Yesterday Julie and I and our neighbor Liesl took advantage of the spring freeze-thaw cycle, put skins on the bottoms of our skis, and hiked up the north side of Gold Creek. We parked our vehicles a mile downriver from the house, crossed a half-mile of snowy flat to the base of a sagebrush ridge, and began climbing its north-facing side. It’s a vertical climb of 2,500 feet to the top, and it took us a leisurely two-and-a-half hours to get there.
From the top you can see the ice of Redfish Lake, and, to the east, the White Cloud range, covered with deep drifted-in snow in its nooks and hollows. High winds have scoured ridges down to the rock, but the drifts will likely last into July this year.
We’ve talked about skiing in July, because it’s an activity that goes with social distancing, and we’re worried we’re going to be social distancing in July no matter what all-clear signal has been sounded by the CDC. We might need something to do in July, we think, although we may not, the bounds of certainty having been unfenced by the pandemic.
In the past I have said that one of these years I’m going to ski the local mountains at least once in every month of the year—it would be possible to do it, even in September and October, if you hiked to a deep north-facing canyon in the Sawtooths, where a shaded couloir melts down to clear ice that looks black from a distance. It would be a short run, and a fast one, on rock skis. But it could be done.
It’s the sort of pointless stupid young male thing that you do for the sake of telling other stupid young males about it later. I’ve stopped doing that sort of thing for the most part, due to age more than wisdom. But lately—it’s true: if the pandemic means you can’t do one thing, you can do another. Even if you haven’t thought about it for years. Even if it’s stupid.
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Lest you think we skied yesterday just for the sake of telling about it later, let me tell you that once we started down, we were on an inch of corn snow on a bulletproof base. The sky was blue, the air was warm, the turns were effortless and safe, and we skied down through the skeletons of whitebark pine, the local high-altitude tree that has been wiped out by the mountain pine beetle in the last decade. They look like the clawed clutching trees in nasty fairy tale illustrations, but we slalomed around them in the sunlight, timing our turns with the rolling drifts on the ridge top.
Between the three of us and the dog we tracked up lots of terrain, grinning all the way. Carving a series of tight turns down a steep slope covered in an inch of slush is a good recipe for feeling like you’re eighteen again, except this time you’re in better control. You do have to stop and rest now and then.
We hit the flats still able to stay on top of the crust, which was getting soft on slopes with direct sun, and reached our cars. There we found that Liesl’s old Chevy Suburban had been vandalized. Someone had deeply scratched the paint on the hood, in four or five places. Those scratches had not been there when she had parked a few hours before.
Liesl is originally from Ketchum, and the Suburban—once her mother’s—still has Blaine County plates, even though Liesl has lived next to us in the valley for almost a decade. She’s a good friend, and a reliable and uncomplaining ski partner, and it’s upsetting to find that the fear and anger of local Custer County people toward outsiders was directed toward one of our own. It’s upsetting enough when it’s directed toward outsiders, even outsiders who have been told to stay in their primary residences.
Julie’s and my vehicle, with its Custer County plates, was untouched. But the day itself was damaged. Our eternal spring ski day, with its sun, blue skies, and easy turns, suddenly collapsed into the dark thin edge of the present. Suddenly the world contained a shape-shifting pandemic, mortal fears, and evil of the most banal and human variety.
Scratching someone’s car may not seem serious enough to deserve to be called evil. But it’s the sort of thing that can turn into its own deadly pandemic. Some strains of trying to ruin someone else’s day tend to become more lethal over time.
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Julie and I got sick for about three weeks in January this year, along with lots of other people in the valley. We thought we had the flu even though we had gotten flu shots in October.
Symptoms: dry cough, shooting muscle pains, tight breathing, fatigue, a couple of nights of waking up drenched in sweat in a cold room. For a while I felt like I couldn’t depend on my autonomic nervous system to breathe for me—that I’d have to consciously will every breath I took—so going to sleep was a matter of some anxiety.
But we got through it, and as soon as we could, we got back out skiing the backcountry. My lungs still feel a bit tight, but they work well enough, as evidenced by yesterday’s climb.
It’s likely we had something other than the flu, and we’ve thought that maybe, just maybe, Sawtooth Valley had COVID-19 before it was widespread in Blaine County, and maybe, just maybe, we gave it to them instead of them giving it to us. Maybe someone, vacationing at Sun Valley from Seattle, took a day off from skiing and drove up to see the mountains and have lunch. They left the virus to incubate for a month in our community before going south again.
Many of us were miserable for a while, but we usually weren’t sick enough that we couldn’t go out to eat and drink a couple of times a week in the one place that stays open all winter.
We are all looking forward to taking an antibody test, once they’ve developed a cheap and reliable one. It would be nice to discern the nature of this virus better than we presently can.
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Few people are comfortable with uncertainty, and the coronavirus has made almost everything—graduation plans, vacations, rent money, food, jobs, life itself—uncertain. I’ve made a habit of telling people they can’t predict the future, and they shouldn’t. Bad things happen to prophets. If they don’t get crucified for being wrong, they get crucified for being right.
I’m trying not to predict what will happen to Sawtooth Valley this summer. Instead I’m confining myself to history.
History, in a month or so: closed bars, unemployed people, mistaken scapegoating and associated vandalism, a false impression that Sawtooth Valley hasn’t had the virus yet and is still a safe place to go, people who social distance to twelve or fifteen feet just to be safe, grocery stores that limit purchases to one of a kind, a tourist economy with no place to go for the tourists who drive up and down the highway, searching for an OPEN sign.
In a month or so, we’ll see if that history has tailed into the present.
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Here in the valley it’s taken the pandemic and resultant economic precarity to make us understand just how good our life has been. Tourists and their close kin, second-home owners, come every summer, bringing gifts and laughter, and then they go away, leaving us to enjoy our solitude.
All winter long, we dream of all the restaurants being open, and of getting lattes and mochas and huckleberry milkshakes from roadside stands, of having brunch any day of the week on open verandas. The anticipation of being there makes us happier than the actual being there, because tourists do bring problems of crowding, tacky staged experiences, and lack-of-common-sense accidents. But nobody starves. Almost everybody gets along.
It’s been a golden age of tourism here in the Valley for the last fifty years or so, but golden ages never last forever. That’s why they’re called golden. The other ages go by silver, brass, and iron—stone, if things go all the way to the bottom—and we hope we don’t have to experience even one of those lesser times, with their privation, their divisiveness, their sudden exposure of the dark aspects of human nature. No thank you, we say. Let’s go back to what it was, when the paint on our cars was safe. At least for this summer, anyway. Please.