It is late fall in Sawtooth Valley. A foot of snow is forecast for the high parts of the Sawtooths this weekend. Here in the valley, we’ll get less, but temperatures are expected to be cold enough to make the ground white. Since I spent large parts of last July and August cutting firebreaks, we have big piles of slash to burn. A day with a couple of inches of snow on the ground is perfect for an anxiety-free giant bonfire.
We have topped off the woodpile with a final pickup-load of wood. We blew out the sprinkler system and put the pump and hoses away. The long-range forecast suggests we might have as warm a winter as we did last year, which would mean rain instead of snow, and we will have to drive forty miles out Highway 21 to Banner Summit to backcountry ski.
Warmth or not, snow or not, it’s getting to the dark season here, and it’s a relief when the sun finally comes over the east wall of mountains and warms and dries the back deck. We’re building fires in the morning, but on sunny afternoons the living room gets warm enough to let the fire go out. Global warming aside, we’re still expecting a long winter, one subjectively much longer if we can’t walk out the door and go skiing anytime we want.
It’s been cold enough that Julie is using the oven again—lately, my life has been blessed with apple and pumpkin pies and the divine miracle of a pot roast heavy with onions, parsnips, carrots and potatoes.
We have lately seen a brief influx of camo-clad tourists with guns, but not as many as usual. The highway traffic noise has, for long stretches of time, faded to silence.
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Last week I had a birthday, my 76th. I’ve been telling people I expect trombones as birthday gifts, but so far FedEx hasn’t delivered any. Perhaps I should have asked for a more dignified instrument, but given the season and my stage of life, I’m a little uneasy about violins and pipe organs. Instead, the song that’s been going through my head comes courtesy of the Rolling Stones:
Well, this could be the last time
This could be the last time
Maybe the last time
I don’t know. Oh no, oh no.
Sad but true: you could instantly identify Baby Boomers if you could hear when people were wandering around with Rolling Stones earworms in their heads.
This particular earworm has turned philosophical on me, now that I’m beginning my 77th year. Lots of things could be the last time for me: the last time I see a good friend, the last time I climb Braxon Peak, the last week-long backpack (possibly already in the past), the last backcountry ski, the last section of irrigation ditch cleared of mud and water weeds, the last time I ski at Sun Valley (definitely already happened—having worked there on Ski Patrol, I’ve always been a little outraged at having to buy a ticket, and a lot more outraged once the single-day lift ticket price reached $250).
Of course, life is uncertain from the get-go. Any time could be your last time for anything, and I suspect that if there is an afterlife, it consists largely of memories—a giant stack of last times you did something if you’ve lived a long life, a short stack if you haven’t—and all the time in the universe to contemplate the rightness or wrongness of what you did, coupled with the firm knowledge that it’s too late to do anything to change it.
That’s probably as good a summation of my life’s end-game as any.
I’m trying to identify those last events ahead of time, so as to cherish their final glimmers of light in my life. Friends are a big part of that. Final truth-telling conversations are a big part of that. Long last looks, complete with last winks, are a big part of that.
I don’t worry much about not skiing Sun Valley again, because backcountry skiing is infinitely superior to skiing at a resort (admittedly, you have to learn to love climbing uphill, which is a skill that requires fine tuning as you get older). I do think it’s important to put some first tracks in powder this winter, whether we have to drive to snow or not, whether they’re final or not. They will announce one more time that we’ve been there and done that, even if they drift over with the first cold wind.
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I confess that as the season of my life coincides ever more neatly with the season of my birthday, I’ve become an eschatologist—eschatology being the study of endings, including the end of time. According to some actuarial tables, I’ve made the transition into extreme old age. Given the pathetic narcissism inherent to being one of the few old bastards left standing, extremely old men are notorious for thinking that everything—economies, civilization, planetary biospheres, gods, and galaxies—is about to die, too.
But this time, I’m afraid, it’s different. Not that the universe would wink out in the absence of narcissism. But our earthly economies, civilization, and a non-lethal climate are showing signs that they’re nearing the end of their existences. It’s no comfort that Julie and I will witness many things that we once thought were permanent melt into thin air.
Ocean temperatures in particular are looking as though they will transform the planet into what is optimistically called Hothouse Earth, which sounds maybe physically and morally survivable until you realize one of its symptoms will be climate refugees, and one of the symptoms of climate refugees will be armed and barricaded borders, and one of the symptoms of those borders will be shoals of bodies piling up on one side or the other of the barbed wire.
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Something that Julie and I just did and not for the last time (with luck) was to celebrate my birthday by driving to Yellowstone Park and wandering along the boardwalks, checking out the geysers and the mud pots and our fellow tourists. This year there were far fewer tourists than usual, and not so many young ones. Canadian license plates were gone from the parking lots and giant buses full of Chinese tourists were single-digit rare at the Artist Point overlook of Yellowstone Falls.
Every parking lot held a few quasi-military big black diesel pickups, but they were not as plentiful as in years past. Diesel was $7.00 a gallon when we last were in Stanley, which adds up to an unwelcome amount when you’ve got a 35-gallon tank or two, seven years of pickup payments to go, and you’re towing a 5th-wheel RV and a flatbed trailer holding a side-by-side 4-wheeler impulse buy.
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After driving through the Park, it’s been our custom to show up at Chico Hot Springs Resort, halfway to Livingston, Montana from the North Entrance. We went last year, and because the hot pools were getting progressively cooler (or our blood was getting progressively thinner) we said that last time was the last time. But over the summer we heard that they had remodeled the pools, fixed the plumbing, and in general had spruced things up.
The hot pools were hot, the dining room was every bit as excellent as we remembered, and our room in the Warren Wing was quiet and not subject to the temperature extremes of the steam-radiators in the older part of the main lodge. We had a very nice two days there, before getting up early on the third day to drive all the way home through an intense rainstorm.
It was good to go. It was good to get home. We’ll do it again, maybe longer and even more relaxed next time, as it didn’t take long, once back, to realize that sometime during the previous three days, I’d been 75 for the last time. Not surprisingly the realization came as a disturbing wake-up call.
For a long time I’ve been thinking, post-birthday, “Okay, then. This is the last year I get another year older.”
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This year I’ve realized the implications of that vow, and now my thoughts are lightly tinged with self-pity. Diminishing daylight is my excuse. That and the knowledge that things will end whether I want them to or not.
A small sample of things we once took for granted that are disappearing:
Capitalism, which, if it’s going to work, requires ever-less expensive labor and energy, damn the human costs.
Peace, which requires democracy and a lack of psychopaths in high places.
Non-lethal weather, which requires wet-bulb temperatures below 31 Celsius.
The value of money, which attenuates, like a gas, until it fills the space left by unpayable debts.
Fresh water, which is becoming drought or deluge, both equally hostile to giant farms and household gardens.
You think of the Romans post 476 C.E., when some villas were still full of stored wine and grain and the kitchen slaves were still coming to work—but the aqueducts had been shut off and people were beginning to drink from the cholera-ridden Tiber.
Thoughts are not always so grim. Distraction comes in the form of the microcosm, which is too small, most days, to become the center of.
Microcosmic questions abound. What’s for lunch? Have the snowshoe hares turned white yet? Will it snow this year, or will we have to drive a thousand feet higher to ski? Will we run out of firewood by April? Will the fire breaks I’ve cut get us through next fire season? Can we do an overnight backpack when it’s night 12 or (subjectively) 15 hours a day? Can I cross that creek without falling through the ice? How about that lake? Can we go out to dinner in the valley, now that it’s possible to get a table but most of the restaurants are closed? When will friends and acquaintances come for short visits but then confess they have no home to return to?
One forgets, in other seasons, how full of interesting small questions Fall can be.
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You may or may not be happy to know that I’m not writing in this journal for the last time. I do apologize for not writing for the last two months or so. It was an over-determined decision, or non-decision, dictated by the mood engendered by some incredibly bad moves by our national leaders, our annual post-tourist-season cleanup of nearby campgrounds (cleaning half-burnt beer cans, nicotine pouches, and used diapers out of filthy firepits does nothing for your estimation of human potential), the state of the economy, the likely dark future for young people of our acquaintance, and the deaths of a number of good, decent people in the valley and in the world. In the face of such discouragements, it takes a while to recharge and go once more into the breach.
I won’t quit writing as long as my brain keeps working. While I know it won’t last forever, it seems to be working well enough to put out a journal entry once every couple of weeks. Maybe for years, if morbid curiosity remains a spur to action.