Last week Idaho began to exceed five hundred new cases of coronavirus a day, the apparent result of Boise’s bars and restaurants opening, the start of tourist season in the mountains, and the declaration of almost everybody that they were tired of the pandemic and it was over. The beach at Redfish Lake was packed with more sunbathers than usual, and not just because of the relaxation of state restrictions. Some of them were geographical refugees, because the big beach at Stanley Lake had liquified and disappeared into deep water during the earthquake last March.
Despite an urgent-but-unenforceable mask recommendation by the city council, the streets of Stanley are filled with bare-faced pedestrians. Campgrounds echo with the gentle hum of dozens of RV generators, and in the undeveloped campgrounds west of town, the packed trailers look like FEMA staging areas before a hurricane. Customers crowd around the outside tables at restaurants. Trailhead parking lots are full. In what must be a record, four hundred people left the Iron Creek Transfer Camp in a single day, on their way, presumably, to Goat and Alpine and Sawtooth Lakes.
It is a scrupulous ritualization of the normal at a never-again-normal time in our history.
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In Boise, Ketchum, and Hailey, mask orders seem to be better enforced, so a lot of the tourists we see are fleeing municipal regulation. Our beaches and restaurants and bars—where no one is requested to put on a mask—now function as worry-free zones for people who don’t want to contemplate the intricacies or the dangers of viral infection.
For a few hours you can lie on a giant towel and doze. You can sit in a comfortable chair and be served dinner. You can get pleasantly hammered on gin-and-tonics while watching Game Six of the 2003 World Series from a barstool. You can forget your mask because the people next to you have forgotten theirs.
You can forget about having to work from home. You can forget you can’t work from home because you don’t have a job. You can forget about concerts and classes being cancelled because of superspreading events. You can refuse to think about the possibility of having to share a house with a sullen fifteen-year-old digital-high-school student, 24/7. You can forget Boise State might not have a football season.
Forgetting. It’s what vacations are for.
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As Sawtooth Valley locals, Julie’s and my normal is other people’s vacations, so it would be logical for us to treat this crowded summer like any other. We could forget a few things ourselves and it’s not like anybody—especially us—would notice.
Instead, we’re scrupulously ritualizing the pandemic. We wear masks when we pick up our mail. We refuse to watch ancient sporting events, even when we know the Yankees are going to lose to the Florida Marlins. We haven’t eaten in a restaurant since early March. (We have ordered take-out pizza, but Julie’s been picking it up while I wait in the car, motor running for a quick getaway.)
We’re not worry-free, even if our visitors are partying like it’s 2019.
They seem more horde than herd this summer. It’s not a positive transformation. These people scare me, and their status as young and gorgeous human beings (I’m referring to a select minority of beachgoers) doesn’t help a bit. Their hearts are hardened against the Coronavirus God. Watching them act invulnerable and carefree brings to mind clouds of locusts, plagues of frogs, swarms of flies, and bats. Millions of bats.
Sawtooth Valley locals provide many services for summer visitors, but this summer we’ve added a new one: we do their worrying for them.
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Another thing: my lawnmower quit. Mowing the lawn has been a comfort to me in these days of waning complacency. When I decided to attack the back yard last Monday, I trundled the mower out there and pulled on the starting cord. It refused to move. A bunch of small plastic parts had disintegrated in the pull-start module.
I spent the next afternoon working on an old and heavy Snapper self-propelled mower that had been in one of our outbuildings for thirty years. I got it running, but only when I poured gas directly in the carburetor, which meant a new gas line and probably a carburetor rebuild. We managed to put it in the pickup, along with an even heavier antique snowblower that had caught on fire the last time I started it in December. I had replaced it with a new snowblower, but when something’s built like a tank you don’t just throw it away. You get it fixed if you can.
We drove the two machines over Galena Summit to a repair shop for small engines in the Wood River Valley. I had to argue with the owner to get him to work on them, saying they were family heirlooms with great sentimental value. He finally admitted he could probably get them running but it would cost me.
I then went to a hardware store in Hailey and ordered a new lightweight push lawnmower, similar to the one I could no longer start. When we got home, I went to the Amazon website and found a new pull-start module to replace the one that had broken and stopped my lawn mowing in the first place.
If all goes well, in ten days or so I’ll have three functioning lawn mowers and two functioning snow blowers. The grass will grow and need to be cut. The snow will fall and need to be blown. I expect to be willing and ready to do these things. Barring extreme global warming, I will have comfort and distraction and freedom from existential dread all the days of my life.
The morning’s news has made it clear that the country is losing the battle against the coronavirus. I can feel the familiar soulless cold shiver.
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A few reasons to have a sudden urge to mow the grass, even if you don’t have a lawn or a working lawnmower:
Anecdotal evidence suggests having the virus doesn’t confer immunity for long and you can get it a second time.
Severe cases of the virus are associated with pathologies of the blood vessels, blood clots, and strokes.
Symptomless spreaders. They’re out there.
Chronic fatigue and brain fog. They may have been out there all along.
Exacerbating co-factors in coronavirus infections include diabetes, obesity, heart disease, COPD, emotional ill-health, Type A blood, air pollution, pesticides, lead-soldered water systems, and the trillions of microbes in everyone’s body that are harmless until they aren’t.
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Medical scientists are cautious when they describe any new data that come in, because it’s been difficult to control the parameters of a worldwide experiment with a virus that has a long incubation period, vastly different effects on different people, and antibody tests (and bodies) that don’t always show antibodies when they should. Governments, including our own, withhold or make up death and hospitalization statistics. People lie on social media for political reasons, or just for the hell of it. Anecdotal evidence is useless but it makes headlines and for most people, it’s what passes for science.
Under these circumstances, the amount of data you collect and the amount of certainty you can claim are in inverse proportion.
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I don’t know how long New Guinean cargo-cults kept on painting radio dials on rocks after 1945, but they eventually recognized the changed context of their hopes. They gave up on the rituals they had once thought would cause planes laden with war supplies to appear on overgrown jungle airstrips.
At the moment, Idaho schools and colleges still plan to have teachers and students back in classrooms and on playing fields in September. At the moment, infection numbers are following steeper and steeper curves.
Idaho’s faith in sympathetic magic is strong. It has tried unrestricted openings of bars and restaurants. It hasn’t gone well. But Idaho is going to try again, only this time with K-12 and college students. Come winter, they’re going to try it with skiers from Seattle. If this isn’t an attempt to bring back pre-coronavirus times by doing pre-coronavirus things, it’s close enough that cargo cultists would recognize the effort.
Even with my fleet of lawnmowers and snowblowers, I’m dubious about sympathetic magic. Our lawn might look pretty good by September, and our driveway might be clear in January, but I’m certain that neither will make it possible for Julie and me to look forward to a Friday night restaurant meal and bottle of wine like we used to. Would that they could.