It was a summer when the monsoon pumped moisture up from Mexico all the way to Idaho. Here in Sawtooth Valley, mornings were mostly clear and cold but warmed up quickly. By the afternoons, thunderheads came over the peaks. Lightning, thunder, and short, intense rainstorms started around five. By seven or eight, the skies were clear again and the air was cool, sweet, and calm. The hills remained green well into August.
I don’t know if it was 1956 or two or three years later, but I was a little kid, one who had to take events as they came.
Often enough in those summers, those events were wonderful. My father had forsaken his life as a hard rock miner for the even less secure life of a salmon-fishing guide, but I hadn’t a clue about how poor we were, or how my parents sweated over their finances at the end of every month. All I knew was that the new world of Sawtooth Valley was a delightful, yet-to-be-explored place, full of interesting people who showed up at our house to go fishing, or—since my mother was the only practicing nurse in the valley—to get lacerations sewn up, fishhooks removed from earlobes, or chest pains diagnosed. I grew up thinking my parents could handle anything.
The Salmon River was full of water in those years, running high into the middle of July, and I was warned against getting close to it. But I remember more than one time when my father packed me across it with one arm while he fought to land a big chinook salmon with the other. He kept our freezers full of enough elk and salmon to get our family through the winter. I remember being told to come inside when the black clouds came over Mt. Heyburn and bangs of thunder started following close onto flashes of lightning. Inside meant inside our house, which had been an old lodgepole furniture shop until my father put a new roof on it, wired it, plumbed it, and made it into a home that would keep us safe.
Raising a kid who feels secure in a dangerous world isn’t easy, but my parents managed it long enough to get me out of the house.
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Julie and I live on the other end of the property these days. Not far upriver from us is Gold Creek. It starts in the foothills of the White Clouds, and it falls twenty-five hundred feet in its six or seven miles. For a good part of its length, it is spanned by deadfall or choked with logjams. For most of the year you can walk across it on exposed rocks.
Gold Creek flows through Idaho Batholith granite that has been rotting into sand for eighty million years. If you climb the hill across the road from our house, you can look down on sandbars, eroding banks of sand, and, farther from the water, acres and acres of sagebrush growing in sand. At that distance, the creek is a thin thread of silver that runs through a green and gray landscape. Once it crosses below Highway 75, it falls straight downhill through a sandy pasture until it hits the river at a right angle.
One evening on that long-ago summer, the black thunderclouds didn’t dissipate at quitting time. One or two hovered over the hills across the highway, and they got even blacker. Other dark and billowing clouds joined them, and we started hearing near-continuous rumbles of thunder. A wide column of heavy rain, marked by flashes of lightning, began to suck the whole sky into Gold Creek.
The storm was still going at dark, and still going the next morning when we got up. The owner of the neighboring Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch, Ed Bogert, showed up at breakfast, asking my father for help. The headgate that regulated water from Gold Creek had washed out and the ranch’s lake was filling with sand. Hay fields were being silted over. Sand was obliterating irrigation ditches, and the bridge that spanned the highway was in danger.
By that time, the Salmon River overflow channel that went by our house was bank-to-bank full, dirt-colored and opaque, carrying logs and the rolling green pinwheels of willow bushes.
Ed Bogert had a small D-3 Caterpillar tractor with a blade, and an hour later I sat in the rain on a low hill and watched as my father worked it out into a raging river of water, bulldozing sand into the mouth of Bogert’s irrigation canal. Again and again my father blocked the canal, only to have the sand he had pushed up get washed back toward him. He would retreat, drop the blade into freshly deposited sand, and push it forward again. Eventually he gave up, because log jams were forming further up the creek and forcing the water out of its banks. Water was coming in behind him, cutting him off from higher ground.
At the highway, the bridge itself began to act as a barrier. Water filled the barrow pits on either side of it and stopped traffic, but enough water flowed under that the bridge survived. Below it, Gold Creek no longer had a creek bed. Instead, it flowed over a wide beach. Finally it dropped into an old riverbed—now an overflow channel—of the Salmon, one that crossed through my parents’ property.
Where the old riverbed had once been deep, it was shallow. Where it once had grown grass for our horses, it now held a level expanse of mud, one punctuated by the tips of willows and pine trees.
Today, if you visit the Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch, you can go to the inlet of its lake and walk through brush and swamp where there once was deep water. It wasn’t a big lake in the first place, and a quarter of it disappeared that day. The canal and the irrigation ditches have been reestablished. Lower Gold Creek’s linearity is due to a deep machine-channeled bed.
I built the house where Julie and I live in 1988, on the edge of the sand-filled overflow channel, in a spot with a view of Mount Heyburn. By then the channel was once again growing thick grass. All I had to do to put in a lush backyard lawn was buy a lawn mower. Small lodgepole pines spread roots in the soft soil there, and they provided a steady supply of successful transplants, because their roots stopped growing when they hit gravel. I could go around a sapling with a shovel, pop out the tree and its plug of roots and soil, and load it into a wheelbarrow. That’s why we have so many trees between our house and the highway.
When I needed fine-grained sand to seal a drain field off from the water table, I got it from the overflow channel. When I needed topsoil for the front lawn, I went further downstream, to a point where the flood had dropped its sand and was running organic-rich mud. When I put a fence around the house, I was grateful whenever I could dig a post hole in two feet of decomposed granite rather than in gravel the size of softballs.
In the last sixty years, no massive cloudburst has come down Gold Creek. In high water years, our backyard is filled with running water, but it never gets more than a foot deep. It runs gently, and usually is gone by the last week in June.
It’s nice to live next to seasonal wetlands. Ducks and geese paddle around outside our windows. Otters sometimes appear in the irrigation ditch that runs under our deck. A beaver colony lives on our stretch of the river. They move into the wet floodplain when the spring runoff washes away their riverside lodges.
Our neighborhood is slightly higher. It is easy to pretend that our landscaping won’t go anywhere, and neither will our house. But even now, we have to take events as they come.
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This year, Sawtooth Valley reminds me of the way it was during my childhood summers, before drought and fire transformed the landscape. Forest Service firefighters used to call the lodgepoles that carpet the hills below the Sawtooths the Asbestos Forest, because the mountains squeezed the moisture out of the southern Idaho clouds every summer day, and the resulting mossy ground cover and soggy deadfall either wouldn’t burn or could easily be put out in an afternoon by a helitack crew.
Now there’s no mention of asbestos, and not just because it’s been pinpointed as the cause of mesothelioma. By August, the areas below the Sawtooth peaks are piled six feet high with brittle deadfall. Duff is two feet thick in places, and as dry as talcum powder. Every late summer drought and wind threaten a firestorm that could turn the valley into Paradise—Paradise, California. Nobody wants to think about what might happen to the subdivisions around Stanley or the fact that on any late summer day, thousands of tourists could be trapped at Redfish Lake by a fire at the mouth of Redfish Lake Creek. Nobody wants to think of a fire even bigger than the one last summer.
But that’s not what we worry about the most. Instead, we think about the increasingly intense rainstorms happening around the world, and the fact that warmer air holds more and more water until it lets go of it all at once. We worry that Gold Creek, which still runs through a giant unstable sandpile, will once again get a half-foot of rain in twenty-four hours. We worry that a half-foot will only be the start. That it might happen during fire season will be small comfort.
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I’m not sounding secure. You may think that the protected feeling I had as a child has been eroded by sad experience, and you’d be right. I’ve discovered that human beings are not always the kind and nurturing creatures that my parents were. I’ve discovered that my parents’ survival had required a deep understanding that the world could kill by fire or flood or a half-dozen other abiding disasters. They made the choice, in the face of all that, to tackle the odds against them, to live and enjoy life while they had it.
I’m channeling Albert Camus, who isn’t the worst guy to channel when you’re in your eighth decade. I have come to cherish his discovery that in the middle of winter, there lies within an invincible summer. I realize that my parents must have made the same discovery. They must have communicated it to me, by example if nothing else.
It helps to have discovered Julie along the way.
Camus also said that our life’s work is searching for those two or three images in whose presence our hearts first opened.
Two or three images. Or twenty or thirty, if your heart opens easily. Those images are armor against the despair that awakens us at three a.m., and all the worries that the world greets us with at sunrise.
One of those images, for me, is of my father, running a smoking, roaring bulldozer in the middle of floating logs, eroding banks, and falling water, holding the machine’s tracks oblique to the current, feeling it tip sideways downstream when the creek bottom dropped out from under him, hitting the throttle to turn into the current and stay upright.
It’s an image that can serve as a metaphor for the dangers of life and the smallness of our efforts when compared to the forces that assemble against us. But I prefer that it remain an image.
I can see my father in the driver’s seat, steering the blade back into the flow of sand and rock, pushing it forward and up and briefly—too briefly—stopping the water, and then doing it again, and then again, all the while grinning at the weather.