Last week Julie and I visited her parents and raided their garden. We came home with fresh corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, chard, potatoes, peaches, blackberries, beets, and carrots—that’s just what I can remember—and then, on the way home, we stopped and shopped at the consumerist holy trinity of Costco, WinCo, and Trader Joe’s.
We spent our money in Ada County, which mandates masks, instead of Canyon County, which doesn’t. That’s the way we’re using our constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms these days. We’re choosing not to get sick and die if we can help it, and we choose not to do business in those counties that refuse to take scientific advice. We leave them instead to the tender mercies of Charles Darwin.
The shopping list was long, and neighbors had added to it. When we pulled out of Boise and headed up Horseshoe Bend hill, the car was riding low on its rear wheels. We made it home, a little more slowly than usual. We steered carefully around even small rocks in the road. If we’d blown a tire, we would have had to unload the trunk to be able to jack the wheel off the ground.
The good news is that we’ll now be able to comply with extended stay-at-home orders if Idaho has an explosion of coronavirus cases once school starts.
The bad news is that out by the Bull Trout Lake turnoff, we passed a pickup and camp trailer that had run into the trees on the other side of the road. The state police were there, but no ambulance. It looked serious. Camp trailers don’t have a lot of substance, and when they hit six-inch diameter lodgepoles at speed, as this one had, they turn into crumpled scraps of aluminum foil, bits of Styrofoam, broken sheets of eighth-inch plywood, twisted steel trailer frames, and torn tires that move one way and then the other in the wind.
We felt the helplessness that comes when you witness someone’s ruined day/vacation/life. It’s the same helplessness we feel when law enforcement vehicles go by our house, lights flashing and sirens screaming, on their way to an accident in the upper valley. You’d like to help, but you can’t, and anyway, if you showed up to help, someone in a uniform would tell you to stay out of the way.
Recreation in Sawtooth Valley has a casualty rate. Here and there, our roadsides are decorated with plastic flowers and crosses—they don’t last for more than a season or two, except in memory, where they persist even when you don’t want them to.
The coronavirus isn’t the only reason we hunker at home in these days of heavy recreational traffic.
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For seven years of my life I was a ski patrolman at Sun Valley, and I was one of those uniformed people who never acted helpless in the face of catastrophe. If someone broke a leg or sliced an artery with a ski edge, I could splint the leg or stop the bleeding, put them in a toboggan, and quickly slide them down to an ambulance at the bottom of the mountain. I rode with babbling shock victims to the hospital and did my best to reassure them that they were going to be all right.
I held an emergency medical technician card, which meant that in the summers I went on ambulance runs here in Sawtooth Valley. The accidents were more serious, but I noticed that if anyone was dead or dying, other EMTs jumped ahead of me on the roster. Death was a drug for some of them. They had an uncanny ability to show up early for motorcycle accidents or head-ons. I was more than willing to stand back and let them have at it.
The good news was that on the few occasions when I did deal with dead people, I reacted with an icy calm when loading their bodies into a toboggan or ambulance. I mentioned this to my supervisor, and she said that maybe I should become a surgeon. I later found out that she—having had wide experience as a nurse in big-city hospitals—didn’t like surgeons.
I also applied for a job as a paramedic in Boise during a post-ski patrol year when a girlfriend had gotten a teaching job in Boise. At an interview with the head of a Boise ambulance service, I was asked about working with dead people. I said it didn’t much bother me. I didn’t get the job, didn’t move to Boise, and didn’t end up in a permanent relationship with that girlfriend. That seemed like bad news at the time.
It occurs to me now that although it was a good thing to go cold and do what needed to be done in a trauma scenario, it wasn’t a good thing to articulate a distant relationship with the dead if you were being interviewed by someone who had been a paramedic for twenty years. It also occurs to me that bad news can eventually turn into good news, which is a source of real hope these days.
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My EMT certification expired forty years ago. I don’t miss my ski patrol uniform.
I have a closer relationship with the dead now. Both my parents are gone, and the names of high-school classmates appear with regularity in the obituary columns of the local papers. I cannot pass an accident without feeling grief for anyone who got hurt or killed. (That includes the folks who periodically immolate themselves on the altar of The Offensively Loud God on Two Wheels. There are people in the valley who cheer when one of them jumps a guardrail, but I’m content just to wish tinnitus upon them in their old age).
It’s good news when empathy enters your life gently. It’s bad news when it comes with the brutal shock of grief for a dead child or parent or sibling or good friend you never had a chance to say goodbye to. Sometimes it comes with the patient whose eloquent last words destroy a surgeon’s belief that bodies are simply machines on their way to the scrap heap, repairable until they aren’t. It comes with the pictures in the wallet that belonged to the body a cop pulls from a wrecked car.
In my case, as a teacher, it came in the form of students who insisted on writing final papers when they were dying of cancer, or who gassed themselves in their parents’ garage when a boyfriend had died.
A career can’t take many instances of peering into other people’s deepest moments of sorrow. Thirty years of my life were spent as a teacher. It was a good way to spend them, and a lucky one, considering that most of my students ended up happier and more skillful than I found them.
But it’s not the successes you remember. It’s the sudden flood-lit vision of the inconsolable that imprints itself onto your frontal lobes and recalls every feeling of helplessness you ever had.
You don’t retire because of age or failing abilities. You simply experience the final hammer-blow of grief that makes each bright new class look like a spring-sown field of tragedy.
You try to leave them all laughing. That’s good news for them, and you hope they will have more of it.
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The school year is starting, which is usually good news in Sawtooth Valley. This year it’s bad news, because for most of Idaho, students are not going back to the classroom or gridiron. School openings have been postponed so districts have time to acquire laptops and establish parking lot Wi-Fi hotspots in poor neighborhoods. In the meantime, there’s no reason for parents to get the kids to practice or to take them shopping for school clothes. They can keep dragging them to RVs in Sawtooth Valley instead.
It may be that our tourist season will extend into October. Already people are planning on living through the winter in the valley, in second homes or motorhomes or the vacation cabins of aunts or uncles, parents or grandparents. They’re putting their kids in the Stanley school, where they think it’s safer than in the cities.
Most of them won’t last through the winter. November is the month when plans become subject to revision here. Worries about global warming disappear far up the exponential climate temperature curve. The shadows from the peaks, so cool and welcoming in July, become lethal.
Every fall we have people coming down from camps in the mountains, having discovered that snow makes life in the wilderness difficult and paralyzingly cold, especially in early season when you can’t dig a snow cave. It takes a whole set of hard-to-imagine skills to stay warm, and you have to engage them more or less constantly. Walks through the woods become ice-glazed obstacle courses. Lakes freeze over, and you can listen to their cracking and booming every time a cloud obscures the sun. Waterfalls become staircases of stalactites.
The people who make it through the winter here get used to cold and solitude and worrying about staying warm. For the past few weeks we’ve been honoring November, cutting and stacking firewood. It’s hot, hard work, in August. People have toppled from heatstroke while chopping firewood on ninety-degree days, being ants when if they’d worried a bit less, they could have been grasshoppers. But that doesn’t stop us.
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This time of the summer, despite having been retired from teaching for fifteen years, Julie and I start having teaching anxiety dreams. We dream of not being prepared for class. We dream that students are jumping up and down, screaming and yelling in our classrooms, using the light fixtures as trapezes, refusing to sit down and listen. We dream that nobody has signed up for our classes.
I have dreamed that I’m in finals week, and that for a semester I’ve taught my Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes, but have forgotten to teach my Tuesday-Thursday classes. I have to quickly come up with a final for a class I haven’t taught. Students are taking their seats and opening their blue books.
I lack the presence of mind to remember they haven’t been in the class either. I could say, “What? You haven’t been to class all semester? What are you thinking, showing up for the final?” But I don’t.
I’ve known colleagues who blame their students for their own shortcomings. Thankfully, my dream-self isn’t one of them. Nonetheless, it’s an awful feeling to have forgotten to teach a class you were supposed to teach.
During this coronavirus year, we toast the schools we left behind and wish the people who teach in them well, and then thank our stars that we’re not teaching this year. We wouldn’t know how to run a classroom as a Zoom session. We wouldn’t know how to help students. We wouldn’t be able to spot a failing student, or avert tragedy before it happens. We wouldn’t be dreaming, but it would still be a nightmare. It wouldn’t be good news, any way you look at it.
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Feelings of helplessness are being validated big-time this August. The pandemic goes on and on. The November election seems sure to be stolen by people who have no qualms about giving aid and comfort to American narcissists, sociopaths, and magical thinkers. There are apparently enough of them in the country to have elected this president and this Senate once. In spite of their general refusal to wear masks, it looks as if enough of them remain on the rolls to do it again.
The stock market keeps going up and up in the face of a non-functional economy, indicating that it’s been forcibly separated from reality. Manipulation of numbers—deaths, infections, unemployment rates, the Dow, votes—seems to be the reality-substitute of the day.
Julie and I are doing what we can to stay well. We are hunkering down and minimizing our contact with others. We’re trying to keep friendships alive over the phone and in Zoom sessions. We’re fine, hiding in the underbrush of this world, until we drive by a wreck, see a rise in positive-test percentages, or watch a motorhome look for a place to park for the winter. Then we think about the future, near and far, even though we won’t—can’t—ever know what it will be until it gets here. That’s good news, I guess, if the future is bad, and bad news if the future is good. Either way, it seems like a joke, although Julie and I are, this August, having a little trouble laughing.