able to repeat the rituals, habits, and ceremonies of past Augusts, and thereby create a convincing simulacrum of a world that sometime in the last two-and-a-half years ceased to exist.

(Update: This morning, just before posting, two small fires in the valley, one north, by Sawtooth Lake, one south, by Alturas, well away from the forest/gingerbread house interface.)