It’s May. Forest Service trucks are making daily trips between the Stanley Ranger Station and the Sawtooth National Recreation Area (SNRA) Headquarters in Ketchum. Last summer there were a lot more, ten or twelve a day, usually with two or more passengers. Now, it’s one person per vehicle, and only three or four go by from eight to five. We notice them when they pass. There’s not much traffic since steelhead season closed.
Social distancing rules remain in place in Idaho. We are in Phase One of a four-phase plan to reopen Idaho’s economy. Each phase is supposed to last two weeks, culminating in the opening of bars, theaters, and stadia, but Idaho’s governor Brad Little has said that life won’t return to normal until there’s a cure or a vaccine, neither of which is guaranteed.
Phase One continues the closure of bars, restaurant dining rooms, hair salons and barbershops. Churches and business offices can open if they observe strict social distancing and require personal protection. Vulnerable people—the over 65s, the immunologically impaired, the obese, smokers, those with cardiovascular disease—are supposed to stay in their homes, if they have a home to stay in. People from outside of Idaho have been told to isolate themselves for two weeks before coming out to enjoy the freedoms of Phase Two on May 15, which include wider access to sunlight, well-spaced restaurant dining, and haircuts.
Governor Little, in his first term, has become a right-wing governor under attack from his right wing. Outraged demonstrators have protested outside of his office and home. One of our northern Idaho legislators has called him “Little Hitler” for his closure orders—but he has remained what he calls “data driven,” which means he’s listening to state health department epidemiologists, not Joseph Goebbels.
The reopening schedule depends on a continued decline in coronavirus cases. A super-spreading wedding reception, or a deliberate coronavirus party attended by people who want to get it over with, and we’ll be back to shouting bare-faced people lining up on Idaho’s statehouse steps, waving AR-15s.
Vulnerability is best understood from the point of view of the vulnerable, and it’s safe to say that if you make your living in the tourist economy, you’re feeling as vulnerable as any fat 75-year-old with a two-pack-a-day habit and a heart transplant. Sawtooth Valley depends on tourists to live, and if they don’t show up, or if they do show up and don’t spend their money, our local businesspeople will face the end of their worlds. About the only people who might be happy about these scenarios work for the Forest Service.
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SNRA officials have closed Recreation Area campgrounds until June 5. The closure will not, in itself, cut deeply into our tourist season. Redfish Lake has within memory had ice on it on June 5, and even in these days of global warming it’s not uncommon for a local June day to see frost, rain, sleet, hail, and high winds all before breakfast. That discourages tourists, who don’t show up en masse until after the first day of summer. That’s when we locals typically say to each other, “See you after Labor Day,” knowing that those with tourist-industry jobs will be too busy to talk and too tired to come by for dinner or a gin-and-tonic on the deck.
The Forest Service has traditionally regulated tourist migration by means of parking tickets, road and trail closures, camping fees in developed campgrounds, and 16-day limits for dispersed camping, which refers to people parking their RVs or pitching tents in undeveloped areas without toilets or water. In recent years, some dispersed camping areas have been closed, forcing more low-rent campers into less low-rent real estate.
Dispersed campers are of particular concern to SNRA law enforcement, as summer workers, lacking housing, have camped in the gulches and vales around Stanley. In periods of high unemployment, people with makeshift campers and ramshackle tents have sought out isolated spots and set up housekeeping for the summer. They have tended to be less fastidious than their counterparts in pay-to-camp areas. The 16-day limit on camping within the SNRA has been enforced zealously, with methods that resemble those of the Border Patrol more than those of an agency created to make life easier for forest users.
Having lived in the valley since 1953, I’ve watched the Forest Service morph from a service agency into a regulatory agency. It’s deteriorated in other ways, mostly due to budget cuts that have reduced its field employees to a fraction of what they were when the SNRA was established in 1972. As in any bureaucracy faced with declining funds, Forest Service administrators protected their own jobs first and adapted the agency’s mission to fit.
The main thrust of their new mission was denying the public the use of public lands. A public agency doesn’t need many seasonal workers if it can funnel the public into high-density areas where it obeys the regulations on entrance billboards and pays for its stay.
The three large lakes in the valley have become crowded profit centers. A few much-photographed Sawtooth destinations—Sawtooth, Saddleback, Goat, and Hell Roaring Lakes—serve as dusty daytrips for the majority of backcountry visitors.
Being a tourist in the SNRA has become a programmed experience, and it is experience designed by a committee, on a winter afternoon, in an office, by people who view the tourist industry as a problem of moving people in, feeding them, taking care of their waste products, preventing stampedes, and moving them out so the next bunch can be moved in. Conceptually, the Forest Service is operating the SNRA as a feedlot.
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At first, the pandemic seems to be an opportunity to further regulate Sawtooth Valley’s tourist population. In the campgrounds, one can easily imagine every other campsite empty, fewer boats on the lakes, more road closures and bans on the large family reunions we usually see in July and August. We could see masks on people floating the rivers, and mostly empty buses taking well-spaced passengers back upriver.
Those of us who grew up watching the Lone Ranger on after-school TV will do a double-take if we see groups of masked horseback riders, expecting them to shoot up the first saloon they come to. Guest lists of weddings will be vetted to ensure that no one will fly in from a coronavirus hot-spot. Old people will be permitted to watch at a safe distance, in groups of one.
You may find this picture disturbing and even horrifyingly totalitarian, but recognizable if you’ve been keeping up with the news. Similar measures have evolved as the local economies across the country have dealt with coronavirus in their midst. In some cases, the virus has been more lethal to the economy than to human beings, although over time a dead economy can result in more death than the virus itself.
The Forest Service does not depend on tourist dollars for its funds, so it faces few barriers to implementing its high needs for control. If new cases spike, even in other states, we can expect closures to happen in high season. More roads will be blocked. Unofficial camping areas will be closed. If we have a bad fire season, you can expect check stations and pilot cars and campfire bans, as in past summers.
It may be that closures, restrictions, and self-quarantining will drastically reduce the number of our summer visitors. As painful as this might be for local businesses, it is probably the least-damaging outcome.
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The armed demonstrators on our statehouse steps tend to fetishize camo clothing, and they pack weapons that they are more or less familiar with. They tend to form public phalanxes in spite of official pleas to social distance. Appeals to their own safety or that of their grandparents only convince them that the real life-and-death matter is maintaining their own world view. They actively disrespect any government, even a respectable cloth-coat Republican state government like Idaho’s. The federal government is their real enemy, and they know a federal uniform when they see it.
It’s possible we’ll get swarms of these people escaping locked-down cities and heading for the designated wildernesses that surround the valley. Wilderness is strongly connected with freedom in their minds, despite the fact that it’s some of the most regulated real estate outside of downtown Manhattan. It’s seen as a place where a bug-out bag and a rifle can allow you to live off the land for a year or two, despite another fact that if a few thousand like-minded people are out there with you, any wild game larger than a ground squirrel will be gone before winter.
Overwhelming unconscious forces can turn one person into a camo-wearing, open-carrying demonstrator waving a Don’t Tread on Me banner. He’ll sneeze in your face if you impinge on his personal freedom.
Equally overwhelming unconscious forces can turn another person into a uniform-wearing federal officer who takes seriously his duty to make people behave. Sneezing in his face will be a felony, and he doesn’t like felonies.
Self-awareness is not a big part of either process.
The pandemic has brought the deep impulse toward freedom and the equally deep impulse toward regulation to the surface of our lives. King Kong and Godzilla have emerged to do battle. Even if their avatars are limited and sometimes ridiculous human beings, those human beings are armed. If we’re lucky, we locals will get to watch from a safe distance. Binoculars are recommended.