On Saturday of last week Julie and I drove out to Redfish. Once we got to the roundabout, we began to pass cars parked on both sides of the road. The backpackers’ parking lot was full. The Lodge parking lots were full. The visitors’ center parking lot was full. If we had wanted to sit on the beach, we would have had to park in the sagebrush behind the stables and walk a dangerous half-mile on a road crowded with giant pickups.
Fortunately, we didn’t want to sit on the beach. We just wanted to check out the numbers and density of the tourists, which usually only takes a minute or so. You drive in the Redfish Road, turn left at the public toilets, check out the beach, take another left at the Lodge parking lot, and duck back onto the pavement by driving the wrong way up through the lot entrance. You can do this if you tell yourself that the ENTRANCE sign doesn’t specify whether it’s the entrance to the road or the entrance to the parking lot. Also, you have to make sure nobody’s coming or you get into a right-of-way dispute. You can win these disputes by pointing at the sign and affecting an attitude of deliberate obtuseness, but in most heavy traffic situations it’s easier to just proceed on through the parking lot to the EXIT sign. At some point deliberate obtuseness becomes plain old garden-variety obtuseness, and it’s good to know where one starts and the other ends.
We drove into a traffic jam. Giant pickups were cruising for parking spaces in both directions, and stopping and waiting for people to move their cars when they had only gone back to the parking lot for sunscreen and ice. When we got to where we usually could see the beach, we couldn’t see it for the bodies. Sun shelters marked out hundred-square-foot homesteads. The new Lodge lawn still had ropes around it and signs asking people to stay off, but people had stretched out beach towels and were sunbathing on the grass.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen more people at Redfish. Nobody—nobody—was wearing masks. I rolled up the car windows and put the air conditioning on recirculate, and slowly maneuvered through the traffic until we could head for home. “Pray for September,” I said. Julie looked at the lines of parked cars on both sides of us. “Pray for January,” she said.
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You can argue that checking out the tourists is a form of cruel amusement, but Julie and I were doing what locals do all around the world when their homes are flooded with people buying commodified experience. Maybe it is cruel, because it’s the amusement of the freak show, heightened by a little frisson of horror at the sudden realization that what’s grotesque for you is normal for those people.
I’m not being deliberately obtuse here, even if the last thing the country needs right now is one more excuse for dehumanizing anyone when, for that purpose, we already have race, religion, gender, political parties, age, education, physical disability, mental illness, and masks. I realize that each tourist who drives into Sawtooth Valley was once a child who had a vision of light and joy and green grass and white-sand beaches and clear water and bright blue skies. I realize that the twelfth armored motorcyclist in the group of fourteen that roars by my house on a Sunday morning still has that innocent little child inside, and he’s trying to keep it alive in a way that works for him. The same is true of the humans who crowd the sand in front of Redfish Lake Lodge, or crumble the shores of the high lakes of the Sawtooths with their hiking boots, or cast flies for planted rainbow in the near-sterile riffles of the Salmon River.
But there are so, so many of them. They have become the human equivalent of the amoebae that illustrate the power of exponential functions in high-school math classes. Or the fermenting vat of brewer’s yeast that poisons itself with its own alcoholic waste products. Or the overgrown flocks of passenger pigeons that darkened the skies and toppled the trees they roosted in, just prior to their extinction.
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When tourists and the rest of us recreate, we really are involved in re-creation, and often enough what we’re re-creating is the world as we delighted in it when we were four or five years old. Julie and I have watched enough grandparents and grandkids on the Redfish beach to know that one can step into that joyous world at any age if one has a real child as a guide.
But our inner children are more delicate and less willing to smile upon everything they see. They can have a tantrum after too many minutes of looking for towel-sized patches of sand among the bodies and beach blankets. They can go into whining marathons when you’ve been cruising the parking lots for an hour, waiting for someone to pack up, back out, and give you their space. And unless your inner child is a Darwin-obsessed fertility specialist—we see them on TV occasionally, little short guys in orange jumpsuits—it will find little delight in sharing the beach with a thousand others just like itself.
My own inner child, I’ve realized, delights in a Sawtooth Valley that exists as it did in 1953, when I first wandered out onto the dirt of our new front yard and started playing in it. It was an untouched world, pristine and gorgeous, and I could see and take joy in every rock and stick and blade of grass. There weren’t that many people in it, which is why my inner child now likes to go backcountry skiing in below-zero weather, or walk high empty ridges in the Sawtooths, or spend whole days climbing over logs, following trails that haven’t been cut out in years. Lest you think I find no joy outside of extreme physical hardship, my inner child also delights in rib steaks coupled with well-made zinfandels (I acquired an inner fake ID for my inner child, years ago) and Julie’s apple pies. There are worse ways to console one’s self for the loss of a 1953-model world.
I’m sure that the tourists who crowded the valley this weekend have their own things to delight in, but I’m equally sure that they haven’t found many of them. Once numbers have exceeded capacity, other people pose problems. You park a half-mile away from where you want to be. You walk down the beach until unclaimed sand appears, and that puts you too far from the outdoor bar. You ignore the noise of boats, motorcycles, and diesel pickups, but at the price of constant subliminal irritation. Now and then you pick up your mask and put it on, however heavy its weight of implied mortality. The scenes you saw in the RV ads, the ones showing mountains silhouetted against sunsets, tumbling rivers, verdant streamsides, grazing elk and antelope? You put them out of your mind.
These are adult solutions to the disappointments, the unrealistic hopes, and the forcibly deferred satisfactions experienced by a child. There are no childhood solutions for those things.
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You know the marshmallow test? If someone administers it to you as an adult, you’ll pass it. You won’t eat the single marshmallow, because you know you’ll get two if you wait a little.
You won’t even eat the two marshmallows after you pass the test. You’ll save both of them for even later, and eventually find them hard and inedible in a forgotten pocket, in spite of an inner child who would have been really pleased to have just the one in the first place.
After a long weekend at Redfish, your inner child will need to have a serious talk with you. It would have been happy with a swim, a float in shallow water atop an old inner tube, a walk along the beach, an ice cream bar on a stick, and a sleepy ride back home. But instead you had to buy the boat and the motorhome, the 4-wheelers and the mountain bikes, reserve an expensive campsite for a week, make sure the satellite TV was working, and invite the neighbors along, who informed you, as they entered the motorhome with their luggage, that they didn’t believe in masks because the coronavirus is a hoax.
It’s hard and brutal duty, all of it. Sometimes adults have no idea what children really want, even when those children are inside them.
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This Thursday Julie and I had guests. Ron and Michele are good friends who had been camping in Montana and were stopping by on their way home to Caldwell. Ron has retired from his job as ski coach at the College of Idaho, and he was relieved not to have to go back to an institution that has chosen—for the moment—to cancel fall semester sports but still hold in-person classes. Michele teaches at a Meridian alternative school, and the West Ada School District is trying to decide whether to hold virtual classes or put everyone back in the classrooms this fall.
Their Montana trip had been a vacation from an uncertain future. They had rented a small camp trailer and bought ten days’ worth of groceries and made reservations at a string of campgrounds from Bozeman to Whitefish, getting the hell out of Idaho until they had some idea of what was going to happen.
When they got here, they parked their trailer a quarter mile away, on the other end of our place. We ate dinner on the deck and had no trouble social distancing, even though we had missed them and wanted to hug them. We were adults and acted like it.
They told us that almost everyone in Montana was wearing a mask because of a statewide mask mandate. They said it was a shock to come over Lost Trail Pass into Idaho, because almost no one was wearing a mask on our side of the border.
It was apparent that Montana and Idaho are acting as a laboratory for the country as a whole. Studies involving millions of participants, ones that would have been prohibitively expensive for the NIH to set up and execute, are being done for free, simply because one governor mandated masks and another told his state’s citizens to do what they felt like.
Ron and Michele also told us that they had talked to people in Montana who said the coronavirus would disappear on November 4, the implication being that the pandemic was a media creation designed to derail the economy and prevent a second term for Donald Trump. It was an interesting idea, but it had all the earmarks of a Russian intelligence disinformation operation.
We toasted the Russians, and said we hoped they were right, but they had been wrong before, and we’d reserve judgment until November 5.
We’re reserving a lot of judgments until November 5, come to think of it. The next hundred days will be filled with more history than the calendar can hold.
Yesterday, looking around a house that was suddenly as confining as it had been all summer, Julie and I grabbed Juno and headed for the dog beach at Redfish. Since it was late on a Sunday afternoon, we were able to find a parking spot close to the Lodge. We walked to the trees at the top of the beach, put down our chairs in a shady spot, took off our masks and watched the tourists from a distance. They suddenly seemed to be worried human beings like ourselves, ones simply trying to enjoy themselves before other people’s irrevocable decisions—and good or bad luck—sent their lives in one grotesque direction or another.