Three days ago, Julie and I took cross-country skis to the end of the plowed road in Fisher Creek canyon, which hits the Salmon River six miles upstream from our house. Fisher Creek is home to one of the three communities allowed under the Sawtooth National Recreation Area master plan, so there is a small cluster of homes between the highway and the National Forest a mile to the east. Their homeowners’ association plows the road, and we have taken advantage of that plowing, in this low-snow year, to park where the plowing stops and ski on up the creek.
At this point, no homeowners have told us we’re not allowed to ski there. If that ever happens, we’ll tell them that although we don’t live at Fisher Creek, we are members of the benevolent organization, The Friends of Fisher Creek. If we’re asked what the Friends of Fisher Creek is so benevolent about, we’ll say classic cross-country skiing.
We’ll see how far that gets us.
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In a normal year, we wouldn’t be cross country skiing in January. We’d be on telemark gear, skiing Ladybug Hill across the road from our house, climbing its steep slopes and skiing its even steeper ones, avalanche conditions permitting.
A trip to the top of Ladybug is usually enough for one day’s exercise. It’s 700 vertical feet, and it usually takes us 40 minutes to get to the top and 10 minutes to ski down, going slow because we’ve earned our turns, step by uphill step, and we want to savor each one. Once we’re down to the highway, it’s another 10 minutes back to our driveway.
An hour, normally. Sometimes we’ll go back up for another run. But not this year. This year the south side of Ladybug Hill has been bare ground and dry sagebrush. The unplowed roads around the valley have been the only places to ski.
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Two days ago, we drove to the parking lot at the mouth of Redfish Lake Creek and skied up the road to the Lodge. We reached the iced-in boat dock in forty minutes, but by then what had been a sunny day had turned cold, gray, and windy. We usually sit for a bit on one of the dock’s benches, looking back at the closed and shuttered lodge, remembering what it looked like in July, when the beaches were full of people talking, laughing, and listening to music. Boats were coming and going on liquid water. The scent of two-cycle exhaust was in the air. Backpackers, returning from the far end of the lake on the Redfish shuttle, put their packs down on the lodge lawn and hit the bar for margaritas.
Not at that moment. At that moment, we were alone. At that moment, it seemed impossible that we were in a place that would ever seem crowded.
We put first tracks on the dock, sat on a bench for a couple of minutes, then got up and headed for the car. I didn’t check the upstairs of the lodge to see if anyone had put a poster of Jack Nicholson behind the dark glass of a guestroom window. I didn’t check to see if it was really a poster.
Yesterday, a gray and overcast sky. Bad light. We stayed home.
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Juno goes with us on these cross-country trips. She can’t go into the backcountry with us any longer, because this pup we got when she was 44 days old now has 8 years and a knee operation under her collar, and she gets stiff and sore if she travels through deep snow.
It is normal for dogs to get old and arthritic and break your heart when they die before you do. It’s normal to keep them home when you go backcountry skiing, although if we get enough snow to get into the steep slopes Juno will give us a look that means we’re the worst humans any dog has ever had and may fail to acknowledge us once we come back through the door.
We assume we’re going to outlive Juno. But I have gotten old enough that the obituary columns are full of people younger than me. There may come a day when Juno expects me to come home, but I won’t. When Julie goes to visit her parents, I make sure she calls when she arrives at their home, which may be needless concern on my part, but travel in the Idaho mountains involves rocks and animals on the road and drunks in giant pickups.
We pretend it’s not normal to lose the people and pets you love, even in the face of wars and rumors of wars, pandemics, famines, auto accidents and avalanches. But all over the world, it’s normal for people and dogs to go out the door and you never see them alive again.
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Talking about normalcy is risky, possibly foolish, on a planet where the air hasn’t been this full of greenhouse gases for three to five million years, and some of those gases never even existed before the 20th century. The earth is in a state of abnormalcy. It will remain that way until the extra heat the atmosphere is now trapping is matched by the heat it radiates out into space.
Don’t hold your breath. Upset a complex system like the earth’s climate and it will be centuries before energy output matches energy input. But it will, because—physics. Dynamic systems seek equilibrium, sometimes violently, which is why it’s risky to mess with their components. You never know how far down the chain of cause and effect the butter will fly.
It’s possible we’ve already turned up the earth’s thermostat too high for most multicellular life to survive. Venus is an extreme example of what happens when delicate tipping points are reached and exponential feedback loops kick in. Earth, given its additional distance from the sun, will probably not reach temperatures hot enough to melt lead. But given the right composition of the atmosphere, the oceans could boil. Property values would tank.
I know, I know. It’s not our problem. Planets have cooking times that span generations. Anyway, humans have the means and the will to end their existence with nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons long before the extremophiles in Yellowstone geyser pools become the Earth’s dominant life form.
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Today it’s snowing. The weather people say 9 to 17 inches could be on the ground three days from now, with lots more to come. Given their forecast track record, we’re not counting on more than a couple inches, but we’re hoping for five feet or so.
We’re also hoping that The Friends of Fisher Creek will not have to put on cross-country skis again. We are yearning for deep powder, and if we get it, we won’t have to park up the Fisher Creek road, and none of the people who pay for the road to be plowed will resent us for frivolously recreating on their plowing fees. We won’t have to face the fact that ownership is what it takes to be a normal human being in Sawtooth Valley.
Here's how that goes:
“What are you doing here? Don’t you know this is a private road?” This, from a part-time resident, part of the Fisher Creek Gentrification Project.
“It’s not a private road,” we say. “It’s a Forest Service road that goes to the head of Fisher Creek. We have a right to be here, just like you. We’re all just tourists in this life, anyway, don’t you think?”
By this time the person who has confronted us has checked out our 7C (Custer County) license plate, which identifies us as locals, possibly with property. Possibly with attorneys on retainer.
“You live here, then?”
“Normally. How about you?”
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Julie and I are trying to appear as normal human beings living normal lives, and Juno tries to act like a normal dog, but it’s clear we’re all having more and more trouble keeping up the illusion. My parents bought the land Julie and I live on in 1953, and I’ve lived here a good chunk of every year since then—year-round since 2004—so it’s not that I’m not a local. Julie and I will have our 28th wedding anniversary in August, and most of the locals who said we and our marriage would never make it through the winters have either died or frozen out.
But being a local isn’t normal. Land prices have made the valley too expensive to call home. Normal people can’t afford property here. Abnormally wealthy people don’t have the time to live here.
Some two-acre lots in the valley are worth over a million dollars. Whatever buildings are on them are tear-downs in a world where some people go without housing. If you’re in the top .1%, you’re seriously abnormal, financially and ethically and probably in other ways, too.
The Stanley city government is planning to build employee housing, despite most new houses in the valley being huge and usually empty. We have absentee billionaires who call themselves locals, which tells you the currency of being a local has undergone a Weimar-style hyperinflation.
Our tourist industry supplies mobs of people who keep summer restaurants full of diners, the rivers full of rafts, the campgrounds full of RVs, and the Fisher Creek loop trail full of mountain bikes. Tourists aren’t normal, either, especially historically, when most of the world’s normal tourists worked for people like Genghis Khan or the U.S. Cavalry. We locals are lucky that thus far our tourists have respected our property rights, no matter how we came by them.
Those of us who live here year-round tend to see the owners of Fisher Creek houses as tourists too, who come for brief holidays at Christmas or Thanksgiving, and longer times—weeks or months—in the summer. Ownership is their ticket to belonging here, and it leads to the disturbing realization that ownership is the ticket to belonging anywhere.
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It’s a short leap, at this point, to recognizing that normalcy comes with a price, and that price includes your soul. It also requires that you turn your awareness from the suffering of the poor and propertyless in the world, and focus on more pleasant issues.
It’s akin to a prime rib dinner with a good wine being more enjoyable when you focus on umami and mouth feel rather than the slaughterhouse.
Abnormally good fortune—such as the kind we Sawtooth Valley locals experience even in a low snow year—requires that you devote a lot of energy to constructing normalcy. It becomes more inward state of mind than ritual outward behavior, and that means a lot of people are walking around feeling normal when they’re as grotesque as any gargoyle that has ever graced Notre-Dame.
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It’s still snowing, harder and harder. The weather report says we can expect wind gusts of 43 mph. That closely corresponds to what we’re seeing out the window.
It’s a storm that might mean the Friends of Fisher Creek are about to become the Friends of Ladybug Hill, or the Friends of Banner Summit, or the Friends of the Happy Hour slope above the fish hatchery. None of those places has a homeowners’ association. We’re looking forward to getting out into snow deep enough that we can come out of our turns without spraying bits of sagebrush.
But today, we’re hunkering down, staying by the fire, thinking about grabbing a load of wood when the wind eases, reading the New York Times website to find out who’s killing whom beyond the valley walls, and worrying about the climate staying cold enough for snow for a few more years.
Normal, no matter how weird that sounds.