Two new pickups, their human occupants, and a barking dog spent last night in the Sportsman’s Access parking lot across our southern fence. It’s not a good place to camp. There’s no toilet and it’s right next to the highway traffic. People have to shit in the bushes. They have to listen to giant motor homes blasting by at 3 a.m. If they’re in a tent, there’s a problem with headlights lighting up the tent roof.
Sprinter vans go by every five minutes or so. They aren’t inherently noisy, but they come festooned with bicycles and kayaks and rocket boxes. At 70 mph they turn into giant plastic whistles.
Our house is close to the highway too, due to winter driveway snow-blowing considerations, but we’re sheltered from the noise by trees and willows and an east wall with small windows. Six inches of fiberglass insulation will stop a lot of road noise. The house does shake a bit when a big semi goes by, but there aren’t as many of them as usual this summer. Road construction has started between here and Sun Valley, making what was a shortcut for truckers into a potential delay. The Fed Ex and UPS vans go by every day, because of a sudden increase in local online shoppers. The loudest noise we hear from them is when they knock on the front door to signal a delivery.
At the moment, I can hear the campers in the parking lot getting ready to leave. They have Boise plates on their pickups but they’re probably new residents of that city, part of the flood of Californians that has arrived in the last several years. They got here just at dark, not really knowing where they were, with little time to find a quieter campsite. They’ll spend this morning looking for one.
It’s a good decision for all concerned, especially if one of the reasons they’re leaving is to look for a campground with a toilet.
________
Their license plates remind me that driving to Boise used to be Julie’s and my way of being tourists. Once there, we cut loose with long impulse-buying strolls through Costco. We stopped for buffet lunches at Indian restaurants. We bought super-sized cups of syrupy mocha from coffee shops. We purchased sprinkler-system upgrades and shovel handles at Home Depot. We made necessary stops at Trader Joe’s for peanut-butter cups and chocolate-covered espresso beans. We bought hard copies of the Idaho Statesman—coin-operated paper machines in Sawtooth Valley became derelict and empty shortly after the Great Recession—for the crossword puzzles and the thick sheaf of weekend sale flyers. The sale flyers in particular made us feel addressed, wanted, and respected, part of something far bigger than ourselves.
No longer. The Statesman has thinned and shrunk and has become almost ad-less, and its crosswords have become too quick and easy. It’s indicative of our free time and increased patience that Julie has subscribed to the much more challenging New York Times crossword puzzle website. She downloads them and prints them out, twenty-five at a time. She’s become quite adept, even with the Friday and Saturday versions—with occasional help from me on clues that demand memories of vicuña coats and Billie Sol Estes and Chrysler Imperials.
Now when it’s time to go to Boise, only one of us goes, wearing a mask and armed with a carefully-winnowed list and a sketch of Costco’s product placement plan. Shopping is an exercise in efficiency. You get in. You get out. You go only to Costco because they require all customers to wear masks, and when you’ve purchased everything on your list you drive back to Sawtooth Valley instead of checking into a motel and having dinner in a nice restaurant and seeing a movie. It’s no fun doing those things alone, anyway.
Coming out of the Costco parking lot, you notice the clogged traffic on Boise roads, the parks full of maskless young people in too-close phalanxes, the gas prices so low you look for free-china-with-a-fill-up signs. The city has an On the Beach recklessness about it. People flock to its bars and restaurants. Its housing prices are still going up and up.
The people who crowd the sidewalk tables celebrate a little too loudly and closely. It’s an exercise in sympathetic magic, an attempt to bring back the same old world of 2019 by exaggerating the same old 2019 moves.
I suppose we’re doing the same thing when we grab a giant cart and wave our card at the person guarding the door at Costco. But for us, at least, it no longer feels like it’s 2019. It feels like 2020, and 2020 feels creepy.
No problem. UPS has begun delivering Costco.com orders to our door.
________
The campers have left. They’ve been replaced by a fly fisherman, lured in by the fish icon on the Sportsman’s Access sign. The fish is false advertising, because the Idaho Fish and Game Department fish trucks haven’t yet dumped in the season’s first batch of farmed rainbow trout.
The only fish in the river are whitefish and suckers and pike minnows, bottom-feeders all. You can catch them on small wet flies that mimic gravel-dwelling insect larva, but not many tourists fish for them. They lack the cachet of trout, even city trout who never learned to feed in the wild and who will strike at any flies that resemble hatchery food pellets.
Later in the summer, when the location and amounts of fish dumps will be posted on the bulletin board in the Stanley Post Office, cars and pickups will crowd the Sportsman’s Access. For a lot of our tourists, catching a hungry farmed fish is what passes for an encounter with nature.
The fly fisherman will leave after an hour of fruitless casting, and be replaced by another fisherman, and then another. Near dark, another camper might be lured in by the pup-tent icon on the Sportsman’s Access sign.
________
Stanley has begun its weekly summer street dances. Every Thursday evening, a band plays in front of the Post Office, and people dance on a closed-off Main Street.
At the first dance of the summer, crowds of people milled about the dusty dance area, some of them dancing but most of them standing around in tight groups, yelling to be heard over the band.
Almost none of them wore masks. They were not in our town to remind themselves that a pandemic was going on. They were here to stop worrying and have fun. Watching them from a distance, we also wanted to stop worrying and have fun, but that wasn’t likely to happen until January, when the street would be safely empty and the dancing, if it worked, would bring a foot of powder.
In the Mountain Village Mercantile, where we get fresh produce on Tuesdays, the checkout clerks put on their masks if a customer is wearing one. They take them off when a customer is maskless. We assume they’ve been instructed to attend to their customers’ emotional comfort.
Our emotional comfort depends on the Mountain Village’s parking lot. If it’s empty, one of us will go in, wearing a mask. But four or five cars will often show up while we’re in there, and the store will become crowded with families with screaming kids and groups of laughing adolescents buying beer and Doritos. There’s a kind of unhappy return-of-the-repressed recognition when they see our masks.
We hasten to the checkout counter and get out. We hope we haven’t made Stanley seem creepy to the other customers, even if they’ve made Stanley seem a little creepy to us.
Still, they should know they can’t escape the virus by coming here, no matter how pristine the valley looks, no matter if our case numbers have remained low, no matter if they think the pandemic is a hoax concocted by the Deep State to make the Trump Administration look bad.
________
I’ve got my response all planned out when someone tells me that my mask indicates I’ve stupidly bought into the pandemic hoax.
“You don’t want to get this thing,” I’ll say. “I’ve had it, but I’m not sure I’m over it. I’m trying to stay away from people because I don’t want to give it to them. I know people who have died from it. John Prine died from it.”
One problem with saying all this is that except for the part about John Prine, I won’t know whether it’s true or not. I know Idaho people who died, but it was early in the pandemic and they may have died of something else.
Another problem with saying this is it won’t change anybody’s mind. The people I say it to will keep on telling me I’ve been duped by people who secretly run things from behind the scenes. When two human beings disagree to this extent about the fundamental nature of reality, it calls into question the sanity of one or the other, and maybe both.
______
Idaho’s viral infection numbers have been following a rising exponential curve that began with the opening of bars and beaches. Epidemiologists point to indices of contagion and note that if each infected person infects more than one person, it won’t be long until everyone alive, and a bunch of dead people, will have had the virus. There’s anecdotal evidence that a youthful sub-population has assumed they’ll get the virus and live through it. They’ve quit worrying about the health of parents and grandparents and are deciding whether to pay off college loans with their inheritance or just buy a new car.
If that sounds too harsh to you, you’ve probably too old to remember what it’s like to be young and narcissistic. You’ve probably forgotten what the young and narcissistic see when they look at anybody over forty: an old person who is going to die soon anyway.
________
Bleak. But it’s become clear that the future is going to be bleaker than the past, here and in Boise and anywhere else.
I like the past. I remember large friendly chunks of it. It was pleasant to live there. If I could keep living there, I would, but it’s dangerous to even try. The people who attempt it become grotesques who exude the unreality of an Alzheimer’s ward.
This summer a similar unreality is in the air of Sawtooth Valley, as our tourists become refugees from uncertainty and terror, obsolete versions of themselves who look like they’ve never had to worry about disease or economic depression or paying the unpayable. Unable to face the present, they’ve decided to cancel it and replace it with the past. As a result, their lives become mere ritual, empty repetitions of things that once had meaning, once-fun things that are now more defiant than pleasurable. Maybe that’s the fate of us all, but it’s painful to watch it happening to people so young.