Julie and I did a quick cross-country ski into Redfish Lake a week ago and found that the ice previously surrounding the docks had melted. The lake was rippling in the afternoon sunshine. We’re accustomed to it being frozen solid this time of year, but it’s not.
Since then, we’ve had a few inches of snow, followed by a couple of below-zero nights. But the Redfish Webcam still shows open water to the far end of the lake.
“It’s not normal,” we say to each other. It’s not, mainly because there’s a warm pool of water about the size of China out in the North Pacific. It’s kept the Pacific Northwest warmer and wetter than usual. If it had been a few degrees colder at our house, we’d have four or five feet of snow on the ground instead of four or five inches, and Redfish Lake would be frozen when we ski out to its docks.
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What is normal is that we’re backcountry skiing this time of year. I’m happy to report that Banner Summit north of Stanley, with its higher elevation, has four feet of snow. Last weekend we accompanied friends to the Banner Glades to (finally) ski four inches of new powder on a firm base. In normal Januarys, we’re all in better climbing shape, but we still tracked up the Glades like the playful powder-trashing vandals that we are.
Everybody had fun. Nobody forgot how to ski. We were able to forget about climate for a while, even though we were skiing through dead black trees left over from the 2024 Wapiti Fire. Slaloming through soft powder in a burned forest turned the most obsessive internal monologue to blessed silence. It was a mental-health exercise, even in an environment of charcoal.
If we’re careless about mentioning powder stashes in casual conversation, it’s because there’s 130,000 acres of new, fire-cleared terrain out there. Some of it’s still waiting for deep snow, of course, but we have faith that the Pacific will cool enough by April to let us try out more new slopes. We will have to avoid a bunch of tree trunks, eight inches in diameter, black, and absolutely immoveable should you run into them. From a skier’s standpoint, the forest needs to burn again, this time down to the rocks. It probably will.
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We live at 6,500 feet in a place surrounded by walls of mountains. In the past five years, when we’ve wanted to ignore the outside world, we’ve waited until tourist season ended and then turned off the news and stopped reading our magazine subscriptions. When storms or distant fires closed the roads into the valley, we pretended that it’s 1960. John F. Kennedy is about to be inaugurated president. Peak oil has yet to arrive. The cars still have fins and tail lights that look like jet-engine exhausts. College loans can be paid off. The climate is still in the Holocene, and aside from the constant threat of nuclear war, things are stable, prosperous, and getting better, every day in every way.
This year, of course, the lack of snow is only the latest breach of the mountain walls. Anxiety about the future keeps the news on and our magazines open on the coffee table.
We wait for another pandemic, another war, yet another rain-on-snow event, another benign chemical turning malignant. We wait for that instant when tourists become refugees. We wait for the increasing gentrification of the valley to make it impossible for us to live here. We wait for the economy to collapse, and with it, our savings. When waiting and worrying get too much to bear, we go skiing in the winter, hiking in the summer.
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Our own ongoing news story is the publication of Journal of the Plague Years, hard copies of my writings on the years 2020 to 2024. Julie did a magnificent job editing them. She worked with a designer to produce three beautiful volumes.
They are proof that if you write a couple of thousand words every week for 156 weeks, arithmetic is your friend. You’ll have written over 300,000 words. I skipped some weeks, so it took me four years to write three years of entries. You can order all three volumes from your favorite independent bookstore for $51. Having written those 300,000 words myself, I can state without equivocation that this is a deal.
They will make a great Valentine’s gift, if you and your significant other(s) value paying attention to the world and telling the truth about it.
They will enliven Thanksgiving dinner conversations with in-laws.
They’re self-help manuals for anyone who wants to remain a sane and smiling witness to dark times.
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When I read through all the material I wrote over four years, a pattern emerged that I wasn’t aware of at the time I was writing. I’ve been more concerned with the problem of human agency than I thought I was.
For most of my life, I’ve resigned myself to not having much effect on the world, and I was fine with that. But looking through my journal entries, I’ve concluded that being a truthful witness to small events changes not just how you look at the world, but the world itself.
Giant forces can overwhelm, but the microcosm is an arena where you can exercise free will. There’s a psychic butterfly effect, where changing small things can end up changing the cosmos, at least from a personal perspective.
If you don’t believe me, read the book.
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Nanoscale free will notwithstanding, you should probably review the Second Law of Thermodynamics (entropy) before starting any major projects. It would have helped Hitler and Stalin. It would still help Elon Musk.
I wrote a fair amount about rich and powerful people in my journal. I’ve realized that having far more money than you need is the start of a lifelong education in what money can’t buy. Having life-and-death power over others is a lifelong education in what power can’t do. Entropy will mess with your plans.
My own writing has convinced me that whoever’s in charge of the universe must be a lot more concerned about the laws of thermodynamics than the Ten Commandments, mainly because the laws of thermodynamics are enforced. If any sentient species is so foolish as to pass laws against thermodynamics, the punishment is brutal. In the case of an overheating planet due to CO2 emissions, we won’t be ignoring thermodynamics much longer, whether we ski or not.
I tried hard to tell the truth in my journal. It was difficult at first. It got easier the longer I kept at it, because truth-telling is an anti-entropic activity. It brings more and more energy into a closed system. My last entries reflect a world that I love, and a life that I don’t want to end.
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As part of an anti-entropic campaign, I have purchased a new pair of skis. I retired the ones I’ve been skiing on for the last 20 years. If I get 20 years out of the new ones, I’ll be skiing at age 95, which is about as far as my anti-entropic ambitions can reach.
After skiing the last two days, I’m creaky and sore. It has occurred to me that I’ll be even creakier and sorer as a 95-year-old. I’m willing to risk that encounter with the dismal laws of thermodynamics, if only to spend more time in a world where even though giant forces can upend human ambition in an instant, every moment you’re doing what you love is evidence that entropy hasn’t triumphed yet.