A year ago, Julie and I were in the last two weeks of a year without alcohol. We had decided to go an entire year without drinking, not because we were very often drinking a lot, but we were drinking a little, every day, and it was becoming part of our life, identity, and budget. On the occasions when we did drink a lot, we were waking up at 3 a.m. wide awake, cursing ourselves. So on January 1, 2019 we put all the wine and spirits in the crawl space and said good-bye to our social life.
Or so we thought. Our social life survived just fine, although when we got together with friends, we missed having a hot toddy after skiing, and we missed having wine with dinner. When summer came, we missed having gin-and-tonics on the deck. When we invited people over we told them to bring their own wine, and on the rare occasions we had parties, the amount of alcohol people brought was far less than it had been. We no longer ended up with more wine at the end of a party than at the beginning.
The parties and dinners ended earlier. The conversations were less didactic, less loud, and, at least when I was talking, more intelligent. Six weeks into the exercise, we started sleeping better and longer. I began to remember my dreams.
I bring this up because I recently went in for a dermatology appointment, and the dermatologist’s assistant, going over my chart, noted that I had quit alcohol. “Not anymore,” I said. “It was just for a year. We’ve returned to wine with enthusiasm.”
“Why’d you quit?” she wanted to know.
“It was time to reset the clocks,” I told her. “It’s a powerful drug and after a year without it, you notice what it does for you and to you. Also, you notice that you spend less time thinking about all the shameful things you did in high school when you’re not wide awake at 3 a.m.”
“But you started drinking again,” she said. It was an accusation, and I realized that she wasn’t talking about me, she was talking about other people, maybe people she loved, whose relationships with alcohol were not as benign as Julie’s and mine have been. I was suddenly in a conversation I didn’t want to be having. Fortunately, the dermatologist chose that moment to come in and start quizzing me about how many sunburns I had gotten forty years ago. I had a lot to confess. My relationship with the sun has not been a benign one at all.
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This morning, the Johns Hopkins COVID map lists 17,862,876 U.S. coronavirus cases and 317,749 deaths. As a nation, we haven’t let those numbers come to consciousness. We see tearful family members and devastated medical workers on TV, but congresspeople are still talking about herd immunity and why masks interfere with constitutional rights. Some of them are still insisting Donald Trump won the election.
Much of what we see on the news is deliberate distraction from what we don’t want to think about, and one of the things we don’t want to think about is the pandemic.
We see people going into the valley’s one open restaurant without masks, and we realize we cannot go there until we get vaccinated. When we’ve spotted maskless people in the post office, we sometimes have waited a day to get our mail.
It’s a tyranny of the unconscious, although in our cases, we’re facing more unconsciousness than tyranny, compared to, say, what those poor folks on Idaho’s regional health boards have to put up with.
Julie and I talk about the pandemic a bunch. Some days we have a glass of wine or a martini on the couch before dinner, and it becomes a pause in the day’s occupation, one where we sit down, stare deep into each other’s eyes, and talk about what’s on our minds. We enjoy these conversations, despite their usually grim content. We’re thankful that after twenty-eight years together, we can still surprise each other with what we have to say.
That’s not to say we’re thinking radically different things. After twenty-eight years, the surprise comes when one of us is struggling to put a thought into words and the other articulates it neatly, powerfully, and concisely. Julie did that last week when she said, “Thank God we quit drinking in 2019 and not 2020.”
One or the other of us has also said, “Thank God we’re still not teaching in Caldwell.”
And “Thank God we’re not homeless,” and “Thank God we can still get out the door for a hike.”
These statements sound blatantly obvious, but on the couch they have the power of revelation. None of these things had to turn out the way they did.
We thank God for our good fortune, although if you go beyond the level of idiom, our theology turns out not to be connected to any organized system of values. God starts looking a lot like Mr. Dumb Luck, who rains his bounty on the good and bad alike, and who turns his face away from you when he feels dyspeptic.
When we look at what is happening in this country and in the world, Julie and I say, “Thank God we’re still alive. Thank God we’ve made it this far.” We never say, “Thank God all our tomorrows will be bright,” because we’re pretty sure that would trigger Mr. Dumb Luck’s sense of irony.
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My relationship with alcohol has not always been benign. When I bartended in Ketchum for a couple of winters, I served chronic alcoholics, drunk drivers, and young people whose IDs had been borrowed from grandparents. Ketchum is a resort town, and the cops—at least when I was bartending—tended to drive the town’s paying customers home rather than hit them with a DUI.
I was a part of that dismal economy. Some of the people who got up from a barstool and walked out the door of Slavey’s, keys in hand, were lucky not to kill someone. If they did and I didn’t hear about it, I wasn’t any less complicit. But no one has much incentive to change a system when they’ve got a starring role in it.
I did, on occasion, harangue my customers who were following alcohol down the road to jail or death. One of my regulars—once a professional-level athlete and business owner in Ketchum—had lost his house, his business, his marriage, and his non-alcoholic friends, all to alcohol. He had told me that on the chairlift in early December of my first year of bartending, when we had ended up next to each other in the lift line. His story affected me deeply, because he was a good skier, an intelligent conversationalist, and his ex-wife had been my teacher in grade school. I still had a helpless crush on her. If I could have gone back to seventh grade and married her, I would have.
One afternoon that spring, when he sat down in late afternoon sunshine across the bar from me, I said, “Why do you keep drinking? It’s not doing you any good.”
If I hadn’t just poured him a drink, he would have gone down the street to the Casino Club, where the drinks were cheaper and stronger. Nobody walks into a bar for a temperance lecture. But he looked at me and said, “I get bored. I get bored. I get bored, and then I drink, and then things start happening again.”
A quick Internet search reveals his last DUI was when he was 87 years old, and he spent a bunch of years in jail for multiple DUIs before that. Boredom must have been a bigger terror for him than jail. I don’t know if he’s still alive—that last DUI was close to a decade ago—but if he is, he must have a titanium liver.
I still have a crush on his ex-wife, at least his ex-wife as she was in 1962, her first year of teaching grade school.
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Boredom has not been a terror for Julie and me this fall, even though the big snowpack we were expecting by now hasn’t arrived.
We’ve substituted the grim terror of boredom with the exhilaration of plain old terror. The track we’ve put up above the Rocky Mountain Lodge has gotten icy and exciting, especially when Juno has decided that we qualify as herd animals and is growling and snapping at our heels as we zip back to the car. Trees whiz by. Low branches threaten a bruised forehead when they don’t threaten decapitation. We get back to our car about the time the sun goes behind the peaks, and the sudden cold reminds us to get home before we die.
This week, according to the forecast, we’ll venture out on the slopes by Banner Summit, skiing around any mound of snow that might be hiding a big rock or a log we could get our skis under at speed. We will go with friends, in separate cars, and keep our distance, but we’ll be glad to ski the same slope with them at long last.
Our indoor social life has not survived the pandemic, but Julie’s got her needlepoint projects and her editing work, which has been picking up after a quiet summer and fall. I’ve got firewood to pack into the house every evening. The driveway needs to be snowblown and the deck shoveled. Clothes need to be washed and folded. Dishes to be loaded and unloaded from the dishwasher.
Also, we’ve got books. The ones we’re reading consistently point out that social lives can be more problematic than fun.
Anna Karenina has gotten a bit millstony in its middle reaches—the Russian nobility might have died of boredom and spite if the Bolsheviks hadn’t done the job for them—but I still read a chapter or two now and then, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be done with it by April.
Even if our day-to-day life, with its routine and its limitations, had us searching for something to do, we would have our memories. I can’t speak for Julie, but I’ve been thinking about events that I haven’t thought about for forty years. Adolescent events have hit me with the force of hallucination, and most of them were incidents that I have deliberately forgotten. It’s a shameful business, but it keeps me occupied.
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We have a joke when we’re backcountry skiing: Hazards Exist That Are Not Marked. You can find signs bearing these words at any ski resort, but they’re much more appropriate in the unsigned backcountry, especially in a low snow year like this. The cushion of powder that all skiers have learned to relax and fall into sometimes obscures hard, sharp things, even when it’s thick and soft, and right now it’s neither thick nor soft.
Your biggest piece of safety gear is your outdoor social life. Your ski buddies will one way or another help you get to the car if you hurt yourself. If you don’t have companions, you will probably die out there if you make a mistake. Something similar can happen if you’re alone indoors, but it takes longer.
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Start thinking about maskless people in the post office or restaurants, or start asking addicts why they do things that destroy their lives and the lives of the people around them, and you’ll see that there’s more than just surface to the world, and that things under the surface can be dangerous. Hazards exist that are not marked.
That’s about as far as I want to carry this metaphor. Suffice it to say that there’s a complexity to this world we probably couldn’t handle if we didn’t spend most of our time skimming the surface of things. The writer Thomas Pynchon refers to “the concealed density of dream” that lives below our everyday existence, which is one of the better descriptions of reality I’ve ever read in literature.
The pandemic has begun to reveal the underlay. The election has begun to reveal the underlay. Dream and memory suddenly have a much bigger role in our lives than we thought they did. A lot that looked like free will last year looks like the handiwork of Mr. Dumb Luck this year. We gaze—with some fear—at the past, as it rises from the deep.