We have seen the first 45-foot diesel pusher motorhome of the season. It was decades old, with sun-faded red paint—no big graphics or smoked glass—but it didn’t look as if it had hit any deer or elk and the giant windshield lacked the kind of crack network that indicates a third or fourth owner has forgone insurance.
We did hear exhaust gas escaping through gaps in the plumbing. No matter. It was going 85, maybe 90. The driver sat seven feet off the pavement, grinning like he was killing snakes. We calculated he could have stopped in a mile or two.
We ducked off the pavement into the barrow pit. He went by in a rush of wind, staring straight down the white line, charging the horizon.
We didn’t see anyone in the passenger seat. In past Aprils, when the motorhomes of this size and condition hit the valley, they were invitations to rich fantasy.
…behind the flashing, speeding windshield, there’s a one-hit rock band heading for the casino at Flathead Lake after a gig at Cactus Pete’s in Jackpot. The lead guitarist is sitting on a queen bed in the back, strumming a new tune on a beat-up old acoustic. An aging girl singer is on the bed beside him, leaning close and humming along, which is bothering the driver big time. He plays bass and used to be married to her, but that was a tour ago, before she listened to that Cowboy Junkies CD and took up nose singing. Not exactly a no-fault divorce.
Sitting in the passenger seat is the band’s sole roadie, who is also the drummer. They used to have a manager, but two gigs ago he took a job selling used cars. The lone backup singer—there used to be two—was asleep on the couch this morning in Twin Falls, but she’s been in the motorhome’s bathroom since Ketchum. They’d check on her but the door’s locked. It might be time to grab the Narcan and break the door down.
The drummer is asking an existential question: “We’ll hit Challis in an hour. You want to stop or go on through?”
“Always a tough question in Challis,” says the driver…
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In April it’s easy to make up stories about the people in old motorhomes. Later in the season, when the shiny new Pace Arrows towing Lexus SUVs appear, the imagination has fewer options. It serves up retired Air Force generals/Boeing board members behind those expensive steering wheels, and their brittle-coiffed wives beside them, headed for Redfish Lake, where they’ll get all 60+ feet of themselves stuck nose-first in the parking lot next to the Lodge. Someone who knows how to back a trailer will eventually get them out, but not before matrimonial courts-martial have issued sentences that indicate there are better ways to spend quarter-million-dollar travel budgets.
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But not this year. This year, because of the pandemic, the Sawtooth Valley tourist economy will cater to different clients. There are no tired bands traveling between casinos these days.
And there’s no guarantee that giant motorhomes will be purchased ever again. They require that two people, having made the discovery that even a four-thousand-square-foot house gets cramped after a month of sheltering in place, will willingly pay a fortune to spend more weeks with each other in the landlocked equivalent of a Diamond Princess stateroom.
But alone? In a faded red, much depreciated but mostly-well-maintained Class A motorhome, 30 easy years on it, fresh-bought from a broken-up rock band glad to be rid of it? The muffler is shot, but it’s got a brand-new door on the bathroom.
To have your own defensible space, on wheels, with a roof-top solar panel, pantry shelves full of enough freeze-dried meals for a year? A half-dozen extra bottles of propane, a chainsaw, cases of good wine, all the books you’ve been planning to read since college and before? To have a four-hundred-square-foot world you can control, a door to it that you can lock, a flat streamside to park on a couple of miles up a grown-over logging road? You cleared deadfall to get to your campsite, and you felled trees behind you as you went. Also, you’re armed.
What could go possibly go wrong?
I’ll leave that particular list to your own imagination, dear reader, but don’t forget to include madness. It’s going around.
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In practical terms, we’re facing a new migratory species in Sawtooth Valley this summer. The deer and the antelope and the sandhill cranes will be similar to previous years, but our tourists will change from people seeking nature into people looking for a place with space, a nature free of infection and infected people.
They won’t see themselves as happy consumers of natural beauty. They might not see the locals as happy purveyors of meals, lodging, and wilderness trips. They might not see their cash-on-hand as discretionary, and they may have come with their own supplies. They might see restrictions on where they can camp and fish and hunt as threats to their continued existence.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, unemployed people walked the county roads of agricultural states, stopping at farmhouses and offering to work for food. There were lots of them, and most of them were turned away. In the cities, miles-long breadlines formed. It was a time of starvation and sickness, of formerly well-housed people becoming homeless.
It was not a time of violence, however. The homeless and starving and sick behaved themselves, mostly, except for the Bonus Army of out-of-work World War One veterans. They set up a protest tent city in front of Congress in 1932 and stayed there, demanding cash for bonus certificates that were set to pay off in an impossibly distant 1945.
The U.S. Army’s General MacArthur tear-gassed them, burned their tents and hauled away their possessions. Young soldiers broke the bones of their demobbed comrades. Municipal police shot and killed two of the marchers. It was not our country’s finest hour. If not for the Second World War, the name MacArthur would live in infamy.
Sawtooth Valley could see hungry people this summer. We do have tasty antelope and deer and elk in the meadows, waiting for the grass to green up. Fish will be in the rivers, judging from the number of hatchery tankers that have gone by the house recently.
But the fish won’t last long. The deer and elk and antelope will graze on the valley floor until they hear the first rifle shot, and then they’ll head into the mountains and get hard to find. Unless you know what you’re doing, you can’t live off the land here, and even if you do know what you’re doing, you can’t live for long without a trip to Costco.
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It comes down to how benign Americans will remain in the face of 25% unemployment. The country held together during the Great Depression because the people who had jobs told the people who didn’t that they deserved to be out of work, and the people out of work for the most part believed them. The government, fearing inflation, refused to print money and give it to anyone, veteran or not, and starving people accepted that refusal. They did vote out Herbert Hoover. He went peacefully.
None of that is going happen this time. There will be free money from the government, and not just to big banks and corporations. Whether or not that will avert violence remains to be seen. Whether or not free money will retain any value remains to be seen. Whether or not we’ll have an election remains to be seen.
When people with third and fourth houses in Sun Valley started hiding out from the coronavirus in them, local renters, laid off from their service jobs and facing eviction, started asking simple but awkward questions: Why do some people own three or four houses and some own none? How is it that you can afford a Lear Jet and I can’t afford food for my kids? How can it be that interest rates have gone down on everything but my college loan?
Over time, awkward questions wear away the anesthesia of wealth. A tremendous anger accompanies the lost complacency of the rich.
Over time, awkward questions inspire violence, either by the government or private security or by people with little left to lose. Over time—we really do not want to go there.
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It may be a matter of common sense, but it still needs to be said: most of the people we meet this summer, locals and tourists, will be in pain. It may be because of family members who have died or who have become incapacitated. It may be from the howling loneliness that comes when you haven’t felt a human touch for weeks. It may result from unemployment, and bills due, and trips to the food bank that you used to contribute to. It may the loss of a world, one that was predictable and secure and full of potlucks and Friday after work drinks with friends, two-family camping vacations and sleepovers at the grandparents’.
Everyone you meet will have lost something. We’ll all be refugees from grief.
The proper response is kindness, not fear. It’s a safer way to treat angry and frightened people, for one thing. It’s the way to a future where we can hold our heads up, for another.