We’re not counting on much these days, especially if it hasn’t happened yet.

One notable exception: we believe Julie will be her usual cheerful and healthy self by tomorrow. That may be wishful thinking, but friends who have reacted badly to their second shot have told us they felt fine after a day, and better thereafter. I started feeling better after my second shot, but it could have been the placebo effect. It could have been the small feeling of safety, although I didn’t really feel safe until yesterday, when I could finally stop worrying about Julie’s vaccination status. Maybe other old men felt fully vaccinated if they got the shots and their spouses had to wait. I didn’t.

I’ve heard of people bursting into tears when they were declared vaccinated, but neither Julie nor I felt that kind of unadulterated relief. For too long, we’ve been imagining what it’s going to be like to be around people again. While it will be good to see friends face-to-face, it will also feel reckless and weird.

We have been careful for so long that it seems like careful is all we know how to do. Masks and hand sanitizer and hunkering down indoors have shaped our lives for over a year. We have grown used to them. We like them. We feel vulnerable without them. Even if new cases of COVID stopped tomorrow, we’d find other microbes to mask against, other reasons to become agoraphobic.

Pfizer’s CEO went on record a week ago about the need for booster shots six months after a first full vaccination, and yearly thereafter. He was just trying to sell stock, but it was not welcome news for us non-stockholders. The CDC immediately pushed back, stating that nobody knows how long the Pfizer or any other vaccine will be effective. The CDC, as usual, emphasized what we don’t know over what we do.

The CDC knows what it’s talking about. Nobody knows what the future will bring. You can count on that.

________

Also, the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted of the murder of George Floyd, the man whose neck he knelt on for nine-and-a-half minutes, cutting off his air. I did feel a great moment of relief when I heard the verdict, because if the jury didn’t convict Chauvin after viewing that video, I would have lost all faith in the rule of law in this country.

I’ve tried to hold onto that faith in the face of a lot of uniformed murderers being let off in the past decade, but a lot of people have stopped believing in justice, on both the left and on the right. Faith is just an obstacle to action for these people. They like the idea of the rule of law going away. They’re looking forward to the time when the law and any implied justice appended thereto is irrelevant.

When the jury delivered its verdict, it felt as if the country backed away—a little—from the end of civil authority and the beginning of the end of our country.

________

Since the end of my weekly journal entries, I’ve been reading a lot, mostly science fiction stories from the 50s and early 60s. You can get a hundred of these stories for ninety-nine cents on Kindle. True, these are stories published in poorly-proofread pulp magazines with bug-eyed monsters chasing half-naked women on their covers, but they are useful object lessons in cultural anthropology.

Your ninety-nine cents will buy you a lot of unconscious racial bigotry, a lot of semi-conscious misogyny, a lot of adolescent-boy fantasies about the perfect girlfriend/wife/mother (a sort of Holy Trinity for adolescent boy science fiction authors). But you’ll also get a presumed future, a future that could actually happen, that has some relationship to the past and the present, that is susceptible to the occasional educated guess or bout of magical thinking. It’s something you can’t have at any price these days.  But it once existed, if these stories are to be believed.

They tell of a future where people will survive nuclear war, at least to the extent that they can huddle in ruined basements and snag the occasional dog or cat for a meal. They can survive on an Earth that has 350 billion people (not a misprint, just a couple of hundred years more of an exponential curve on a graph). Absent biowarfare and hydrogen bombs, they live in a techno-Utopia, with faster-than-light travel, vat-grown chicken, free energy, underwater cities, asteroid mining, robots and androids, all-knowing computers, talking aliens—the list goes on and on.

Contrast these worlds with ours, and you’ll see that a hundred stories of pulp sci-fi for under a buck is a bargain.

It’s a bargain for me, because I don’t think Julie and I can presume a future that has any connection to the present. That’s because the present we’re in doesn’t have any connection to the past. You can make predictions of course, because that’s what human brains are wired to do, but you have to wait around for results.

You might think you’re able to predict the present, but the year 2020 has shown that it takes us a long time to even grasp what happened yesterday.

It may be that we have a future. It’s just that we won’t realize we’re in it when we get there.

________

My other reading has been Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which gets around the question of having a future by saying that a human life, whether it lasts for three hundred years or three days, is so small relative to Eternity that its length doesn’t matter. He also says that our lives are the struggles of a little soul carrying around a corpse, which, if I understand it correctly, means that we are creatures of Eternity rather than Time. It takes a leap of faith to believe in the soul, and Eternity, but right now they’re looking considerably more solid than the rule of law.

I find Marcus Aurelius comforting, in spite of his insistence that life is hard, vanishingly short, and lacking in free will. He says there is joy in fulfilling one’s fate, doing one’s duty, recognizing that fighting evil is a losing but worthwhile endeavor, and accepting one’s defeats with grace. He advocates being as kind as possible to one’s fellow beings within the confines of fate.

Meditations is free on Kindle. Read it, take it to heart, and even if you haven’t just read a hundred science fiction stories for a buck, you’ll know that the value of literature is seldom related to its price. Also that the wisdom of human beings can live long after them if they’re willing to write it down.

________

In the last week, I’ve had two inquiries about my book Traplines, which was published in 2003. The reason for the interest—that far post-publication—is the possibility that the lower Snake dams will be breached to restore salmon runs to Central Idaho.

Passages in Traplines describe my father’s guiding business and his clients, who paid him ten dollars a day to hook chinook salmon and then hand them the pole so they could pull the fish to shore. I wrote about salmon thick in the rivers and a valley bright with high water and new willow leaves and sunshine. People wanted to quote my words in books and articles that supported dam breaching.

I declined to give permission, because I no longer believe in breaching the dams or restoring the salmon runs. I’ve become a heretic. I tend to see salmon restoration as a kind of ghost dance, an attempt to bring back the world the salmon left. That world is gone forever.

Also, tourism—given as one of the reasons for breaching the dams—has become a force for evil, a phenomenon of surface that destroys everything authentic it touches. Also, the proponents of breaching see nuclear power as a substitute for hydropower, and if there’s one thing worse than tourism, it’s a world with a Fukushima/Chernobyl-level event every twenty-five years or so over the projected half-life of plutonium.

The salmon that we used to fish for in the back yard are extinct. In their place is an artificial species, one that can substitute for the real thing, at least enough for magical thinkers to pretend that things can be put back to what they were sixty years ago.

For me, the value of the salmon is in their absence. We can look at our empty rivers, slackwater reservoirs, barren spawning beds, and fish trucks spewing six-inch rainbow into tourist-lined fishing holes, and we can see how little substance magical thinking gets us. If we bring the salmon back, it will be expensive camouflage on an utterly denatured world.

________

I don’t believe that you can go back into a warm and comfortable past, whether it’s 1960 or 2019. Humans, at least during their time on the planet, are stuck in the present. Geologists talk about Deep Time, evoking a past that encompasses millions and billions of years, against which (thanks, Marcus Aurelius!) we exist as mayflies. Perhaps we should start to think about the Deep Present, the place we can live if we pay attention to the Now, a place just as full of good and evil and wonder and possibility as the past, and one that we can actually live in, as long as we run to keep up.

We had reservations at the most civilized Riverside Hotel in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, on March 19, 2020. Our plans included a soak in the hot pools next door and dinner at the Hotel. The next day, after another soak in the early morning, we would head for Salt Lake, where I was reading at The King’s English Bookshop. From Salt Lake, we would drive to Durango, Colorado, where I would visit writing classes and give a reading at Fort Lewis College.

We were scheduled to arrive in Albuquerque on March 25. I looked forward to meeting the fine folks at the University of New Mexico Press, and an evening reading at Albuquerque’s Bookworks.

Over the next two weeks, we would make our way back home, starting with Santa Fe and Taos. I was planning to flog my book anywhere in the American Southwest that would have me. In between appearances at bookstores, book clubs, and college classes, Julie and I would visit national parks and monuments, hit any other hot spring resorts on the map, and wine and dine like there was no tomorrow.

________

There was a tomorrow—365 of them, as of today—but no book tour. On March 11, a COVID pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization. Very quickly, the country started shutting down. On March 13, Idaho had its first confirmed case.

We began cancelling reservations. Our 2020 calendar is marked with cross-outs through April. After April, there are blank spaces where once there would have been birthday get-togethers, solstice parties, more road trips, and visits from friends. 

On March 22 the Los Angeles Review of Books published “On Having One’s Book Tour Cancelled by the Coronavirus Outbreak,” a piece I had written at the suggestion of Stephen Hull, the director of UNM Press. In it, I explained a cancelled book tour wasn’t the end of the world, but it was the end of a certain type of world, a world where you could get in the car and head for new territory, give in-person readings, and talk about economic collapse in the abstract.

________

Soon after the LA Review piece was published, I decided to write a journal, along the lines of the one Daniel Defoe’s uncle had written during the London Plague of 1665.  Defoe took his uncle’s work, edited it, researched its details, and republished it as A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722.  Defoe had the advantage of a 57-year perspective on the events he was writing about. He knew what was going to happen next, and so did his readers.  His uncle’s primary source became a well-crafted history, which only lost a little of its authority due to Defoe’s previous fame as the author of the fictional Robinson Crusoe.

I didn’t have the luxury of a 57-year perspective on COVID, so I set out to write primary-source material.

I started publishing two-thousand-word entries every Monday at 10 a.m., too often focusing on the week’s headlines, or my thoughts on the dismal politics of the world and the country. I kept track of state and national COVID deaths, and the flood of tourists that hit the valley last summer. I meditated in print on the human tendency to act in self-destructive ways.

For comic relief, I reported on our hikes, camping trips, and skiing.

The journal made the year whiz by. There’s nothing like a Monday deadline to make the rest of the week seem like a too-short break. It usually took a day to write two thousand words—I had gotten used to the length while writing for Travel and Leisure and the ski magazines—and another day to edit and rewrite. Then Julie would do an edit and I’d enter her corrections. Julie would give one more reading, alert me to any lapses in fact or taste, and post it on my website.

I adopted an anecdotal, elliptical style, one where I could throw seemingly unrelated topics together and see how they jelled. I threw in jokes where I could. I charged my readers with the responsibility of making sense of my writing, and thankfully, they rose to the challenge.

The final manuscript is long enough to make a book, written at a time in my life when I thought I was done writing books.  I don’t know if anyone will publish it. At the least, I can have a few copies made up and pass them out to the CNAs when I move into the memory ward at the First Hard Frost Assisted Living facility in Stanley, if it’s ever built and if I win the contest to name it.

________

I did not anticipate that we would have vaccines so soon, and I had no idea that the pandemic, masks, and vaccines would be politicized.  I had no idea that after a year and more than a half-million deaths, people would still be saying the virus didn’t exist.

I didn’t predict Biden would be elected or that he would be as competent as he has been so far.

I did insist that we were living in a radically different world.

Biden seems to understand that the situation requires massive changes in the role of the American government, akin to FDR’s programs in the 1930s. He has quickly pushed through a bill that begins the transfer of the country’s wealth to poor people, something that will let the country live a little longer than it would have otherwise. He has begun work on an infrastructure bill that will put people back to work. He gave a speech that proved he’s not as demented as the last guy.

The Republican half of the country, in a kind of ghost dance, has started reopening bars and restaurants and eliminating restrictions on large gatherings. They’ve declared the pandemic over, and it isn’t the first time.  As ghost dances go, this one isn’t going to have any better results than the ghost dances that inspired Wounded Knee.

In my first post, I wrote that, “With luck and wisdom, we will carry on,” a sentence that qualifies as prophetic if you leave out the wisdom part.  

________

As you might expect, I’m tired of sitting in a chair and staring at a screen and juggling words and paragraphs until something begins to reflect coherent thought. Given the seasonal nature of time here in Sawtooth Valley, I would start repeating myself if I continued. I’ll spare you that.

I will leave all the entries up on my website for a few months and will still post occasionally.  All of you who remain signed up for notifications will continue to get them. Just don’t expect them often.

I plan on posting a short note when I receive my second vaccine jab. If something big happens in the valley or in the outside world, I’ll post about what it means to Julie and me but likely won’t spend the time figuring out what it means to the world. If we travel, I’ll take notes and work on my rusty travel-writing skills, and post anything that seems worthwhile. Maybe I’ll write about a real book tour, one with lecterns and flesh-and-blood audiences and a heckler or two.

When I was teaching fiction workshops, I used to tell my students that now and then when you were working on a story you could suddenly feel the whole thing drop down into a deeper and more solid reality. If that happened to them, I said, they had found the real story, and that was the one they needed to live in for as long as it took to see how it turned out.  More than once in the past year I’ve had that sudden loss of altitude happen in the middle of one of my journal entries. A story was beginning, and I could feel the pull of its suddenly-real characters.  But to follow them into a fictional world would have taken too long and I had to finish the post I was working on, which was usually about something else entirely.

Now I’ll have the time to work on some short stories and see if they enter that deeper reality. I may be done writing books—really and truly, this time—but I’m not done thinking and writing about the people who danced at the edge of my vision while I was trying to write about tourists, grief, and the politics of the pandemic. I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the dehumanization of my world, and I want to write about a world where the trend is in the opposite direction. That’s going to require that I start making things up.

It’s a good thing I’m not the president.

Which brings up the fact that the journal of our plague year may be over, but the plague is not. The world has had a tough year, and from what I can anticipate, the next few years aren’t going to be much easier. There will be a long tail on COVID, and the damage it inflicts on its survivors may last for decades. There will almost certainly be other plagues. The world economy will not get any better without huge increases in the production of goods and energy, and those increases will run hard into climate and vital resource limits.

I have written elsewhere that all we need is cheap fusion reactors that can be loaded on a flatbed and delivered to the city they will power, and cheap briefcase-sized batteries that will move a car for five hundred miles.  Then we could have the 20th century all over again, if we had another Earth to have it on. I think the extra Earth may be easier to come by than the reactors or the batteries.

________

I want to thank everyone who took the time to read my entries.  Your presence in the world made writing a real-life activity for me, and if I ever got stuck in the middle of a piece all I had to do was visualize one or two or a dozen of my readers, and I could feel the momentum of thoughts pick up again. It was a conversation, and it continues. Thank you all.

Skiing down, you had to read the hill, but parts of it were written in an unknown language. The long deep drifts on the north sides of ridges acted as cold storage for the three inches of powder from the last storm, so you could make tight quick turns until the terrain or downed trees forced you out on the south-facing slope and into three inches of slush.

If you started too late in the day, you could, even skiing the tops of drifts, punch through to the bottom foot of snowpack—last fall’s dry and cold powder, now a hollow blend of air and fragile flowers of frost.

If the tails of your skis dropped into that layer at the end of a turn, it was easy to fall backward and discover you were stuck in a hole, with the snow under you collapsing further every time you tried to get your skis under your center of gravity.

Your backpack turned you into an upside-down turtle. You had to wriggle free of shoulder straps, take off your skis, struggle upright in crotch-deep snow, and slowly boot-pack a platform you could stand on. In ten minutes or so, you were skiing again. Traverses and kick-turns, mostly.

These are avalanche conditions. In the late afternoons, the top foot of snow softens and compresses downward. It can get dense enough to collapse the bottom layer, especially if you’re skiing over it. Then an entire hillside’s snowpack can begin floating on a layer of trapped air. Once it gets going, it pushes more air under the snowpack below it. Given room, ten acres of snow can start moving at highway speeds, breaking trees and ripping up brush and rocks along the way. If you’re caught in a spring avalanche, you’re more likely to die of trauma than asphyxiation.

You ski the ridges, where you’re likely to be at the top of an avalanche if it starts. You keep an eye out for terrain traps, and you remember that people can die when their arms and legs are caught by deep wet snow and their heads are jammed into a drift or tree well. You don’t ski alone.

________

I’m making skiing sound dangerous, but it’s less dangerous than going to Stanley without a mask these days, now that Idaho has decided it’s going to ignore the new, more contagious COVID variants. Snowmobilers are coming into the valley from towns that have eased all restrictions on masks and distancing, and they crowd into the bars and restaurants, treating Stanley like a sanctuary city for aerosol droplets.

We locals mask up for the post office and the grocery store. We do our best to stay out of the restaurants, although Julie and I have gotten takeout three or four times this year. When we’ve had to wait for our order, it’s been less than comfortable. Our masks draw what look like hostile stares from the maskless. You find yourself feeling guilty and defensive in your own town. After years of trying not to upset the tourists, you’ve upset the tourists.

This tourist season is starting out like last tourist season, with an influx of people who believe the virus doesn’t exist. Or if it does exist it’s no worse than a cold. If it’s worse than a cold it’s no worse than the flu. If it’s worse than the flu it won’t kill you. And so on. Tourists get together in Stanley, infect each other, and return to their homes. We locals, possibly because we have getting caught in an avalanche as a handy metaphor for catching the virus, try to maximize our odds of survival in a situation where there’s some risk no matter what you do. In that way, a mask is like an avalanche beacon, a kind of talisman that—if the worst should happen—tells the people who find your body that you weren’t being an idiot. Even dead, you were being as careful as you knew how to be.

________

Vaccination will arrive too late for most tourists to have what they remember as a normal summer. But they’ll be back, anyway. Sawtooth Valley will seem less dangerous to them than wherever they live, if only because they don’t know people who died here. For those of us who have lived here long enough to have seen whole generations come and go, the tourist industry’s implied offer of a vacation from death rings hollow, especially in the face of CDC-predicted surges in infection.

For those of us who will have been vaccinated by then, plague-year habits will die slowly, if at all. Our days of casual, non-special-occasion restaurant dining are gone forever. Weddings are now in the same hazardous category as gender-reveal parties. Shaking hands is out. Costco on weekends is out. Even if it’s just a cold, saying, “It’s just a cold,” is out.

Going to see Steely Dan and Pink Floyd tribute bands in crowded basement nightclubs is a thing of the past.

Also, we fear getting on a plane and getting off in a city half a world away. The pandemic has shrunk our world, and where Julie and I once talked of flying to Vietnam or London or Portugal, we now talk about driving to Portland or Albuquerque or Seattle. We worry about the economic horrors coming as whole nations lose the ability to buy plastic shit to make themselves feel better, and housing bubbles collapse when people find that no matter where they go, there they are. We’ve imagined ourselves in the situation of the folks who got stranded across oceans when the pandemic closures hit. We comfort ourselves that we’re stranded at home.

Bad as they are, these scenarios assume that 2021 won’t deliver anything worse than 2020. No new and more lethal plague. Our damaged world economy will have enough resilience to keep a majority of humans alive and functioning. No major climate disaster. No earthquake a magnitude greater than the one last March. No screeching halt to the Gulf Stream and the subsequent icing of what’s left of Great Britain. No nuclear war. No Second Coming of Christ, or of Donald Trump, for that matter. No world leaders revealed as space alien lizards in lifelike rubber human suits.

In short, we imagined that the place where we’re stranded—physically and culturally—won’t change beyond all recognition.

Would that that were true. Our home has already changed beyond any happy recognition, and not simply because of this summer’s expected mass in-migration of Sprinter Van owners in lifelike rubber human suits.

________

I don’t think there’s a human alive that doesn’t know, somewhere below the level of conscious thought, that things post-pandemic will never again be the same. But a lot of effort is being expended to keep that realization unconscious.

Rational human decision-making this summer will be constrained by a near-unanimous denial of humanity’s undeniable crises: economic inequality, racial conflict, climate tipping points in the rear-view mirror, starvation-and-torture inspired migration, the triumph of right-wing dictators, the malignant machine intelligences of Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon, the decline of Energy Return on Energy Invested, a global corporate culture that has put an Inc. behind every country’s name—all manifestations of a world civilization whose mainspring has come unwound. When the energy that motivates civilization starts to flag, the everyday becomes the grotesque, the lethally imbalanced, the best of intentions gone wrong, the best of human beings gone bad.

The bottom layer has gone out of things, is another way to put it, and what looked like a solid structure can’t even hold itself up. The only thing left to do is pretend that memory is more solid than reality. It’s an exercise we’re doing a lot these days, and not just when we’re skiing.

Maybe you’re doing it, too.

________

I did get two big days of memorable skiing in last week, warm temperatures notwithstanding. Both involved long climbs with long approaches, and both left me exhausted at the end of the day. Julie, who had to work while I went skiing with our friends Michael and Liesl and Sean, was remarkably tolerant about my coming home and immediately going to sleep on the couch.

I am discovering that, at seventy, you don’t bounce back from a day of intense exercise. It takes more than a night’s rest to restore muscles, more than a day or two to get excited about climbing another two or three thousand vertical feet. Aches and pains that used to vanish in the presence of blue skies and powder snow now persist through the long uphills. Climbs that used to take an hour still take an hour, but the hours are longer than they used to be.

It doesn’t help that my ski partners are youngsters in their fifties, who have spent this year hiking and skiing and otherwise getting in excellent shape. Still, I keep up the best I can, and they wait for me at the top. I’m grateful to be able to get there, but I’ve realized that big ski days won’t last forever, nor will my existence. Some of the futures I’ve worried about I won’t have to suffer through.

________

Last Saturday anti-maskers held a demonstration on the Idaho statehouse steps. They built a fire in a barrel and had their kids—their young kids—throw masks into it. They made the national news. Commentators noticed that Idaho didn’t have a mask mandate, so it was a demonstration against a regulation that didn’t exist. I told Julie that some of those parents might regret dragging their kids to a mask burning once their kids turned into sullen adolescents taking high-school biology.

Julie said she didn’t think they would regret anything, because they were all insane. Looking at the photos of people tossing masks into the flames, it was hard to disagree with her. I said that we, as a civilization, have deliberately forgotten that all humans have an unconscious death-wish. “What you refuse to bring to consciousness, you have to act out,” I said. “They’re acting it out.”

Judging from the things people are refusing to deal with consciously, we’re in for a lot of acting out over the next few months. I would advise staying away from crowds, because we all will do things in a group we wouldn’t do alone.

It’s easy to get caught up in the bad craziness of others, especially as the mob mentality takes you far away from the things you don’t want to think about.

________

Spring is the season of migratory mass movements, and sure enough, traffic on Highway 75 is increasing. After the snowmobilers will come steelhead season. Early season campers, usually with trailers and campers, will come next. By July, tourism will be in full swing, and the roads and campgrounds will be choked with people until school starts in September, if it starts. Our visitors will once again act like there’s no pandemic and maybe by September, there won’t be.

As mass movements go, the ones we’ll see this year will be relatively harmless. We may have superspreader weddings, a few hundred acres of forest burned from unattended campfires, and roadsides littered with beer cans and Styrofoam, but we don’t yet expect rioters breaking into the Stanley City Hall, or marching soldiers on Ace of Diamonds Street, or rifle-toting people bicycling out of the cities with bug-out bags on their backs, children in tow.

But one of these years, the spring equinox will see masses of people who aren’t here for recreation. When that happens, we will hope they won’t be bleeding from their pores. We will hope they won’t be in tanks. We will hope that they won’t be acting out death wishes.

We will hope they’re just traveling through on their way to Canada to see the Banff and Jasper Parks, not fleeing a country and a culture and a climate that has turned them into refugees who cannot remember peace, or health, or snow.

Getting the vaccine while Julie waited in the car was a difficult moment of conscience. It’s hard to think that I’ll be protected when she won’t be. That’s not the way our marriage has worked, for one thing. For another, I would be lost without her, should she catch the virus and die.

Spending a year quarantining together without falling out of love is an accomplishment, I suppose, but it also reveals a terrifying weakness: whichever of us is left living after the other dies will live on in deep, possibly unbearable grief. Speaking only for myself, I don’t think life would be worth living without Julie, or her cooking.

I’m not sure what she would miss most about me. I’m not about to ask.

________

Some other events of last week, in the vein of Harper’s Magazine, the dark journal of ironic juxtaposition:

 NASA’s Perseverance Rover landed safely on a Martian river delta. Tiger Woods shattered both legs in a car accident. For the first time this year, Julie and I skied the hill a mile downriver—JPP, also known as Julie’s Powder Palace—and it was better skiing than this year’s weird temperature swings and intense winds had led us to expect. Ted Cruz discovered the science of optics and came back to a freakishly cold Texas from a warm Cancun. A Saturday Daily Beast article noted that Cruz’s superpower is that he has no shame. CO2 levels at the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Observatory were 416.52 ppm on Valentine’s Day, higher than any time in the last three million Valentine’s Days. Joe Biden launched the first air strikes of his presidency on Iranian-backed militia outposts in Syria, killing 22 or more. A snowmobiler was killed by an avalanche in the Smiley Creek drainage of Sawtooth Valley. Computer simulations have revealed that without humans on the planet, wooly mammoths would have lived another 4,000 years. No word on how long the mastodons would have lasted. We burned the last piece of firewood from the woodpile next to the garage on February 25. It had lasted three weeks longer than last year’s woodpile next to the garage. We are now pulling firewood from the woodpile on the deck, which can be accessed while wearing slippers. In the Disney city of Orlando, Florida, attendees at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference unveiled a golden statue of Donald Trump, apparently unaware that their gesture lay in ironic juxtaposition with the Book of Exodus. Idaho became home to the California and British variants of COVID-19, which are more transmissible and probably more lethal than the Wuhan original. Idaho’s medical community has raised the possibility that second vaccine jabs should be delayed so more people can have their first. Julie and I successfully completed February Fitness Month, during which we abstain from alcohol and exercise every day that lacks blizzards or vaccine side effects. Steak and red wine and postponed Valentine’s hyperbole are on tonight’s dinner menu.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

________

Last week also saw pandemic deaths in the U.S. reach half a million. It was a number duly and solemnly noted by President Biden, who emphasized the tragedy the number represented. He urged Americans not to become “numb to sorrow,” which sounds like good therapeutic advice, unless you’re one of the many who grieve. Then you might require a little numbness just to live, because the loss of a parent, spouse, or child can be unbearable.

(Since Biden’s speech, 13,023 more people have died of COVID-19. It’s tempting to think you’re at the shank end of history when the death toll reaches big round numbers, but you’re always in the middle of it.)

We say that time heals all wounds, but we all know people who never got over their grief. They died of it, or they embraced the fog of dementia, or they retreated into denial or paranoia. Families manage to forbid their members to even think about dead children, and grandchildren grow up not knowing about a dead aunt or uncle, or stillbirths or miscarriages. It’s true that grief can act as growth hormone for the soul, but it’s a rare soul that can allow itself the full embrace of sorrow and not come out the other side saying it’s had way more growth than it can stand.

The sheer number of family members, co-workers, friends, lovers, and fans of the dead has turned us into the United States of Grief, a nation of PTSD victims, led by a grieving president, a therapist-in-chief whose life has been filled with irretrievable loss. If, as the Evangelicals assert, God anointed Donald Trump as president for a reason, He has anointed Joe Biden for half a million reasons.

Perhaps the cohort we need to model ourselves upon is the American veterans who returned from the Second World War, who came home having lost friends, innocence, opportunity, youth—everything that made up their lives before the war—and got to work. They dropped their burden of grief and went to school and got jobs and raised families. They didn’t complain, didn’t talk about their war experience, didn’t shirk from hard and lengthy tasks. They became tough in the best sense of the word.

Only toward the ends of their lives did the horror come back to them, in the delirium of hospice drugs or the loneliness of a hospital bed, revealing that you can live a life while being numb to sorrow, but the sorrow is still there when the anesthesia wears off.

________

If Americans could become a tough (if numb) people, and, post-pandemic, build a nation the way we did from 1946 to 1963, I would have more hope for this country and this world. But this country and the world have, in the most literal sense, fallen apart since that time. The pandemic has exposed widening divisions between rich and poor, between people who read science and people who don’t, between conservative and liberal, creditors and debtors, white and Indian, white and Black, white and Asian, white and Hispanic. We are divided into employed and not, religious and not, well-nourished and not. We are QAnon or not, addicted or not, armed or not, psychopathic or not.

The term American used to hold us all together. It doesn’t anymore. There is no sense that we might be stronger as a nation if we had the stamina and intelligence to partner up with the fellow Americans we see as enemies.

I’m a person who has written an end of the world book, so it will come as no surprise when I say that America is over, more or less. I’ve written that the year 2030 will see us destroyed as a nation, with our formerly United States “a moonscaped radioactive desert where the survivors are confined to caves and ruins and drink ash-fouled water and don’t look too closely at the meat they’re eating, and knowledge and technology diminish with each burned book and broken machine and dead battery.”

It doesn’t have to be that way, of course. All it would require is courage and superhuman effort and constant brutally honest self-assessments as to whether or not we’re contributing to the whole. Also, generosity. Also, temperance. Also, justice. Also, kindness. Also, sacrifice. Basically, we all have to put ourselves in the position of an ICU nurse during a pandemic.

Probably not going to happen.

2030 it is. Plan on having to get tough, and not in the best sense of the word. Bring the hot sauce. Don’t expect that if there’s a virus going ’round, you’ll get vaccinated against it.

________

Rosa Luxemburg, the early 20th century economic theorist, is credited with inventing the slogan “Socialism or Barbarism,” which has been stuck in my head lately.

I’m not advocating one or the other, because I can’t. In fact, my reaction to the slogan is, “Like we have a choice.”

I do know that capitalism is a temporary phenomenon, one dependent on free resources and the ability to pollute without cost. That’s why energy companies—the prime example of contemporary capitalism in crisis—resist clean-air laws and restrictions on extracting oil and gas from public lands. If these companies aren’t subsidized with public resources, they can’t produce a product at a price their customers can afford.

It’s worse than that. Capitalism has to expand and keep on expanding, because it depends on debt. Interest rates generally reflect how much an economy is growing, plus whatever the financial class takes for its own sustenance and amusement. That’s why super-low interest rates indicate a non-producing, non-expanding economy, one headed for a crash once its debts come due. At that point, capitalism becomes barbarism, if barbarism means starvation in the midst of luxury, Orwell’s “boot stomping on a human face—forever,” or simple old Might Makes Right.

Socialism holds out the promise that a country or a culture can last a little longer than it would if it stuck with pure capitalism. You can argue that this country still exists because of the socialistic reforms that tamed the trusts or brought Social Security to a generation of starving grandparents. Great Britain would be lacking its gentry if its returning soldiers hadn’t chosen the ballot over the gun in 1946.

Julie and I are too old and too averse to violence to do well under barbarism. That’s not necessarily true of the neighbors. Even now, absent the rule of law, there are people in Sawtooth Valley who would supply the boot if we would supply the face. That sounds paranoid, but it’s more like the watchful waiting of a cautious oncologist.

Anyway, it’s in our interest to return to as much of the world of 2019 or earlier—1955, say—as we can. But I’m old enough to have witnessed what millions of Americans call free will morph into a lemming migration, one heading in a rush toward the cliffs, and below them, the sea. 1955 isn’t going to come again, and neither is 2019. 

The pandemic has delivered a body-blow to the American economy. In effect, it’s sped up the process of economic decay, and increased the unavoidable costs of energy, health, food, and shelter at a time of extreme unemployment. 2030 doesn’t look as far away as it used to. I think Joe Biden’s got his heart in the right place, and he’ll try to keep the suffering to a minimum, even if it means raising taxes on the rich. Because of that, this country will last longer under him than it would have under Donald Trump. But Biden’s an old man, and the barbarians are at the gate.

________

Now that we’re in a month when we’re free to drink alcohol again, Julie and I will return to a sunset ritual that has us sitting on the couch with glasses of wine, eating hummus and crackers and kalamata olives, and conducting ongoing conversations about the many ironic juxtapositions that mark our lives. One of those juxtapositions stems from the fact that Sawtooth Valley, especially during tourist season, resembles a carefully constructed diorama, and we locals have a tendency to become part of the exhibit.

We note that we have done what we were supposed to do with our lives, mostly. We went to college, got jobs, bought a house in a rising market, saved our money, kept learning new skills, refused to buy snowmobiles or Sprinter Vans, and lived as frugally as we could in the world of fragile privilege our parents’ hard work had given us. As a result, we have had a good life, but it may have come at the cost of being the last middle-class couple in America, soon to be extinct. At least that’s what it says on the plaque on the other side of the glass.

If you were white, straight, male, and angry, he welcomed you into his circle of admirers. He told you that you were smarter than other people. But he said you were victimized by affirmative action and a general prejudice against the successful. You were among a hardworking, honest minority that kept our nation going, but your tax dollars went to support dishonest parasites who sold drugs, were whores or pimps, and spent all day drinking 40-oz. bottles of Old English 800.

Upon hearing of his death, I thought if there is an afterlife, and if happiness there exists in proportion to the amount of kindness, understanding, mercy, and charity you’ve shown toward your fellow creatures during your earthly existence, Rush Limbaugh is, right now, deeply, deeply unhappy.

________ 

I never became one of Limbaugh’s admirers. For one thing, I’ve always been smart enough to distrust people who told me I was smarter than other people. For another, I have hated bullies since I was old enough to be bullied.

Bullies were a playground fixture at Ketchum Elementary School. Early on I learned to blend into the background so as not to attract their attention, all the while paying deep attention to them. I learned how to read the coded language of exclusion, that subcategory of English that designates some people in and some people out, and I got good at knowing when someone was about to get picked on. I tried to make sure it wasn’t me, but I hated bullies just the same.

The biggest bully at Ketchum Elementary—not counting the hot lunch cooks, who must be forgiven because they knew not what they did—was Mrs. Mac, our third-grade teacher. As a third grader, I was terrified of her, and with some reason, because her favorite mode of discipline was to stand behind a child and administer hard and repeated slaps between the shoulder blades. My memory still retains an image of Ricky Day, nine years old, mouth open and moaning in terror, head snapping back and arms going in the air with each slap, while Mrs. Mac screamed at him to stop talking when she was talking.

It took me years to realize that Mrs. Mac was mentally ill, and that she should never have been allowed to enter a room filled with people smaller than she was. It took me more years to understand that bullies forget the pain and humiliation they cause others, but their victims remember everything the bullies did, and every detail about who the bullies were.

Once, thirty years after I was a third-grader, a classmate told me a story that might have explained Mrs. Mac’s cruelty. My classmate’s mother had told her that Mrs. Mac had been a great beauty in her youth, with many admirers, and she could have married a number of men who were far more successful than the man she had married.

When I was a third-grader, Mrs. Mac was in her late fifties, going through what in retrospect must have been one of the all-time Guinness World Records horrible pre-replacement hormone menopauses, and suffering from depression, blind helpless rage, and nihilistic despair.

Much has been written about women disappearing from male consciousness after menopause, and how they find it a relief. For Mrs. Mac, though, in the time and the culture she was in, where female currency was counted in units of beauty, her mirror must have terrorized her like she terrorized her third graders. Her grey hair and wrinkles and jowls (and mad eyes, it must be said) must have convinced her she was being obliterated. Beating up little kids was reaching for another chance at existence, and it worked. Sixty-two years later, she’s still in this world, occupying a room in my brain.

________

When I was in third grade, my father supplemented our family income by trapping mink, weasels, marten, otter, and coyotes. He supplemented our diet with wild game. Beef was a wasteful luxury, even in the form of hamburger.

He taught me to hunt and butcher elk and deer. I helped him check his trapline, and I watched as he killed the animals still alive in his traps. Early on, I made a fuss and wanted to take them home as pets, but my father spent a lot of time explaining the wild world to me, and how a predator made a living. “Humans are predators, too,” he said. “We all have to kill to live.”

Over the years, I learned how to trap and skin animals, and I suppose, if I had to, I could pull a box of traps from the attic of the garage and start up a trapline again. I don’t think that will happen, because if trapping is the only way Julie and I can stay alive, a bunch of other things will have happened that would make our continued existence dubious anyway.

In the meantime, I much prefer that my killing be indirect. I tell Julie, when she asks me if I’m ever going to apply for an elk permit, that I will the day Costco closes its meat department.

________

If you’re eight years old and your father is teaching you to kill furry little animals that look a lot like teddy bears and Easter bunnies and acrylic puppies, you become, of necessity, a philosopher. Fortunately, my father understood the process, and helped out. “Never cause unnecessary suffering,” he told me. “There’s too much suffering in the world as it is.” It was sound advice, even coming from a man whose hands were covered in blood.

After a few years of trapping, I didn’t need to be convinced that there was more than enough suffering in the world. I had also hunted enough to know that hunting usually guarantees a crueler death for an animal than a slaughterhouse.

Every year I find the remains of elk and deer in the hills above our house, shot and left to rot by people who didn’t want to pack them out, or gut-shot and never found when they ran off and hid. Not causing unnecessary suffering takes skill and hard work, and there are better ways of not causing it than hunting or trapping. As soon as I got old enough to quit them both, I did.

These days I still see young men who try to make a living outside of the culture by trapping or guiding hunters. But it’s brutal work, hard on the spirit over time, and pays less than working in a Burger King. Nobody I know has made a career of it. Even my father had to drive ski bus in the winter and work on road construction in the summer to make enough money to feed, clothe, and educate his kids. Fur prices have gotten worse since he was a trapper.

Without survival as a rationale, trapping becomes a cruel hobby. Cruelty shouldn’t be a hobby.

________

I won’t allow Rush Limbaugh to occupy a room in my brain. It’s already crowded in there, and if I believe the gerontologists, it’s getting smaller and smaller. At some point you have to go through your hippocampus and throw out the squatters, the junkies, and the criminals. Limbaugh qualifies for eviction on all three counts.

I do have some sympathy for him. I’ve learned enough about the human psyche over the years to know that sadism is a part of everybody. I’ve also learned that if you’re hurting somebody, they have to acknowledge that you exist. Somewhere in Limbaugh’s past, the self he was constructing got damaged enough that he quit trying to build on it and started trying to protect what was left of it. Other people could be enlisted in the effort, even against their will.

Over time, it became a habit, and then a career. It was no doubt a process that involved one logical but cruel business decision after another. When his sadism got grotesque, as sadism always does, it was too late to change.

That he had so many fans suggests that plenty of people enjoyed his cruelty, and they used it to validate their own existences. If his fans weren’t bullies themselves, they were at least akin to the kids who stand around a fight on the playground, chanting, “Hit him again. Hit him again.”

I watched the ceremony where Limbaugh was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Donald Trump. Limbaugh was in the advanced stages of lung cancer by that time, and he must have known that he wasn’t going to live long. He teared up. He might have been thinking of his own mortality. He might have been overcome by the honor of the occasion. He might have realized he was going to miss this world, maybe a lot. 

But I don’t think so. I got the distinct impression that he thought he had made the world a better place and was being rewarded for it. He was someone, finally—made so by order of the president. Those were tears of relief.

You cannot have your father tell you, “Never cause unnecessary suffering,” and think that Rush Limbaugh has made the world a better place. You cannot think that Limbaugh’s father ever told him that the world has enough suffering as it is.

________

I can remember every bully I have ever encountered. I can tell you their names, and, in most cases, where they live.

It’s amazing what you can find out on the Internet these days, and it’s amazing how much comfort you can derive from a little personal information. It’s amazing how much you can remember about people once you put your mind to it, and it’s amazing what you remember about them that they cannot remember about themselves.

It’s amazing how much information you can find between the paragraphs of an obituary.

I’m describing an utter waste of time, especially considering I’m not going to track down a bunch of third-rate people, one by one, and confront them with what they did, decades ago, to other people and to me. It would be about as useful as confronting Rush Limbaugh, if he were still alive, because old bullies are well defended against remembering themselves as young bullies, or for that matter the bullies they were yesterday. You can’t appeal to their consciences. You can’t tell them they hurt you and expect them to feel guilty.

You can’t call the cops on someone who sucker-punched you in a high school locker-room. You can’t confront the tattered little old lady who made fun of your clothes when you were twelve and she was thirteen and a foot taller than you and dating a ski instructor. You can’t call out the guy who made his girlfriend wait in the car while he visited a whorehouse in Burley, Idaho in April of 1967.

It would be stupid and pointless and would increase the amount of suffering in the world. It might set off an exhumation of my own memories, ones where I hurt people weaker than me, and it might make me remember my father’s voice, saying, “Humans are predators, too.”

It might make me, God forbid, forgive bullies, just so I could forgive myself. I like to think my own sins were far less serious than any of the ones I’ve listed above, but I haven’t consulted with the people I committed them against. They might convince me I’m not as forgivable as I think.

________

Mrs. Mac, long retired from teaching, died in a snowstorm, walking home from the grocery store to her home in Hailey. She slipped and fell down and was covered up with snow, and, I heard, buried by a snowplow whose driver didn’t see her. It was a day before somebody noticed her leg sticking out of a snowbank. 

When I found out about it, my first thought was, “Good. Serves her right.” I was old enough to know better than to think that, but I thought it anyway.

By then I had been a teacher myself. Even though I had tried to be a nurturer, not a predator, I had made mistakes. I had made people cry when I gave them bad grades or showed them where their essays and stories contradicted themselves. I had made them angry when I caught them lying or cheating, and I had really made them angry when I stopped them from being bullies. I had a reputation for being sadistic to sadists, or at least to people I had decided were sadists. I was a shepherd protecting my flock from wolves, never thinking about where the flock was headed at the end of the summer.

No doubt there are people out there who will cheer if I’m ever found frozen solid in a snowbank, and who will say that if there is an afterlife, I’ll soon be warm enough.

They had all written a bunch. I got eleven pieces of writing—good writing—and read them carefully, taking notes. Some people in the class were doing things with their words that I wished I could do. Everyone knew how to construct a scene and introduce a cast of characters. Everyone wanted to be a better writer, which made talking to them about craft a joy and a privilege.

I focused my class on the violence of everyday life, which almost never makes it into stories. Readers may not pick up a story for its violence, but they get bored when it’s missing. They stop thinking the characters are real, because they’re too nice to be real.

It’s a rare story that keeps a reader’s attention if it doesn’t contain a bad person doing awful things to a good person, and a good person getting even or dying in the attempt. But it’s painful to put those actions on the page. Often the violence is psychological, and it’s even more painful to write than the physical kind.

I read the class a passage from my why-to-write book, MFA in a Box, which began by complaining that “Nothing much happens in many of the stories that I read. If the conflict needs to be solved by violence, often enough the writer leaves the scene.”

I had prefaced the passage with an epigraph from the writer Philip K. Dick: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Later in the chapter, I had written, “The writer’s most important function is bearing witness to what is real—to what hasn’t gone away, even though you’ve stopped believing in it.” I emphasized that writers need to have faith that reality exists, even though humans aren’t very good about figuring out the difference between reality and wishful thinking.

Witnessing the truth takes care and hard work and never pretending that you know what’s going on when you don’t, never pretending that violence isn’t there when it is, and never, ever running away from reality because you don’t like it.

________

I write this as Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial has ended with his acquittal. I am not surprised at this outcome, because Trump has long experience in getting other people to commit violence for him without getting his hands dirty. When the Capitol was breached and vandalized and the Vice President was threatened with hanging, Trump was safely back in the White House, watching it all on TV.

No one knows how close Mike Pence came to death, but he’s a cautious man—cautious enough to never spend time alone with a woman who isn’t his wife—and he must have felt like he was spending time alone with death in spite of a lifetime of trying to avoid it.

Acquitted or not, Donald Trump remains a violent man. That fact won’t go away, even though Republican senators wish it would. They also wish that Trump’s claim that the Democrats stole the election wasn’t a lie, and that the Democrats had really managed a level of organization, discipline, and unified intent that they haven’t been capable of for fifty years.

What isn’t a lie—what won’t go away just because you stop believing in it—is that all humans are deeply violent beings. Violence is just under the surface for most of us, and all we need for it to come out is someone who will tell us it’s justified. Often enough, that justification is that someone has cheated us or stolen from us or is going to take our place.

Convince us of any of those, and most of us are capable of murder. Get any of us in a mob, and the idea that Mike Pence might have ended his life suspended from a gallows on the Capitol steps doesn’t seem farfetched at all.

________

If you don’t believe me, search your heart for murderous impulses. Imagine having a button that, if pushed, would make someone disappear forever. If you can’t come up with the name of a person you’d make disappear, you’re a better human being than I am.

Or not. Maybe you would disappear whole political parties, occupations, economic classes, tribes, skin colors, and nations.

Watching the Capitol riot, I found myself wondering what would have happened if God had performed a miracle and placed the Chicago police force, as they were in 1968, in the halls of the Capitol, waiting for the mob to break in. Those were the police who forever darkened the 1968 Democratic convention by leaving hundreds of antiwar demonstrators brain-damaged, crippled, and broken.

The Chicago police may have destroyed the future of this country in their desire to punish people they saw as hippies and anarchists. They certainly destroyed one future of this country, the one that had President Hubert Humphrey and single-payer health care and lacked Richard Nixon, Watergate, and Henry Kissinger messing with China and Chile and Iran.

Brought to January 6, 2021 by divine Uber, those same Chicago police would have held the Capitol steps against the rioters and killed a bunch of them. I’m ashamed to admit I would have cheered them on. Lots of people would have been injured and killed, but I would have thought it served them right for going up against a police force determined to make people behave in a civilized manner.

Had I really wanted to witness the families missing parents or children, the grief attending to wrecked lives, the blood oozing from ears, the broken bones? Not really. But somewhere below my neocortex, my reptile brain, a structure that hasn’t had a software update in a million years, would have been happy if it all had happened that way.

If I could get rid of the thinking, observing, logical, kind, and human part of myself, the rest of me would be free to cheer on murder.

________

I’m afraid of the Democrats’ muscle-memory coming into play.

If this country gets contemporary equivalents of Chicago Mayor Richard Daly, Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara—to say nothing of Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, Democrats all—we’ll see what competent authoritarians look like, especially now that the Republicans have removed the constraints of compassion and decency.

If Republicans keep abusing Democrats with voter-suppression laws, lies about stolen elections, gerrymandering, scapegoating, and accusations of cannibalism and pedophilia, they’ll awaken a sleeping giant.

For the moment, Democrats can pretend they don’t have a dark side. Take away the obvious propaganda and QAnon conspiracy theories, and Democratic villainy takes the form of that too-nice-to-be-real Obama couple, Hunter Biden in rehab, OSHA regulations, the Clean Air and Endangered Species Acts, a fifteen-dollar minimum wage, and the Postal Service.

But turn the Democrats into resentment-fanning populists, equip them with graphs showing the last two decades’ worth of wealth transfer between classes in this country, wait for the inevitable foreclosures and bankruptcies and evictions as a debt-fueled economy reaches its brutal repayment stage, and you’ll see what a mob of angry true believers, properly coached, can do to the people they’re told to blame. A lot of people will have dibs on those weaselly little guys, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio.

There’s a good story in there somewhere, but it’s going to require a better author than someone who leaves the scene when the furniture starts getting tossed around.

________

I’ve told a couple of generations of writing students that they can send their characters into dangers that they would stay away from, have their characters say things they wouldn’t say themselves, and act on impulses they’re too timid or too smart to act on.

One of my collections of short stories, Sudden Death Over Time, consists of first-person dramatic monologues. Every character I invented to tell those stories, except for the last, is a psychopath. I didn’t have any trouble imagining them, which makes me a little worried about where they came from. 

People do mistake those bad, twisted, dysfunctional characters for the author. That’s why I ended the book with a peaceful and maybe dull story told by a person deeply in love with his wife, who spends his days building fence because a good fence, with all its hard work and slow progress, grounds him in a good and honest and human-scale existence. His story manages to free him from his substantial anger at the evil he sees in other human beings. Most readers are relieved, by that time in the book, that the author finally has shown them somebody who knows the difference between right and wrong, love and hate, cruelty and kindness, violence and peace.

The readers have already seen what happens to people who don’t discern those differences. A lifetime of amoral self-interest ends up as self-destruction, mainly because humans are mortal. Amoral self-interest looks pretty stupid from a deathbed.

At some point you have to start loving your fellow humans and doing what you can to help them, or your life doesn’t mean shit.

All of the psychopaths in my stories end badly. They die alone, staring into nothing, irrelevant when they aren’t scorned, fools who thought they were wise.

I learned not to be a psychopath not just by seeing my characters’ ends. Their whole lives are ugly, even in their moments of triumph. They are people who let their reptile brains construct their existences from the raw materials of laziness and stupidity and selfishness. The finished product is indistinguishable from pure evil.

________

I learn more from writing a book than I learned in school. Here’s a tip: if you can’t learn from real people, you should write books and learn from your characters.

In the end, writing is a program of self-improvement. Because it requires so much time and effort, writing glorifies the God of Hard Work, who is into self-improvement big-time.

There are worse gods. The God of Hard Work always sticks with you and mostly keeps you out of trouble. If Christ had worshiped the God of Hard Work, he would have stayed a carpenter, and there wouldn’t have been centuries of philosophers whining about that episode of parental abandonment in Gethsemane.

I didn’t tell my Zoom class, which contained a devout Christian or two, that last part. But they were all good writers, who had learned that hard work is a solid, honorable way of life, if not a deity.

________

I did tell the class that everything they would ever write would be an artifact, and necessarily imperfect. If they were writing a memoir, they wouldn’t be able to tell their own story just because they put an I on the page. Even when they tried to make those I-persons smarter, happier, more virtuous, and better looking than their authors, evil would creep into the mix. Readers would end up seeing things in authors that the authors themselves couldn’t face.

That’s okay. Readers appreciate characters with faults, and even authors with faults. But they care about characters more than they care about authors. Readers know when you invest your life in your characters. They know when you care for them, empathize with them, and give them the dignity you wish you had yourself. Take care of your characters, and your readers will believe in them, even when they don’t believe in you. In that case you may disappear, but your characters will remain.

________

We have had, for the last four years, a crappy author writing our national narrative. Even his latest impeachment ended with a whimper rather than a bang. When conflict between good and evil threatened, he said there were nice people on both sides, which is no way to tell a story. He treated his characters with contempt, and nobody, least of all himself, believed in them.

We’ve had to bring in a new writer. He’s got a new blank document on his computer screen. We hope he’ll be better with the language, among other things.

We know he’ll work harder than the last guy. We know he’ll be more interesting than the last guy.

We think he has a sense of his own mortality and what a life lived in service to other people looks like.

We hope he’ll be into self-improvement. We hope he’ll respect and learn from his characters.

We hope he has a sense that whatever he does, it won’t be perfect, but that won’t stop him from trying to make it so.

We hope he writes a self-help book. We hope he writes a story with a moral. We hope, when he confronts the inevitable violence beneath the surface of every story, the good guys win, and that they don’t take winning as permission to stop being good. We hope he’s taken a writing class.

We look forward to reading the initial draft.

Again, conditions were treacherous. I performed the season’s first full-on face plant. Julie skied beautifully all the way down, not falling, not even once.

She wanted you to know.

________

Vaccine news: We have no idea when we’ll get vaccinated. The St. Luke’s My Chart appointment schedule was overwhelmed within a few seconds of 8:00 a.m. last Monday, when it was opened to those sixty-five and above. No times were available when I could finally log onto their system. I am now on the waiting list at the clinic in Stanley. I will remain on the list until vaccination.

Today I got an email from St. Luke’s, thanking me for my patience, noting that adjustments to the system were ongoing, and suggesting that I check with the “state, local health districts, pharmacies, or other health care providers about Covid-19 vaccination openings and to schedule an appointment.”

Then: “THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING. We know this is a challenging time for everyone, and your health remains our priority. Our goal is to get the COVID-19 vaccine to as many people as possible as quickly as possible. Thank you for your patience [again] and your partnership [partnership?], in achieving that goal.”

I understand that we have, in Idaho, hundreds of thousands of people wanting vaccines. We don’t have the vaccine for them. We won’t for some months. I also understand that here in Sawtooth Valley, due to our low population and isolation, we’re far down the priority list. I understand we’re going to have to wait.

I don’t understand St. Luke’s calling me a partner. It’s a bit too much like Amazon calling its warehouse employees associates.

________

In 1980, I was hired by a Ketchum, Idaho start-up company, Health Data International, to write a layman’s book on heart disease. My intended audience was composed of people who had survived myocardial infarctions and their families.

I was told to take the language of scientific studies and medical textbooks and turn it into writing that eighth-graders could understand. By that time, I had taught eighth-graders, and knew that they responded well to concrete, impossible to misinterpret language. I titled my manuscript So You’ve Gone and Had a Heart Attack, and got to work.

My manuscript was never published, because Health Data International went bankrupt before they could publish books and start distributing them. My words—concrete, impossible to misinterpret, hundreds of pages of them—rest in a law firm’s archives somewhere in New York state.

If I had to sum up the meaning of those pages, I would say, “Everybody gets old and dies. No exceptions. If you’ve had a heart attack, especially if you’ve had heart-muscle damage, your life will become much more limited but will still be worth living. If you have a second or third heart attack, there are worse ways to go.”

Health Data International went out of business because its target customers didn’t like its language. They preferred the anesthesia of near-incomprehensible medicalese to the blunt-force trauma of plainly put truth.

________

Before my employer’s bankruptcy, I was sent to Atlanta, D.C., New York, and Boston to interview cardiologists who had written seminal papers on heart disease. For two weeks I navigated airports, hotels, and the maze-like corridors of research hospitals, talking to people who had taken time away from saving lives to answer my questions. The medical knowledge I acquired is mostly obsolete now, but I did take away lifelong common-sense lessons: stay in shape, stay away from cigarette smoke, moderate my alcohol intake, and don’t get too angry at anyone or anything.

One of my interviews was the dean of the medical school at SUNY Buffalo. He didn’t want to talk about heart disease, though. He had been a bellhop in the early 1950s at the Sun Valley Lodge and he told me that when he saw I was from Ketchum, he cleared his afternoon schedule. “Those two years were the best of my life,” he said. “If I could stand the lifting, I’d go back to it in a minute.”

We talked about Ketchum in the 1950s, about Ernest Hemingway and his suicide, about Sun Valley and the changes it had gone through in thirty years. He asked me how old I was and I told him I was thirty. I had been born in the Sun Valley Lodge—the hospital was on its third floor—about the same time he was carrying suitcases there. “I’ll bet you’re having a good time,” he said.

I reminded him of the purpose of my visit. He told me to put away my questions. “Let me tell you about this industry,” he said, and began describing a strike at a medical-equipment factory that had cut off the local teaching hospital’s supply of pacemakers.

“We haven’t installed a pacemaker in six weeks,” he told me. “We’ve got a huge bunch of patients—we’ve told them they’ll die without one—waiting. So far we haven’t lost anybody. We’re over-installing the electronics, in case you don’t know what that means.”

I said I couldn’t put that in my book.

“There’s a huge bunch of things you can’t put in your book.” He put his fingers on his breastbone. “I’ve had bypass surgery. You know what most people who have had bypass surgery say? ‘I’d rather die than have bypass surgery again.’ We know what we’re talking about.”

If I had been a more experienced interviewer, I would have steered the conversation back to state-of-the-art developments in cardiology. Instead, I listened as he said, “We’ve turned medicine into a soulless profit center in this country. We’re squeezing more and more from our patients, and from our doctors, for that matter.

“I see our graduates go on to internships and residencies, and they get through them all right,” he said. “They’re waiting for the salary, and the Porsche, the family, the vacations in Paris. What they get is eighty-hour weeks for the rest of their career, divorces, malpractice insurance. They lose patients they love. Their kids are strangers to them. They get bitter and angry, and it ends up hurting their patients. I think the system we’ve set up is causing more suffering than it cures.

“Look at Hemingway. His doctors could have saved that mind, that talent, if they’d sat him down after his last plane wreck and told him to quit drinking. Instead, they waited until he was in alcoholic dementia and then gave him shock treatment. It destroyed what little was left of him.”

I couldn’t put that in my book, either. But, as we say in the interview business, I was learning some shit. “You’ve thought this through,” I said.

“Enough to be behind this desk rather than in an operating theater,” he said. “Even here, I listen to a lot of cynical old people who were idealistic young people a couple of years ago. It’s enough to make me wish I’d stayed a bellhop.” He paused. “Not really. I’m proud of what I’ve done with my life. But I’ve got this fantasy that I’m carrying Hemingway’s bags to his room in the Lodge when I have a heart attack and die. He puts me in one of his stories. It’d be like Death in the Afternoon. But no kitchen knives tied to a chair. Just too much luggage.”

He grinned. The interview ended with me unable to tell where his memories ended and his relationship with death began. No wonder he had ended up in the dean’s office.

________

Julie and I have an ongoing conversation about how the pandemic would have unfolded if the fatality rate was twenty or thirty percent, like hantavirus, and if it hit young people harder than us old folks. We have speculated that many of the people now demanding freedom from masks would start demanding prison for people who refused to wear them. The either/or nature of their thinking wouldn’t change, but with a couple of dead children in every other family, mobs would demand curfews and lockdowns instead of unlimited church and sporting event attendance.

The trouble with our conversation is that it isn’t hypothetical. The 1918 flu did hit young people harder than the old, and although the fatality rate stayed below three percent, a third of Americans got it. Slightly less than three-quarters of a million of them died.

The downriver town of Challis, never overly welcoming to outsiders in the best of times, put checkpoints on the highways leading into town and stopped travelers at gunpoint. Still, the flu got in. I don’t know if the infected were expelled to Stanley or Mackay, but I am sure that would have been the civic impulse.

The people of Challis had a point. Out in the wider world, cities that refused to lock down, or that opened too soon after lockdowns, paid for it in deaths. Cities that effectively ceased economic activity had fewer deaths and recovered their economies more quickly once the pandemic was over.

Millions of people who lived were disabled for months or years. The president of the United States got it, and it probably killed him by causing a severe stroke.

The flu went on for two years before disappearing in 1920. Since that time, flu pandemics worldwide have killed millions every decade. Very few people, over the years, have conflated freedom with the flu.

________

Ever since my interview in Buffalo, I’ve been a student of industrial medicine. Nothing that I’ve learned contradicts what that former Sun Valley bellhop told me. If you combine the expensive and inhumane procedures performed to extend a life a week or a month, the malpractice industry, administrative bloat, the impoverishment and inequalities attendant to insurance, Medicare and Medicaid fraud, the deliberate addiction of millions, prescription cascades, diagnostic errors, abusive training practices—you can make the case that industrial medicine causes more suffering than it cures.

Should the tragedy Julie and I talk about come in 2022 or a few years later—and it will come, according to every epidemiologist I’ve read—St. Luke’s won’t be effective in fighting it. Industrial medicine is a system designed to fill hospital beds, not keep them empty. It’s too big to respond quickly to a pandemic threat, too dependent on other institutions to take responsibility for life-and-death decisions, and too complex to have as its single purpose the prevention of disease and suffering.

When a pandemic comes along, a finely-tuned financial mechanism that depends on a steady input of the sick stops working. Some of its profit centers get overwhelmed by oversupply, others cease to work because of shortages. Quick response to changing conditions becomes impossible, and first-line workers burn out, retire, or become sick themselves. Their lives become one long emergency. We call them heroes, but don’t demand that their employers treat them like heroes.

If all of this sounds unfair, remember that not long ago, doctors and nurses didn’t have the drugs, procedures, and infrastructure we have now. Their cure rate wasn’t that great, but they did have their share of unexpected recoveries.

Their level of systemic harm was far lower. Their level of empathy was far higher, and I suspect patient quality of life was higher, too. I’m not saying we should get rid of the medical advances of the last eighty years, but we could administer them in a much more humane and human way, one that treats patients as something other than units of added value.

At the risk of sounding like the demented fascist Margaret Thatcher, let me assert that there is no medical industry. There are only patients and their families and the people who take care of them. As long as corporate medicine exists as a mechanism for extracting money from the sick, those patients and families and caregivers will suffer.

Saying so goes against the tide of corporate evolution. But to paraphrase Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, any organization adds complexity in response to stress until it runs into diminishing returns. When the maintenance costs of complexity exceed the returns it delivers, the organization breaks down. Its choices are a return to simplicity or death. History suggests that death is more popular.

St. Luke’s and other vast medical organizations do not exist in a vacuum. They are responding to an era of offshoring, just-in-time supply chains, pharmaceutical industry malfeasance, employee abuse, treachery toward clients and customers, and the financialization of everything. The difference is that lots of people within the medical industry have sworn an oath to do no harm. If they let themselves think about it, they may find their consciences at odds with corporate culture. Over time, that’s a recipe for crazy.

I don’t have a recipe to avoid collapse, but I can say that if we have a choice, returning to simplicity is better than death. If the way medicine is practiced in this country were simpler, smaller-scale, more humane and flexible, and less fragile and subject to disruption, we’d all have a better chance of living when the next pandemic hits.

The storm came in with wind. Saturday, I spent a half-hour blowing a big drift out of the driveway. Then I got the snowblower up on the deck and cleared it off. Then another squall came over the peaks and dropped two more inches of snow.

Juno had to be encouraged out into the drifts this morning. When the snow is deep, she tends to pee on the deck, which is one of the reasons we keep it cleared. Another reason is that sometime in February, the sky might clear between a couple of warm Pacific storms. We’ll drag the deck chairs out of the garage and sit outside to watch the sun go down. It will be the first day of spring, equinox notwithstanding.

Big wind slabs line the gullies on the hill across the road, and even though it would be fun to ski them, we’ll wait for the freeze-thaw cycles that begin in April. After a week of warm days and cold nights, the snow stabilizes. You can ski the fatal routes.

In spots the hill is steep enough that you can skim the snow with an uphill elbow while you complete your turns. A deep exhilaration comes from making forty or fifty windshield-wiper turns in two inches of new powder on a bulletproof base. Look back uphill and you’ll see your mark on the world, at least until the next snowfall.

But not now. Now, we’ll be getting windy storms all the way through March. The long vertical drifts that mark the hill will build up a few inches a day for ten days or so, and then cut loose all at once. The piles of snow at the bottom of the hill last into June. I always keep an eye on them to see if anybody’s skis or snowboard have melted out, or anybody’s arm or leg, for that matter. So far nobody’s been that unlucky.

________

Julie and I and Juno did ski the hill before this last storm. Conditions were, in a word, difficult.

We had breakable crust and soft spots between the hard ridges of drifts, and we had to feel our way through four or five different kinds of snow on every turn. Julie got worried about falling, which in itself guarantees a fall. I’ve learned that she can fall three times and still have fun, but after the fourth fall, fun isn’t in the picture for either of us.

Nobody fell four times. One of us fell three times. Nobody skied with the slightest amount of grace. (Juno displayed grace. She charged down the mountain in six-foot leaps, disappearing when she landed, exploding into sunlight when she jumped again.)

We all ended up on the highway, walking back to the house, tired but happy. If our ski tracks were our mark on the world, it looked like we had gone through life as rank amateurs.

________ 

This winter Julie and I have been arguing over living forever if we could. Here’s what I want:

We get to live in the here and now. Eternal youth is part of the package. Both of us living in this house, in this world, skiing and hiking and reading books. Stacking fall woodpile after fall woodpile, forever. Writing journal entry upon journal entry, book upon book, until our hard drives rival the Library at Alexandria. One of us cooking fabulous meal after fabulous meal. The other loading and unloading the dishwasher, forever, fabulously. Planning a hundredth wedding anniversary every hundred years.

“I like living,” I say to Julie. “I like this world. I like you. I’d stay in this life forever if I could.”

She disagrees. “I’d hate living forever, here or anyplace else. I’d get bored. All of our friends would get old, and sooner or later they’d all get Alzheimer’s, and we’d have to visit them in nursing homes.”

(This is a trap. She’s trying to get me to say that our friends would live forever, too, at which point she’ll say which friends, and I’ll say all of them, and she’ll say what about their kids, and I’ll say only if they behave, and she’ll ask who gets to decide what good behavior is. Ultimately I’ll have to concede that everybody gets to live forever, which would, within a few generations, make for a Sawtooth Valley overrun with entitled, non-empathetic, and disgustingly immortal tourists in Sprinter Vans. I don’t take the bait.)

But I am hurt that she, a couple of decades younger than I am, would choose to leave me by dying. I wouldn’t do that to her, if I had anything to say about it.

“Besides,” she says, “life without death would have no meaning. Death gives depth to life. Take away death, and life would get static and lifeless. Everything would happen over and over again, even January. Alzheimer’s would be a defense against the crush of memory.”

“It is a defense against the crush of memory,” I tell her. “A good one, from the looks of things.”

________

A memory of a long-ago summer, no doubt brought to consciousness by the dark and the cold, and the mostly grim news of this discontented winter:

I’m five years old, and with my father, who is fishing for salmon on the river behind where our house is now, and he’s hooked a big chinook salmon. The river is high and the fish has run downstream and he’s come to a place on the bank where the willows are too high to get his line over them. He looks at me and tells me to climb onto his shoulders. He kneels down, holding his fishing rod as high as he can, and I climb up and hang on for dear life. He walks out into the water, which with his first step rises to his waist, and he starts running with the current, trying to keep up with the fish so his line won’t break.

The water reaches his chest—and my shins—before he is able to do an aquatic dance along the riverbed boulders to a gravel bar on the other side. He emerges with water-filled hip-boots onto solid ground, sloshing with every step. I won’t let go. He tells me to get down so he can land the fish.

The salmon finally stops its run. He plays it for another twenty minutes, finally pulling it exhausted into the shallows. He kills it by sticking the blade of his knife into the top of its head.

I try to lift the fish, but it’s too heavy for me. My father takes a loop of baling twine from a coat pocket and threads it through the salmon’s gills. He slings the fish over one shoulder. Its tail reaches the back of his knees, and then the ground, when he kneels again and I climb again on his shoulders.

We wander up and down the far bank, looking for a safe crossing. When we get home, my mother, who spends her Junes terrified that she’s going to lose husband or son to high water, wants to know why my shoes and pants are wet.

“He went wading,” says my father, not telling her that I waded on his shoulders.

He picks up a fish scale from a shelf beside the kitchen stove, hooks it into the loop of twine, and holds the salmon high. It weighs 22 pounds.

This June, that memory will be sixty-five years old. I can still walk to the exact spot on the bank where my father hooked that salmon, although now where my father was chest deep in water there’s fifty feet of gravel bar. Where that salmon died is now a deep swift hole. Where once the bottom of the valley flooded every spring, overflow channels lie choked with volunteer lodgepole. The river is empty of fish. My father is dead these twenty years.

I’ve changed a bit myself, but I still look at the big rocks on the other side of the river—their arrangement and their markings—through the eyes of an unsurprised five-year-old, taking it all in. If I sit on the bank on a summer evening—this summer, if I’m alive—I’ll see my father fishing across the river from me. He’ll be backlit by the sunset, a happy man in the prime of his life, one confident enough to carry a small boy on his back and walk the bed of a raging river while reeling in a big fish.

________

I’ve told Julie more times than I should about Rutger Hauer’s death scene in the sci-fi movie Blade Runner. Hauer plays a near-future replicant, an artificial human designed with superhuman powers and a less-than-human lifespan. Hauer’s character starts remembering all the astonishing things he’s done and seen in his allotted thirty years of life. Then he says, just before dying, “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

That scene has haunted me ever since I first saw it, likely because tears in rain and ski tracks obliterated by new snowfall both evoke human mortality, and its sheer indifferent waste of experience, of moments and images once bright in memory, of perfect turns, of eyes on faces and the touch of fingers on arms, looks of alarm or love or both—all gone, lost in time, never to be part of anyone’s imagination again. Of all of death’s terrors, the loss of memory is the worst.

But as Julie knows, and I am learning, memory has heft, and volume, and when enough of it piles on the slopes of your life, it can all slide down and take you with it. You’ll end up buried, stuck in a terrain trap, unable to move or breathe, yearning to escape to sunlight. 

Still, the next time I’m feeling like geologic time will erase me, memories, and everything else, I’ll tell Julie again about tears in the rain.

________

Anti-mortality update: today I can sign up for my first vaccination jab, according to the St. Luke’s of Idaho My Chart web page. I’ll do it on the advice of Amy Klingler, our friend who runs the clinic in Stanley, but I’m not happy about it.

Instead of what I hoped would happen—getting vaccinated in Stanley—I’ll have to go to St. Luke’s Wood River, between Hailey and Ketchum. It’s a place I fear and loathe, partly because the St. Luke’s organization has become a brutalist, malignant, administration-heavy cyber-structured medical bureaucracy that has, Borg-like, gobbled up independent medical operations all over Idaho, and partly because my most recent memory from there is colonoscopic in nature. Resistance is futile in either case.

The Stanley clinic’s health district is headquartered in eastern Idaho. The Stanley clinic will receive vaccine shipments in proportion to the population it serves. It’s competing with Idaho Falls and Rexburg, the home of BYU Idaho, whose students, last fall, were caught conducting COVID-spreading parties so they could sell their antibody-laden blood for tuition. Stanley, with its official population of sixty-three, is going to be far down the priority list.

St. Luke’s Wood River is in the more tightly organized South Central District, but I’m not counting on getting vaccinated anytime soon. The Wood River Valley will get far more vaccine than we will, but it’s a community where seventy-five-year-olds outnumber children. There will be a long line, one full of people who have lawyers on retainers and whose only desire is for the process to be completely fair for themselves and their families.

I’ve told Julie I’d wait until we could get vaccinated together, a notion she rejected immediately. But I think that once vaccine production hits high gear, we’ll go from famine to feast all over Idaho, at least as far as vaccines are concerned. In that case, we could end up getting vaccinated on the same day.

________

Nothing is sure, I remind myself. We could die the day we’re scheduled to get the vaccine, possibly by missing a curve on Galena Summit. I’d rather not, as I’ve explained above, but the irony of dying on the way to one’s own vaccination—the irony of dying on the way to anything—has the effect of literalizing the metaphors we sometimes confuse with real life. That’s a good thing. Literalized metaphors become real life, real tears, real turns in trackless powder, and they don’t always contain wide-ranging meaning. They do have a comforting solidity once you reach out and touch them.

As if by magic, the Capitol had become a place where poetry and hymns were sung. It had become high enough moral ground that Donald Trump couldn’t be there, for fear of altitude sickness.

It was a place where Joe Biden could say he wanted to be a president for all Americans, even the ones who had voted against him. For me, the best moment was when Amanda Gorman, a twenty-two-year-old poet, embodied a brilliant hope as she read her poem detailing what it would take to finally lay down the burden our country’s history.

Julie was in tears of relief and joy for most of the ceremony, but I wasn’t. The last inauguration that brought tears to my eyes was Bill Clinton’s, and I remembered too well the way that turned out.

Clinton accelerated the move of U.S. manufacturing to China, Vietnam, and Mexico. He continued Reagan’s destruction of labor unions, one of the main supports of the American middle class. He put the country’s hopes and dreams in the incompetent but no doubt enthusiastic hands of Monica Lewinsky. Along the way, he showed us that an intelligent psychopath, one who had abdicated moral authority, could get re-elected to our highest office.

So even when Joe Biden called on Americans to live in a world ruled by Fate, one where our only human defense against a brutal universe was to need a hand or lend a hand, I didn’t cry. I just hoped that this time, our president wasn’t a psychopath.

________

I taught college students for twenty-odd years, and Amanda Gorman brought back memories of hyper-intelligent young adults in my classes. I remembered people for whom my biggest contribution to their education had been to get out of their way. I remembered entire semesters where I had assigned a list of favorite books and then watched what happened when ten or twelve or fifteen good minds grappled with life-and-death ideas. I had learned that when a professor started dictating answers instead of asking questions, mediocre students took a lot of notes and thinking students got bored. I saved my deep attention for the thinkers and learners and let the others keep up as they could.

Amanda Gorman interested me because she wasn’t singing poetry that was cynical or enraged or bored. Those are popular choices for a lot of our young writers these days, especially ones who have been reduced to serfdom or paralyzing anxiety or dull resignation by educational loans. (Future historians, if there are any, will record that banks and colleges and universities reintroduced slavery in the United States with easily acquired and impossible to retire college debt.)

But Gorman’s professors, her family, her fellow students, and her own clear ambition had brought her to this point, standing on the steps of the Capitol, reading her work to the president of the United States. A lot of people had helped her to get there. None of them, as far as I could tell, had convinced her that her horizons had limits.

She still has a long way to go. She wants to run for president in 2036. What had been Robert Frost’s career peak, and Maya Angelou’s too, is for her merely a foothill.

To listen to someone that confident and still quite aware of the pain, terror, and danger the next four years will hold must have given Joe Biden a moment of genuine hope for his country. He’s old enough to know that a human being, standing alone, doesn’t stand a chance in this world. It was good to see his own future given a chance, in the form of Amanda Gorman. It was good to see him give her a chance. It will be good to see her given many more chances.

________

Garth Brooks sang Amazing Grace. His performance was in sharp contrast to the scenes of rioters in the halls of the Capitol. I had the thought that his singing would make for telling irony if done as a voice-over to all the scenes of mayhem videoed on January 6. As a performer, Brooks must have known he would enrage a plurality of his fans by singing a song of reconciliation and love and salvation at Joe Biden’s inauguration. I’ve already seen a hit piece on him saying that his fist-bumps with Democratic officials indicate his willingness to hang out with near-term abortionists and other friends in low places. Death threats cannot be far behind.

Brooks’s performance sparked a good if ancient memory. Julie and I asked her older brother and two younger sisters to sing Amazing Grace at our wedding. For me, at least, it was a presumptuous request. On that day—August 17, 1996—I wasn’t sure a wretch like me could be saved, or that Julie and I, pledging that our union would last until death, would be blessed with the kind of grace that could make that promise last.

The future looked just as dubious then as it does now, and while my sins weren’t as dark as those of John Newton, the reformed slave-ship captain who wrote the hymn, I wasn’t at all sure I deserved forgiveness from God or myself or a series of angry ex-girlfriends. Also, I had colleagues in the English Department who had urged me, upon finding out that I was dating a student, to date someone less innocent, less trusting, less intelligent, and less willing to give her heart than Julie.

I ignored their advice, and Amazing Grace has turned out to be a better selection for our wedding than we could have imagined twenty-five years ago.

We’re going to ask her siblings to sing again at our fiftieth anniversary, if we all get there. I’ll be ninety-five. Making it fifty years together will require a more grace-filled and less dangerous world than we’ve lived in so far.

We’re taking nothing for granted, not grace, not good works, not even our good friend Mr. Dumb Luck. But watching the inauguration last Wednesday, we began to feel that we could at least start planning our future. We put Amanda Gorman on the guest list.

________

I have been sleeping eight or nine hours a night since Biden’s inauguration. In the afternoons I’ve been napping on the couch. A great relaxation has come over me, and I’ve realized it’s because Donald Trump is no longer in the White House. I no longer scan the headlines, worried that some fundamental axiom of human decency will have been violated, that some self-aware, competent official will have been fired, or that another woman will reveal assaults physical and legal. I no longer have that small edge of anxiety that awaits each day’s evidence that our government takes satisfaction from being cruel, that it pardons the guilty and executes the insane and takes children from their parents.

I hadn’t realized the weight of the shadow of fear and anger that the Trump Administration cast over the country, and the depth of the ugliness generated by its willingness to punish people of good will. I’ve always believed Solzhenitsyn’s dictum that the line between good and evil runs down the middle of the human heart, but the last four years have demonstrated that the line can be moved so a heart contains far more evil than good.

Trump moved the line for us all. His anger and paranoia have been contagious. His lying has generated terror and rage in hearts where no terror or rage had existed before. His own fears—of losing, of being found out for the hollow human being he is, of discovering that other people are people too, more honest, more decent ones than he is—have found their way into the collective psyche.

Amanda Gorman suggested that we cannot lay down the burden of our history if we don’t study it, know it, understand it, remember every year of it, and tell the truth about it. By extension, if we forget it, ignore it, lie about it, whitewash it—that burden will become heavy enough to break the mind of this nation. It nearly did so on January 6. 

But the prohibition against remembering has been lifted. Buried images keep coming to the surface. They’re not pretty, but once we see and acknowledge them, we no longer have to spend our energy making sure we don’t think about them. We can spend that energy moving the line that divides our heart back toward its center.

________

It will be a long time before the images of the Capitol riot fade from my mind. It will be a long time before I forget that image of a cop being beaten with a flagpole, or of the retired Air Force officer in combat gear, carrying zip-tie handcuffs for captured congresspeople. I won’t forget the breaking windows or the furniture piled against doors. I won’t forget the profanity, the threats, the feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, the broken windows and doors, the murder of a man just doing his job. Fortunately, neither will the FBI. 

Rumors are circulating that Capitol rioters were infiltrated by Antifa, and that no Trump supporter would destroy property or disobey a policeman. The video is pretty convincing that they would.

On January 6, our country very nearly lost its vision of itself. I have no doubt that had Trump succeeded in derailing the certification of the Electoral College votes, he would eventually have ended up as the contemporary equivalent of Mussolini, hanging naked upside down from the marquee of a gas station. But millions of people would have died in the interim, most of them through no fault of their own. Trump would have happily sacrificed their lives and their happiness to his own ambitions.

These are strong words, but they’re backed up by recent history. When a country gets as close as ours was to civil war, not much goes according to plan, unless the plan is for a lot of people to die by violence. As a people, we dodged a bullet. A lot of bullets. I’m relieved that what happened here didn’t keep going like it did in Russia in 1917, Spain in 1937, or China in 1949. Let’s hope that the overwhelming majority of Americans are just as relieved as I am.

________

Psychopaths will be with us always, and as a country we don’t deal with them as we should. We don’t always lock them up as incurably evil, even when they’ve destroyed lots of people. Often enough, we make them our leaders, and that’s going to get us in terrible trouble one of these days, more terrible than the trouble we’ve already been in.

Here’s a primer on how to recognize them:

1. They lie when they could just as easily tell the truth.

2. They’re lazy unless they’re working in their own self-interest. Then they can work really hard.

3. Their intelligence is cold-blooded, unless they’re stupid. Then their stupidity is cold-blooded.

4. They remind you that reptiles once ruled the earth.

5. They never accept responsibility for anything that goes wrong.

6. They never share credit for anything that goes right.

7. People they have been close to in the past will not go near them.

If you recognize any of these criteria in anyone running for office, it’s a good idea, for the country and for your family and for yourself, not to vote for them. If they’re just running in a mob toward the Capitol, tell them to stop and reconsider whether what they’re intending is reasonable and justified. Watch out for the ones carrying baseball bats.

________

Amanda Gorman gave us a compass for right and wrong in her poem, and a moment of grace for a country that needed it. Watch her sing it again—it’s easy enough to call up on YouTube—and you’ll start seeing a country we would vote for if it were on the ballot. I’m glad Joe Biden was listening. I hope we all were.

This Winterfest, Stanley is facing restrictions enforced by an honor code. Facemasks and social distancing will be required, and the pub crawl and all live music will be out-of-doors. Stanley’s mayor is concerned that if the weather is ugly, people will crawl into unlocked restaurants and bars. He’s worried that honor alone won’t be enough to keep them outside, especially if the wind is howling and snowdrifts are making it hard to swing dance in the middle of Ace of Diamonds Street. Also, it could be raining.

The mayor has a point. Winterfest is traditionally a time when the town drunk is a collective noun. Having, in the distant past, attended Winterfests and enthusiastically joined that collective, I have my doubts about anybody’s honor holding up under the strain of copious alcohol, the after-sundown cold and dark, facefuls of wind-whipped sleet, the angry politicization of masks and distance, and the tendency of snowmobilers (right wing) and cross-country skiers (left wing) to form tribes and find defensible structures to cluster in.

Winterfest’s traditional outhouse race is on. So is the traditional drag race, Stanley’s nod to gender diversity, where heterosexual white males get to dress up in the clothes of mothers, wives, and girlfriends and run the length of Ace of Diamonds on snowshoes.

The fat-tired bicycle race is probably on unless the course is too snowy or too soft or is solid see-the-grass-through-it ice. The backcountry figure-eight competition, sometimes held if the conditions are right, probably won’t happen because right now our slopes are covered by an eighteen-inch layer of sugary snow under a two-inch rain crust. We’d need a foot of chilled, fluffy powder to get people to even sign up.

Julie and I won’t be going to Winterfest. We’re too close to having vaccines at the Stanley Clinic, and, as I’ve been explaining to friends, we don’t want to be the last people to die on the morning before the armistice is signed.

________

As of this writing, a new, more contagious COVID variant (B117) has spread from the UK to Colorado, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Georgia, Florida, Oregon, and California. According to epidemiologists, its transmissibility ensures that natural selection will make it the most widespread viral variant by March.

Given that some people in those states are skiers, and wealthy enough to vacation or even have a home in Sun Valley, it’s likely that the UK variant is already sixty miles south of us. Somebody carrying it is likely to get bored with groomed slopes and long spread-out lift-lines. They’ll drive up to attend Stanley’s Winterfest.

Even though the vaccines are designed to be effective for all sorts of strains of the virus, I’m worried that easier transmission will mean increased virulence. We’ve been told that initial viral load is a prime factor in the seriousness of a COVID infection, so wouldn’t the virus spread cell-to-cell more easily once it’s contracted, and thereby increase the viral load in vivo? Just asking.

________

Julie and I did get a good ski in before it rained last week. We went up the north side of Gold Creek, a long ridge a mile north of us. It’s a good place to backcountry ski because you have to cross a mile of flat before you get to the steep stuff. It’s 2600’ vertical to the top, and unless you like a long slog through giant drifts and twisted trees, hiking around and through windswept piles of rocks, and watching for slab avalanches even in the best of conditions, there are easier places to ski. We like it because it’s a steep and scenic tour interspersed with some nice powder slopes. It’s also isolated and a bit scary when you get all the way up there and see how far you are from your vehicle should anything go wrong. 

The route is usually empty of other skiers until we get a track up it, and even then, if we meet somebody, they’re usually smart, deliberate skiers who won’t need rescuing, there to savor the scenery as much as the skiing. You don’t want to be on the same mountain with somebody who takes unnecessary chances. I’ve quit skiing Copper Mountain, the popular backcountry ski hill near Banner Summit, because I’ve seen too many people ski the chutes on its steep north side, and I’ve taken dead skiers down in toboggans before. That was when I was a ski patrolman on Baldy, not free-skiing on Copper. Not that the guys in the sled would have known any difference.

(It’s a problem for ethics class. Q: Do you risk your life to rescue someone who skied down a couloir and got avalanched? A: Of course you do, as long as you’re sitting safe in ethics class.)

Julie and I consider ourselves smart, deliberate backcountry skiers who err on the side of caution, but lots of people who fit that description can still be found on avalanche fatality lists. You can reduce the risks out there, but you can’t reduce them to nothing.

As it was, when we started across the flat from our car, we’d go forty feet and the surface of the snow would drop an inch due to an airy layer of frost about halfway down. We’d go another forty feet and it would drop again. Juno was with us, and if she got off the track her rear legs would spin out in the sugary base layer and we’d have to pull her up on the track again.

“If the snow was any deeper,” I told Julie, “we’d go home and drink tea on the couch.”

“Where you go, I will go,” she said, which has been our private joke ever since she refused to include that promise in her wedding vows. Now when she says it, I can hear the unspoken part of it, which is, “as long as you don’t screw up.”

Fair enough.

We cut a steep track up through the shallow snow of a wind-exposed ridge, for safety’s sake. We didn’t go all the way to the top, because we would have had to cross a slide area on the way, and I wasn’t going to trust the snowpack if it was too deep, at that higher altitude, to be anchored by the sagebrush.

It was a good thing. On the way down, we skied from tree to tree, one and then the other, until we could get on a long hogsback that went all the way to the bottom. We put side-by-side turns down through snow that was soft and deep in spots, wind-crusted in others. Sagebrush kicked our skis around a bit, but we didn’t hit any rocks.

Our tracks looked graceful enough considering the conditions, until Juno came charging down through them, making them look broken and unskilled. It’s a joy for her and for us to have her along, but I wish she’d learn not to contaminate the evidence.

All along our descent, the snow kept breaking and settling. I watched fracture lines jump out from my ski tips and multiply upslope from me, which is never a good sign. Julie stayed at a safe distance until I’d get on the close downside of a big tree trunk, and then she’d catch up. We didn’t start any avalanches, but with deeper snow, we would have been wondering how we were going to get out of there alive.

We kept our tracks on the very top of the hogsback. We avoided terrain traps. We didn’t stick our skis under horizontal logs at speed. We all made it safely back to the car.

________

Outside Magazine has lately put out a flurry of cautionary articles about avalanches and backcountry skiing. It has noted that the age of the people who get hurt or die in the backcountry has been going up. The complacency of long experience and the inevitable geriatric erosion of backcountry skills are taking their toll, according to one article, which sounded reasonable until I read that the casualties the writer was talking about were all thirty-five or so.

In any event, the magazine has taken time out from its Ten-Best articles (a noxious sub-variety of journalism that has destroyed more beautiful places than any number of open-pit uranium mines and deep-water oil wells) to emphasize the trouble you can get into in the backcountry and the precautions you need to take to avoid it.

Outside even published an avalanche poem that says that avalanches don’t care who you are or what you dream of doing with your life, but the people who love you do. That seems obvious enough, but upon reading the poem I realized that you could substitute coronavirus for avalanche and it would mean the same thing: it’s a dangerous universe. It doesn’t really care whether you live or die. For the sake of your own life and the happiness of the people who love you, you should do what you can to take care of yourself. 

It occurred to me that I could do some work on the poem, translate its message and its metaphors into COVIDese, and send it to the Stanley City Council. I realize they’ve approved Winterfest due to pressure from the local hospitality industry, which long ago designed and implemented the celebration to make money in a traditionally slack season.

But this year’s event is a lot like skiing eighteen inches of fragile windslab on a foot of rotten hoarfrost.

This pandemic has killed far more people than all backcountry avalanches put together. One can imagine the reaction of Outside if 400,000 backcountry skiers were buried by avalanches every year, even if most of them were over thirty-five and going to die soon anyway.

If you’re frightened of avalanches (we are), and you spend a lot of time assessing their risks (we do), and you avoid them when you can (like the plague), shouldn’t you also be frightened of a variant coronavirus superspreader event this winter in Stanley?

________

You may think I’ve become a grumpy old fart. Guilty. I’m getting tired of watching people run around without masks in the local grocery stores. I’m tired of seeing people I know in the obituary columns. I’m tired of not seeing good friends because they’re hunkered down just like Julie and I are, waiting for vaccination. I’m tired of having a week of ten-below nights followed by three days of off-and-on rain followed by ten-below nights again. I’m tired of Ten-Best lists, especially ones that mention Idaho, or Sawtooth Valley, or Sprinter Vans.

I’ve only seen one Sprinter Van this month and I’m already sick of Sprinter Vans.

All I can say in my defense is that being a grumpy old fart is an improvement over the person I was when I was skiing the northside chutes of Copper, thoughtlessly endangering myself and anybody who might be foolish enough to try to rescue me.

I don’t do that anymore, and I wear my mask when I go to town. I think of friends and family that I hope to see on the other side of vaccination. When I see happy maskless people walking the streets of Stanley, heading for a bar with an open sign, I only mutter and snarl into my mask a little, and quietly, so I’m the only one who can hear what I’m saying. It’s safer that way.

________

Julie and I witnessed the recent super-spreader event in the Capitol with a deep sadness and an even deeper relief. The sadness comes from understanding that this country is divided into warring tribes who see each other as the embodiment of evil.

The relief comes from seeing video of Donald Trump that indicates he is old, sick, and demented, and won’t be able to run for president in 2024. That may seem a cruel thing to say, but he’s been a bad president, an incompetent administrator and strategist, and he’s brought out the worst in the American people. The country will be a kinder and gentler place if and when he becomes incapable of politics.

He may be incapable of politics now. The people who know him best no longer trust him. They watched him set his mob of supporters on poor old loyal Mike Pence—who foolishly thought he had been chosen as Vice President for his deep Christian incorruptibility—who had to be escorted out of the Capitol Building by Secret Service officers responsible for his safety. Pence may see himself as a future Christian martyr, but like St. Augustine, he’d prefer not to transition just now.

We still worry that the world is in danger of being destroyed if Trump decides that launching a nuclear weapon toward Tehran or Pyongyang will let him stay in the White House for the duration of a national emergency. (It would be a national emergency all right, but like the nation, it probably wouldn’t last any longer than his current term. There’s a reason it’s called Mutually Assured Destruction.)

But nobody in the Pentagon is going to jeopardize their retirement by firing off a nuclear weapon. The military aide with the nuclear football has already been briefed not to let Trump near the codes, and they’ve been changed since the Russian hack anyway. Barring a suicidal chain of command, we all will live to vote another day.

What we will vote for is likely to be a creature put together by a marketing team to appeal to exactly half of Americans.

It’s important that we have contested elections. The Deep State exists, and it consists of millions of people dedicated to keeping Americans at each other’s throats.

________ 

If this idea sounds far-fetched, consider who besides Donald Trump benefits when this country splits between opposing factions. There’s Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, the news business, the ad agencies, the lawyers, the free-trade economists, the retailers of cheap Chinese goods, and the resource and energy companies.

In the case of other countries, a giant enemy paralyzed by infighting is safer than one that knows exactly what it wants. You also get an object lesson that sells your citizens on the advantages of a one-party totalitarian state.

In the case of corporations, equal opposing forces can be tipped one way or the other with a minimum of lobbying. With lawyers, it’s always nice to have an unending supply of people in your waiting room who think they’ve been cheated.

For ordinary Americans, it’s like rooting for one football team or another, which at least keeps our minds off rising sea levels, hurricanes, and economic collapse.

Get all these people giving what they can to right- or left-wing boys’ clubs, and you can keep the pot boiling for another election cycle or two.

_________ 

Yet the recent election was more honest than most. Safeguards were put in, ironically because Trump had insisted the last election was fraudulent.

Eighty-one million people voted for Biden against Trump’s seventy-five million. The Republican Electoral College strategy worked until it didn’t.

One of Trump’s mistakes was telling a lot of people who had lost a lot and are set to lose a lot more that they would be winners, for once. They’re probably disappointed at the moment, having finally seen that they still look like losers on TV.

Another Trump mistake was thinking that he already had the election fixed. He made a typical political newbie’s mistake, thinking that people he had bought were going to stay bought. That’s the reason he’s so enraged at the Georgia governor and secretary of state right now.

Yet another Trump mistake was underestimating the level of violence he was generating in his followers, and how frightening yet familiar it was for the rest of us. Watching on TV, what we saw happen in the Capitol generated not the Shock of the New but the Shock of Recognition. We had seen those expressions on those faces before, in supermarkets and gas stations and waiting at stoplights. We had known exactly what they wanted to do the minute they looked at us.

________

A problem arises with engineered chaos. It soon becomes the real thing, and refuses to stay within safe parameters in a world of declining resources and climate phase-changes and pandemics. As Trump has discovered, trying to craft a little instability risks a collapse of the entire system.

In a worst-case scenario—pretty much where we are now—civil war begins. Institutions that were supposed to last forever disappear. We are led by a series of military men dressed in civilian clothes if we’re lucky. If we’re not, we get a Stalin, a Mao, a Mussolini or a Hitler or a Franco. One thing we won’t get is a Trump or even a Senator Cruz or Hawley.

In any event, the America we knew before January 6 is gone forever.

I expect more violence before, during, and after Biden’s inauguration, more and more strident allegations of a stolen election from Trump supporters, a gradually escalating war between police and people of color, multiple versions of the truth for everything, a lot of innocent people dead, a lot of once-nice people no longer innocent.

________

Sigmund Freud has been justly condemned for his misogyny, homophobia, pathologizing of outsiders, prurient Puritanism, his shoehorning of all human motivation into the Oedipus Complex, and his annoying compulsion to tell you what you’re really thinking. But our own culture has, in cancelling Freud, thrown out a number of babies with the bathwater.

Among these are the ideas that the unconscious exists, and that its contents consist of what we know but refuse to think about, and that we project onto others those things we don’t like in ourselves, and that any civilization has multiple traps and snares that cause deep pain to the people forced to follow its rules. The attack on the Capitol was carried out by people made unconscious by rage, who wanted to destroy a civilization that has by definition stunted their lives, and who were looking for someone they could blame for making them destroy it. It was appropriate that they were called to action by a person who hasn’t possessed conscious awareness for years.

One of the reasons that Trump can tell lies and have them seen as deeper truths is because he operates entirely on an unconscious level, and so can connect directly with the unconscious of his followers. It’s like God talking to them, if God lives caged in the darkness within.

In such a situation, impulse substitutes for critical thinking, and impulse becomes the only reality. Impulse does not allow for self-doubt, nor does it allow for any distinction between truth and lies. It does allow for unrestrained violence against the people whom their God says deserve punishment.

________

Even if you’re stuck hunkering down at home, dependent on screens for information, you’re not completely at the mercy of people who tell you only what they want you to believe. You can stop listening to only one network, for one thing. You can start reading history, for another.

Critical thinking has been around for three thousand years, and it’s teachable to anyone capable of reason and skepticism. You don’t believe what you’re told just because the person telling it roots for the same football team, is one way of putting it. You never look at the world through the fogged-over lens of ideology, is another. You approach new data knowing you’ll have to work hard to make sure it’s true, and once you decide it is true, you have to be willing to renounce any cherished belief that it shows to be false.

Critical thinking has been codified as the scientific method, and it’s a powerful way to get at the truth. It’s not perfect. Scientists, like any group of humans, can be stampeded into asking the wrong questions of the world, sometimes for centuries. And the scientific method is slow. Humans are sometimes too impatient to wait for solid evidence to base their actions on, especially if they’ve discovered the sheer exhilaration of acting on rage.

________

I have watched the Republican party struggle with critical thinking since Richard Nixon was wandering the halls of the White House with a glass of scotch, talking to the portraits of his predecessors. From that time on, instead of subjecting their own doctrines to skepticism, they’ve doubled down again and again. Magical thinking has taken the place of honest observation of the world. Where reality intruded, reality has been blamed on Democrats. Where lies were needed to get elected, lies were told. Where votes needed suppressing, votes were suppressed.

When fighting for principles was called for, they fought for lies and called them principles.

When George W. Bush’s advisor Karl Rove told a reporter that, “we’re an empire now, and an empire creates its own reality,” he was talking about a purely Republican empire. He was also talking about lies becoming the truth if you apply enough pressure. It’s an assertion that devolves down to the ancient doctrine of might making right.

It has been a process of decades, and generations of lies and liars have culminated in the compulsive liar Donald Trump becoming president. To turn Karl Rove on his head (something I’ve always wanted to do), when you destroy a reality with lies, you destroy the empire that created it.

Trump’s followers, in the aftermath of trashing the Capitol, suddenly find themselves in a world where wishes don’t come true just because you want them to, with warrants out for their arrest and termination notices in their corporate email. The Republican Party, which once trumpeted law and order, has corrupted the law and promoted disorder and defiled the temple of our democracy.

Trump’s militias brought zip-tie handcuffs into the Capitol, looking for members of Congress. They erected a gallows and noose across the grass from the marble steps, which recalled the terrorism of the Jim Crow years. They tried to overthrow an elected government before it could be installed. They killed a cop.

Then they tried to blame their own actions on Antifa, their go-to scapegoat.

It’s rare when an entire ideology collapses so completely into incoherence, but that’s what has happened to Republicanism. I know the Democrats don’t have a comprehensive and accurate vision of the world, but they’re masters of realism compared to Republicans. They at least know that the hard work of critical thinking can discover, however slowly, a reality that all Americans can believe in.

That requires that all Americans become critical thinkers. It’s a nice thought, but unrealistic.

The real masters of realism, of course, work at Johns Hopkins. From the Johns Hopkins Covid Map this morning: 22,410,609 U.S. infections. 374,348 U.S. deaths.

Perhaps I was overwhelmed by committee work, or by the stacks of essays I was correcting, or by the line of students that formed outside of my office every afternoon, demanding serious attention and care. On the one hand I was listening to my advisees tell stories of family illness, grief, financial disaster, divorce, death, and incest. On the other I was listening to colleagues moan about how overworked they were.

So I stood up in a late-November faculty meeting and said, “We’re spending a lot of time talking about working too hard, but I put myself through grad school working on a cement crew, and you people [I used the phrase you people] don’t work nearly as hard as the people who built the buildings you teach in. I’m teaching an overload and correcting eighty essays a week, and I feel like I’m in the best job I’ve ever had. Part of it is that I like the work, but part of it is that compared to being a cement worker, it’s not that much work.”

There was dead silence for a moment, and then people resumed complaining. I had committed one of those acts that is never acknowledged in polite company, no matter how bad its odor. After the meeting, the dean of the faculty came up to me and said, “Thank you for saying that. But you’re never going to get tenure.”

________

You cannot plan the future when you’ve been told it’s not going to happen. You also cannot depend on getting a job you’ve trained for, or assume you’ll get vaccinated on schedule, or think that your quick trip to Samarra will allow you to skip your meeting with Death, even if you’ve been told that he’s searching for you somewhere else. Looking at the 90,000 or so words I’ve put in this journal so far, you can’t even be sure you won’t write a book, if some future Daniel Defoe decides to turn your words into a Journal of the Plague Year.

Geneticists have computed the odds of you being you, and me being me, starting from one of our distant ancestors in the Pre-Cambrian, and they say that our existence in any form is statistically impossible. Theoretical physicists tell us that to plan the future is to alter it, often in ways that we can’t plan for. Other theoretical physicists tell us that we occupy one of an infinite number of universes, the endless writhing branches of a continuously bifurcating reality. Anyone we can imagine being, and a bunch of someones we can’t imagine being, we are, somewhere and sometime.

In the universe where I was hired by the College of Idaho—after hearing from colleagues, people on the grounds crew, cafeteria workers and even the college president that I wasn’t going to get tenure—I ended up getting tenure. I was even promoted to full professor after fifteen years.

In all, I spent twenty-six years on the College of Idaho faculty, but the last ten of those years were as the College’s writer-at-large, a position that didn’t come with a salary. During yet another institutional financial crisis, I had traded that expensive full professorship for a relatively cheap decade of medical insurance for Julie and me. It was more than worth it for all concerned, but yet more evidence that neither the College nor I was in a universe where tenure meant what it was supposed to mean.

Julie started editing for a company that produced sales literature for Hewlett-Packard, and I started teaching in a low-residency MFA program. We moved to our house in Sawtooth Valley. It has been our home universe ever since.

________

New Year’s Day, 2021: As we were getting ready for a Zoom call with friends in Illinois, Julie turned to me and said, “This time last year we weren’t thinking about a pandemic. This time last year we didn’t Zoom our friends, we got on a plane and visited them. We went out to dinner in Chicago. We walked in the lakefront park and stood under the Bean and looked at the picture of Dorian Gray in the Art Institute.”

This time last year we were looking forward to a jubilee year, which would be marked by my seventieth birthday, Julie’s fiftieth, and our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. I was going to be reading in London on my birthday, but the other two occasions were going to be crowded celebrations at our house.

But the future we—and the rest of the country—thought we had this time last year is now a desert of expectation. The pandemic has put us all in a new place, and every day that it goes on carries us further from the old place.

That doesn’t mean that Julie and I and the country don’t have a future. It just means that if a year ago we had tried to predict anything, we would have been a little wrong in February, a lot wrong by April, and completely wrong by now.

That’s why, if you were today expecting me to provide a list of predictions for the New Year, you will be disappointed. I’m not going to tell you that every Idaho seventy-year-old will be vaccinated by May, or that Donald Trump will be crowned Emperor for Life by June, or that four Supreme Court justices will resign by July. I won’t say that in August the stock market will crash or that China will invade Taiwan and that Shanghai and Taipei will be destroyed by nuclear weapons. I’m not going to tell you that 2021 will see an accident at a Russian bioweapons facility reduce the human population by fifty-eight percent. I won’t predict our country will be in a civil war, or that seven U.S. senators, three of them from western states, will be hanged for treason. I won’t even tell you that the College of Idaho will go bankrupt due to a permanent shut-off of foreign student visas and CTE lawsuits from brain-damaged football players.

According to some theories of physics, all these things will happen sometime, somewhere. It’s a scary multiverse.

________ 

Sometimes the unknowable isn’t all bad news. Julie and I, walking into a College of Idaho classroom in 1989, couldn’t have known that we would spend happy decades together. It was her first class as a student, and my first class as a professor.

Even if I had believed it was ethical to fall in love with a student and marry her, I would have said to myself, “If you do that, you’re never going to get tenure.”

Julie and I have tried to figure out how we ended up together, and the best we can come up with is that hitting adolescence in vast non-civilized spaces (she on a ranch in the Eastern Oregon desert, me in Sawtooth Valley) deprived us of the kind of socialization that we needed to become normal, non-alienated, fully-tenured human beings. We both had a language invented over years of talking to ourselves, but neither of us expected to find another native speaker.

We both recognized socialization as a kind of covert violence that we had never experienced. (My father was a trapper. Julie’s father was a rancher. We knew what up-close violence looked like and knew when it was necessary for existence and when it wasn’t. Socialization, when we figured out what it was, looked like a totally unnecessary detour to the slaughterhouse.)

At any rate, the decades have flown by—as they do when you’re having fun—and I’m still in love, and Julie says she is too.

Julie has become a better cook, and she was a good one to begin with. I’ve become a better person. Shows what good cooking can do for you.

________

This year I’ve been emailing friends New Year’s greetings, wishing them, as a kind of mantra, good news from unexpected directions all year long. I’ve been sincere but non-specific, as I don’t know what unexpected good news would mean to them.

But the other day I got some good news from out of the blue that was wonderfully specific. Jeremy Garber, an employee at Powell’s, the great independent bookstore in Portland, put my A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World on a Lit Hub list: Best Under-the-Radar Books of 2020.

I’ve never met Jeremy, but I call him friend.

Lit Hub is a national book-focused website with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and Hundred Pieces’ ranking on Amazon jumped from down in the millions to up in the thirty-thousands. That may not sound like much, but it’s a great leap in a universe where 2,200,000 books are published each year.

Also, we went skiing New Year’s Day on Banner Summit, and a slope that had been terrible skiing a few days before had received a five-inch layer of powder. The subsurface crust had softened up, and the snow was so good that you didn’t even have to think to turn. We exhausted ourselves and the dog, climbing up and skiing down again and again, and got back to the car tired and happy. We were with our friends Liesl and Michael and Sean. Everybody remembered how to ski. Everybody was still in good enough shape to ski. It felt good for Julie and me to start the year off in the presence of other human beings.

On the suddenly reasonable assumption that what you throw out into your world comes right back at you, I’m wishing everyone reading these words even better news, from far more unexpected directions, for the entire upcoming year, and the year after, if you can stand it.

_________

The day I received tenure at the College of Idaho I became certain that I would die in the harness. I would teach long beyond my safe-to-consume date, and my students, used to waiting for long pauses while I collected what was left of my wits, would discover that my draped-over-the-lectern pose was due to death, not fatigue. It would not be a bad way to go, I decided. I loved teaching and I loved the College and couldn’t think of a better way to get old.

That imagined future didn’t happen. My imagination has gotten richer and deeper since then, and I’ve thought of even better futures. One thing I’ve stopped doing, though, is thinking the future has any relationship to the present. You can’t count on anything happening until it happens.

If you want to make the gods laugh, goes the old saying, tell them your plans. But that assumes a certain malice on the part of the gods, and further assumes that you always plan what’s best for you. In the presence of endlessly bifurcating realities, that’s impossible. Also, the gods—even the tiny quantum gods in charge of delivering us one future out of many—might be more benign than we give them credit for, and they might gift you with nice surprises from unexpected directions, and they might appreciate a little gratitude once in a while.

Good things can happen, and many good things are my 2021 wish for you, me, Julie, my former you people colleagues, everyone else within reading distance, and especially Jeremy who works at Powell’s in Portland, who liked my book well enough to recommend it for a kind of tenure. If you see him there and you’ve been vaccinated, give him a hug for me.

This Christmas, in what suddenly seemed like an empty house, we were wishing others were with us. Nobody among close friends and family has died in the pandemic, but our solitude reminded us that there are people—once close—we will never see again. In the absence of loud and happy conversation, people we hadn’t seen or thought of for a long time crept into the silences. Several times in the past year, when I put the name of an old acquaintance into a search engine, I found an obituary. It was a shock, every time, even though I can read the actuarial tables as well as anybody.

Julie and I and Juno did do a Christmas ski into Redfish Lake Lodge during the late afternoon. We had to wait for Julie’s pie to come out of the oven, so by the time we got on the snow, the day was already getting darker. By the time we reached the Redfish docks, a snowstorm was beginning to hover over the peaks. The dark chased us back to the car. We had to take off our sunglasses or we couldn’t see to ski.

________

Once home, Julie got serious with dinner. Juno went to sleep on the floor in front of the woodstove.

The menu:

Grilled Leg of Lamb
Roasted Garlic Potatoes
Kale and Arugula Salad with Pine Nuts
A ’16 California Zinfandel
Port or Brandy
Apple Pie
Black Coffee
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Movie)

We made it as far as the Zinfandel, although I did get the dishes done before I fell into bed.

________

Although it’s not listed, guilt was on our Christmas menu. This year has brought with it too many examples of lives ended, jobs and homes lost, careers destroyed, hopes dashed. We find ourselves dismayed that our country consistently ignores—when it doesn’t deliberately harm—the poor people within its borders. We know that our Christmas dinner—all paid for, consumed under our own roof, with enough left over for Boxing Day—puts us among a fortunate minority of Americans. Our economy has become a zero-sum game, and this winter, if you watch the news, having enough can feel like a crime.

At the same time, we fear the sudden change of circumstance that could render our happiness into grief, our savings into worthless paper, our health into sickness, our world into ruins. Both of us absorbed the deep lessons of Depression Era parents and grandparents: work hard, save compulsively, use it up, wear it out, make it do, never buy new. Both of us absorbed the even deeper lessons of the Cold War and of the AIDS epidemic and of nursing homes: in the end, other people make your life-and-death decisions for you. You can do everything you’re supposed to do and still have no idea if your virtuous, well-planned, well-deserved life will last out the week.

Here’s the mantra: It’s really not up to you. It’s never been up to you. It will never be up to you.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t feel guilty about it.

Julie and I have spent nearly thirty years in the muddy psychic terrain between the guilt of having a good life we didn’t really deserve and the anxiety of losing it all through no fault of our own. Yet life remains interesting and full of joy. It’s a contradiction we’re in no hurry to resolve.

________

A week before Christmas, we cut a small skinny tree from a thicket of volunteer lodgepole in the back yard. We decorated it with lights and strings of beads, and the ornaments that Julie’s grandparents gave her over the years she was growing up. We attached red velvet bows to the ends of branches, wrapped the tree-holder in a brocaded cloth, and turned on the lights.

It looked just like all the other Christmas trees we’ve decorated over the years. Now and then we get a new ornament as a gift, and this year Julie made a needlepoint snowman that sits up near the top. But anyone seeing our tree this year and seeing any of our other trees over the last twenty years would have trouble distinguishing between them. Dr. Seuss could claim them all as his own.

We called it good. We called it funny-looking. We called it beautiful. In our house, all those things go well together.

________

We did finally watch A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood on Boxing Day. It’s a movie about Fred Rogers, whose television show for young children, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, was the subject of parody and ridicule for its general sappiness. But it was also a program that met tiny children on their own turf. It was designed to address what worried them, what made them angry or confused, and what made them happy.

Fred Rogers had figured out that few children, even ones raised in privileged homes, get to have real selves in real time. They get damaged by families who love them for who they are expected to be, not for who they are. In every episode, though, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood treated them like real persons. For many of these children, it was the first step on a lifetime project of realizing they were a person, and that personhood was worth protecting and nurturing.

The movie made it clear that Fred Rogers, a Christian minister, lived as he believed. He practiced Christian charity, which simply meant that he genuinely loved his fellow humans and, when he had the opportunity, acted on that love.

The movie also made it clear that living a life of Christian charity isn’t easy. It takes time, sweat, tears, and pain, but it’s likely the only path most of us have to any kind of earthly happiness. As for the people around you, you allow them to have real selves in real time. It’s good for them and the company of real people is really good for you.

________

One of the lines in the movie referred to the idea—widespread across cultures and countries—that just about the time you learn how to live, you get old and die. It might be more accurate to say that when the evidence becomes overwhelming that you’re mortal, you become open to the idea that life isn’t all getting and spending, winning and losing, righting wrongs and making sure that you’ve justified your life exactly as you’ve lived it. All of these things are crushing burdens for human beings, and any idea that counters them—such as the soul being a process, one that by definition will never be completed—comes as a happy and freeing revelation.

Every few years I reread Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, an improbably cheerful book that details how human beings are creatures with divine minds trapped in mortal bodies. Becker says the death is a reality we cannot face, and that our lives, our bank accounts, our houses, our art and literature, and our children if we have them, are all attempts to live beyond our Biblically mandated threescore and ten.

A pandemic becomes a near-death experience and causes us to even more emphatically deny that we are subject to death. Becker notes that the same thing can happen when your football team loses a championship game, or your new car gets a ding in a parking lot, or a typo is discovered in your just-published book. Make any little thing into your immortality project, and it can be a near-death experience if you find a flaw in it.

Becker was a psychologist and social scientist. He was dying of cancer as he was writing Denial of Death. His editors had to finish his book for him, which is delightfully ironic enough to get him into the Writer’s Hall of Fame. He’s immortal in my mind.

His editors also put together a posthumous volume called Escape from Evil. It consists of his notes on the problem of bad people, and he, no doubt by habit, locates the dark side of the human psyche—our fallen nature—in our inability to come to terms with death. We kill people so we don’t have to die ourselves, and we hurt them so we don’t have to feel pain. We leave damaging legacies so our descendants, in their suffering, won’t forget us. We imagine that others want us to die, and that justifies any atrocity we choose to commit against them. Once they’re dead and we’re still alive, we’ve triumphed over death. Or so we think. Temporarily. But only if we’re good at lying to ourselves.

Becker believes in science. He places his faith in the scientific method as a reliable way to know the universe we’re in. He notes that organized religion owes existence to its offer of an escape from death, but he doesn’t comment one way or another on an afterlife. An afterlife is not subject to scientific investigation in the same way as an all-too-present, all-too-real fear of death. Becker, with some wisdom, focuses on what he could explore in the world he still occupies, saving questions of the afterlife for after his life.

_______

I used to tell my student advisees, usually when they had come back from a family funeral and were in their first away-from-home existential crisis, that regardless of what happened after death, death itself was a major lifestyle change. You couldn’t expect to go through it and not have a period of serious adjustment, if you had anything left to adjust.

My students were oddly comforted by this view of things, mainly because religious dogma fails pretty badly at funerals. Conventional certainties about eternal life, as Becker indicates, don’t fare well in the face of an open casket.

My own view of the afterlife is not marked by any certainty whatsoever, but at times I do speculate that everybody goes to hell after death, and hell is an indefinite period of examining, from a cosmic perspective, every evil thing you ever did. You get to relive every anger, every easy way out, every mean thought, every bit of sloth, avarice, self-righteousness, greed, envy, lust, and gluttony, all from a position of knowing better. I’ve been proceeding on the hope that you get time off if you start early.

Heaven springs into existence when you finally own up to your sins, understand why you committed them, and know that you’re not capable of committing them again.Not many people make it to heaven, at least on any human scale of time.

________

Science is a method of questioning reality, and as such it gives many more answers about what isn’t than what is. It tends to destroy religious dogma on contact. Didactic images of the afterlife fall apart in the face of the Laws of Thermodynamics. Wine is much more likely to turn to water than the other way around. Walls do not tumble down when you blow ramshorns at them. Snakes do not talk. People cast into fiery furnaces do not walk unharmed out of them.

Demonic possession is a real thing, but the demons turn out to be brutal grandparents seven generations removed, their sins cascading onto the heads of their descendants through time.

Resurrection and eternal life? Still awaiting scientific evidence.

One thing that science seems to be unable to falsify is Christian ethics. Simply put, you don’t have to believe that Christ exists to behave like him. You don’t have to prove that God exists if God is love. In the presence of love, the eternal starts edging into our lives. Also questions of conscience spring up. They tend to banish questions about the afterlife into an irrelevant future.

If you’re looking for certainty in this world, there’s plenty of it on your own plate, in the choices you make to be kind or not. You certainly don’t have to wonder whether or not they exist.

________

Four hundred thousand more Americans have died in 2020 than died in 2019. That number is evidence enough that business as usual will not occur in this generation.We will never go back to what we were.A new generation has been forged this year, and it will have to live in a new world. A lot of happy conversations are going to be tempered by silences.

Four hundred thousand. No science of grief exists to quantify the effect those deaths have had on the families torn apart by them, but none is needed. The grief is there, enormous and unmoving. There’s no explaining it away. You can refuse to share it, but only at the cost of ignoring the truth that one of those grieving families could be yours.

Will be yours. Grief is woven into the fabric of human existence. Loss is the price of having love in your life. It’s worth it, but that doesn’t make it any less painful.

Fred Rogers had the ability to value and respect little kids as they were when he was talking to them. For a lot of them, that was the moment they snapped into personhood. To have someone focus on who you are and what you’re trying to express seems to be essential for human development, judging from the amount of people walking around who never became persons.

We owe it to ourselves to pay attention to each other, if only so we can live in a world where when you look at a human, you can expect somebody to be in there.

There’s room for Christian ethics in our response to the grieving, even if it’s only to say, “What you’re feeling is real. I’m sorry this thing happened to you. I will grieve with you, so you won’t be alone in your grief.”

That sort of thing won’t save the world, but it will make one small part of it—your part of it—a friendlier place.

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.

________

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.

________

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.

________

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.

________ 

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.

________

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.

One prisoner escapes his chains, leaves the cave, and wanders amazed through the trees, farms, and cities of the outside world. When he sneaks back into the dark cave to describe to his fellows all that he’s witnessed, they refuse to believe him.

Watching their sunburned escapee friend stumble around in sun-blinded confusion, the prisoners resolve to never try to escape.

This small story forms the core of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. It’s a story useful to anyone who teaches critical thinking, because it’s a handy way to explain that reality isn’t always what it seems.

I used to mention the cave in journalism classes when I was trying to explain the need to verify news stories. “As a reporter, you need to know when something looks like what it isn’t,” I told them. “That requires time, effort, and a perpetual refusal to take things at face value.”

“That’s why you go into interviews having done some research. You find out if the person you’re interviewing has a reputation for lying. You interview more than one person. You consult experts on points of dispute.

“You can maybe start thinking a story is true once it’s been verified by two independent sources, but don’t stop at two. Keep looking, and never refuse to change your mind when new evidence contradicts old evidence. Don’t ever mistake what you know for what’s real.”

It’s been a while since I taught journalism, but Plato’s Cave has stuck with me, especially this winter in Sawtooth Valley, where evidence of the outside world comes from an occasional pickup or SUV on the highway, plus aircraft contrails far above our heads, plus the Internet.

In spite of what the Internet tells us, the pickups do not appear to be full of right-wing militia members and they don’t have anti-aircraft guns mounted in their beds. The contrails are too few and too thin to be chem-trails, and the aircraft leaving them don’t look like military transports flying shock troops into cities run by Democrats.

The news stories and commentaries on my computer screen present themselves as reality. They’re not. As a critical thinker, I don’t need Plato to point out that the Internet presents a corrupt and incomplete version of what’s really out there.

That is, if anything is out there.

________

I’ve spent the morning reading people who are expecting Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and refuse to give up the reins of power on January 20. Almost all of these people think that he should do this because he’s been cheated out of the presidency by election fraud. They believe that the military is going to back him up. They cite as evidence increased flights of troop-carrying C-130s out of air bases, and the presence of aircraft carriers off our Atlantic coast.

It’s assumed that Trump cannot take these steps without generating armed opposition from Black Lives Matter and Antifa protestors, but it’s also assumed that these groups will all be rounded up and shot shortly after the military takes control. Also, COVID-19 will be revealed as nothing worse than the common cold, and everyone will take off their masks and go back to work. The Dow Jones will take aim at 40,000. Industry will return to the Rust Belt. Women will return to kitchen and nursery.

On some websites, there are calls for traitors to be guillotined, except for journalists, who instead should be stripped naked and staked out in the desert over fire-ant nests. The ingrate justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, along with Attorney General Barr, are to be executed by firing squad.

You get the idea, reading the commentary on far-right websites, that over the next four years, a lot of people will be executed in ways limited only by their executioners’ imaginations. You also get the idea that a lot of people aspire to be executioners.

I wish I was making this up, but I’m not. These are real comments on real websites, and real people are creating them. I think it’s safe to say they’re not critical thinkers. It’s also safe to say their emotional lives are insanely violent and cruel and their confidence is unshakeable.

________

If the verification techniques I taught in my journalism classes had been followed by every voter in the country, Donald Trump’s stories wouldn’t have won him election in 2016. He wouldn’t have become president if voters had demanded more than one source for their information, if they had insisted he release his tax returns, or if they had pondered the implications of his legal history.

He wouldn’t have become president if an outright lie had been a deal-breaker for the average voter.

Now, we are asked to believe the story of a stolen election. Election officials, even in Republican states, are saying it didn’t happen. Voting machine experts are saying it didn’t happen. By any journalistic assessment, it’s an outright lie. But it might keep Donald Trump in the White House.

Lies have put all sorts of people in power and kept them there. But the trouble with basing your power on a lie is that it requires more and more energy to maintain as time goes on. The energy that should have gone into, say, coordinating a response to a pandemic goes instead into making sure that people still believe what you’re telling them. Ultimately, nothing becomes as important as ensuring the real world doesn’t impact your thinking or the thinking of your followers.

All that will be required to paralyze these not-so-United States for the next four years is to keep Donald Trump in the Oval Office. There will be no energy left for anything but making up enough elaborate fictions to keep him there.

________ 

Sawtooth Valley is not a cave, but it has a cave’s ability to substitute for the real. We who live here are not chained to rock walls, and we know that the images on our computer screens may or may not be manipulated. We know the words we read on screens may be true, or partly true, or deliberate lies written by evil people, or by good people crazed by lives of disappointment and tragedy. Also, we here in the valley are free to drive over Galena Summit with our critical thinking caps on and do some good old honest fact-checking.

Most of us don’t bother in these pandemic days. We know that fact-checking, for us, would only confirm that one Costco looks like another. Besides, we’ve got a nice wall here and we love it and its ever-changing shadows.

Even the news simply serves to convince us that other walls are worse. It’s a recipe for complacency, which doesn’t chafe like chains do, and is just as effective in keeping us from seeing the world.

________

Plato suggested that if you want to escape the cave, you could dedicate yourself to a good, solid, eternal idea, like Truth, or Justice, or even Kindness. These ideas were more real than any faint shadow you could discern as a cave-dweller.

I sided with Plato. I told my journalism students that Truth was to be their highest and best goal, and although they could never completely reach it, there were ways of getting ever closer to it. It was worth going to jail for. It was worth dying for, even if it meant being staked out over a bunch of fire ants somewhere south of Tucson.

“Why can’t you ever reach Truth?” they wanted to know.

“Sometimes your whole story is an artifact of your point of view,” I said. “And deadlines always come before you’re done. Some of your interviewees will have filled you full of happy lies. But the story will go to print with your name on it, and you better have done enough work and been perceptive enough that your readers know you’ve seen through the lies, accounted for any research bias, and admitted that you didn’t have time to nail down everything you needed to. If you haven’t done all that, you need to give up on Truth and become lobbyists.”

It’s telling that none of my journalism students are, as far as I know, journalists. A number of them are lobbyists, however, which makes me think they were really paying attention when I described all the ways journalists could be manipulated.

________

Sometime later today the Electoral College is expected to certify that Joe Biden has won the election. I have no idea if it really will do that. There may be enough faithless electors to give the presidency to Trump again, or maybe the military will interrupt the proceedings and announce Trump is president for another four or eight years. Perhaps Trump will declare martial law for a decade. Perhaps Congress will refuse to accept the Electoral College results.

If any of these measures keep Biden out of office, all constitutional restraints on executive authority will be gone.

I know such things can happen, because they’ve happened in other countries, at other times, and the Republican party has convinced me that they won’t let questions of conscience impede their vision of an Ideal Republic, no matter how shabby, avaricious, and ugly that republic ends up being in the flesh.

But I simply don’t know what will happen. I can’t know what will happen and I certainly, at this point, can’t determine what will happen. I no longer can distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t real, especially on the Internet. Uncertainty has become the gray stone wall upon which I watch the news.

________

Philosophers have been busy since Plato, and they’ve taken pains to logically undercut a lot of things that he took for granted, like ideas and mathematical axioms and even the natural world. Deconstruction has shown that if you change the context of an idea you can change its meaning to anything—hence nothing—and that with a little tweaking, you can show that mathematical truth and the natural world exist only as artifacts of an oppressive culture. Plato’s bedrock reality, the world of the ideal, is no longer believed to exist.

Plato’s cave has been expanded to include its own outside. You can’t escape it.

Once people learned how to make reality itself into an artifact, there wasn’t much that journalists and scientists and other believers in Truth could point to in its defense. Even if we could have pointed to Truth’s solid service in World War Two and in the civil rights movement, nobody was listening. Truth itself had already gone over to the enemy.

An astronomer friend has notified me that Jupiter and Saturn will appear as a point of light a week from now, on the solstice. They will be 400 million miles apart, of course, but from our perspective they’ll look like they’re almost touching. It’s the best example I can give of our point of view creating the news these days.

The end of this process—and it is a process, one where each step seems inevitable once it’s been taken—is that each of us becomes a world, and what each of us believes is true. That’s not a good outlook for a country that hopes to arrive at a consensus on where to go, what to do, and what the purpose of our nation should be.

In another week the moon won’t even be visible. By the solstice, chances are good that nighttime temperatures will have hit twenty below. By the new year, if we haven’t kept a sharp eye on the pantry, we will have run out of coffee and died.

They will find us in the spring, our empty cups clutched in hands gloved by frost.

These worries occupy my mind these mornings, usually when I’m placing fresh wood atop the still-glowing coals in the woodstove. One look outside the ice-glazed windows and it’s easy to imagine the days growing shorter right past December 21, getting even shorter into January and February, shorter yet into March and April. By June, the oceans will freeze.

Never mind that the house is warm and soon to be warmer. Never mind that Julie is up, and the kitchen will soon smell of bacon, sourdough, and high-caffeine coffee. Never mind that the size of the woodpile has been carefully calculated to outlast the winter.

Something cold beyond reason starts gnawing at your awareness when you know you couldn’t live through the night without the house, the woodstove, and Costco.com.

________

I am old enough to remember Sawtooth Valley before it had power lines and before Galena Summit was kept reliably open in the winters. I can remember when the highway was a dirt road. I can remember when there were salmon in the river.

I remember our neighbors up the valley—Harry and Martine Fleming, Bill Sullivan, Stubb and Vella Merritt, Ted and Phyllis Williams, Morgan and Tiny Williams, Margie Shaw, Jim and Verna Decker, Sandy and Rosie Brooks. All of them are gone now, but for a while they formed a community of shared hardship every winter, one that helped each other cut firewood and shovel roofs and move cattle and pull each other’s vehicles out of snowdrifts. When Phyllis Williams played piano at the two-room Quonset Hut that was the Stanley School, the whole valley showed up to dance if the snow hadn’t yet closed the roads. There was no TV. The phone was on a party line, and not everyone could afford to join the party. The people who kept animals through the winter couldn’t let them out of the barns for weeks at a time, and in deep snow years they didn’t leave their houses for months, except to keep their animals alive.

Our family was not a part of that community—we left every fall for the Wood River Valley, where my parents had Sun Valley jobs that came with Sun Valley paychecks—but here, every summer, we were welcomed as the exotic summer people we were. My father was a fishing guide, and he visited the ranches up and down the valley, making sure he could take his clients along the Salmon River where it went through their pastures. I remember going with my father to a house-raising for Ted and Phyllis Williams—probably the last house-raising in the valley, because the Sawtooth social contract and its communitarian traditions were fraying even then—and afterward, I overheard my parents talking about Ted and Phyllis’s daughter, Mitzi, who had left the valley and had been vocal about not ever coming back. My mother said it was because Mitzi had gotten a college education, which allowed her to have wider ambitions.

________

Most of the people I’ve mentioned stayed too long in the valley. They finally left when their physical or financial health broke or was about to break under the weight of age, or long winters, or bad beef and hay prices. The kids had escaped as soon as they could. If they ever changed their minds and wanted to come back, the ranches had all been sold.

My parents retired here and eventually became the oldest year-round residents in the valley. But old age makes for hard winters. My parents stayed too long, and our memory of their last difficult years cautions Julie and me against doing the same.

Of course, old age isn’t easy no matter where you are, and wider horizons bring with them agonizing decisions about where to go to feel at home and thoughts about the people you would miss terribly. Julie and I have gotten to the age where we miss people terribly, even when they’re alive and in the neighborhood.

________

The winters are easier here than they were when I was a kid. This is a statement of fact, not some walk-both-ways-uphill-to-school old man foolishness. We have electricity, and a propane furnace to keep the house above freezing if we leave for a week or a month or even longer. We have broadband, and Julie, with her college education, edits sales materials for Hewlett-Packard, writes grants for non-profits, and proofreads books for East Coast writers.

Between her paychecks and my savings, we keep ourselves in groceries, and, until this year, cheap airline tickets. Before the pandemic, we used to be low-rent travelers. We could just get in the car and drive all the way to Boise on a plowed road, board a plane and walk out into the 3 a.m. heat of Bangkok or Saigon, wide awake and ready for adventure.

We’re a long way from that scenario these days. This fall has taken us back seventy or eighty years, to a world where hunkering if not hibernation is essential for survival. It has put us in too-close touch with long-ago Sawtooth Valley adolescents, who spent miserable Januarys and Februarys trapped in too-small houses, stuck with carrying buckets of creek water to cows and horses in too-small barns, swamping out manure-choked stalls, re-reading Great Expectations because they knew just where Pip had come from and where he was going.

That’s why the woodpile looks so healthy, and why we spent our stimulus checks on the new woodstove in the living room. That’s why there are a couple of extra cases of chili in the crawl space. But it’s also why the vehicles in the garage have full gas tanks.

It’s why the To Read shelf is packed with books, and why I’m halfway through Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s fine-print 1877 doorstop. If you’d like to leave the world you’re in and enter fully into another, even if it’s one full of gossip and intrigue and doomed people saying awful things to each other, a Russian novel will do the trick.

________

The winters are also easier because of climate change. We still see twenty below. It still snows enough some years that roofs need to be shoveled. We still ski the peaks in May if we’re not tired of skiing by then. But it’s been a long time since we’ve seen two weeks of forty-below nights and ten-below days. Fifty-five below, the coldest temperature I’ve experienced, hasn’t been reached since the 1980s. It’s been decades since I’ve watched a late May snowstorm come down over Williams Peak from the picture window in the Sawtooth Hotel dining room and listened while the cook padded out from the kitchen, looked at the same frozen view I was looking at, and muttered, “I’m sick of this shit.”

Now, spring comes early. Fall comes late. We worry from July to October that a mega-fire will sweep through the valley, destroying everything.

The earth is 2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in 1712 when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine. Recent headlines note that we’ve gone beyond the target set by the Paris Climate Accord, and a number of exponential feedback loops are in full swing. That means this climate phase change isn’t the last one that will blindly transform our world.

Blind transformation is what phase changes do—they’re a little like black holes, where if you get close to them time gets all wonky and the past doesn’t make it intact to the future.

It still doesn’t feel warm in the darkest twenty-six days of the year. It still doesn’t dispel the feeling that sometime in the next few years you might look at the world we’re in now as a fat Russian novel, full of doomed people who had no idea what was about to hit them.

________

COVID-19 is not the only plague to have hit Sawtooth Valley in the past few years. A blight of giant houses has appeared in spots that have iconic views of the Sawtooths.

The law that established the Sawtooth National Recreation Area specified that the rural/rustic/agrarian values of the valley be maintained as they had been since homesteading days. But what has infested the land of our vanished neighbors consists of great angled mansions, inspired, apparently, by airport terminal buildings. Walls of windows face the mountains. The spaces inside are designed for fundraisers rather than for small, intimate dinners. Who will live in them, and for how long?

Given the climatic, epidemic, and political variables in the air, it’s an unanswerable question. I don’t look to Anna Karenina for answers, even as our country permanently divides into what might be called nobility and what might be called serfs.

I don’t think we’ll have the kind of revolution the Russians had, and that’s a good thing. If some future Trotsky were to lead a proletariat army out of the foreclosed suburbs of Boise, I’m certain that Julie and I would be mistaken for capitalist bourgeoisie and murdered, no matter how poor we are in relation to our new neighbors.

I hope, rather, that we’ll have a revolution in ethics. At some point people will start thinking that building ten- and fifteen-thousand square foot homes in a world where more and more people are homeless is flat-out tacky, ugly, selfish behavior. I can remember touring great mansions in Newport, Rhode Island, built the other time we had robber barons running the country. They had become what in the UK are known as piles, objects of architectural entropy that had become prisons for the heirs of the people who built them. They had begun as hopes for the future, but had ended as burdens from the past, in the form of vast echoing mausoleums for lives of questionable taste.

Meanwhile, in Sawtooth Valley, more of them are going up every time one of the old ranches changes hands. Of them, my friend Bruce says, “There must be giants living in those places.”

“They’re just trying to make a statement,” I say.

“I’m not sure I’d make a statement like that about myself,” says Bruce, “even if I was one.”

_______

I’ve read a big chunk of Anna Karenina, but still have 543 pages left. I hope to finish it by the shortest day of the year, and then start on something cheerier, like The Pickwick Papers or Best American Science and Nature Writing. I’ll read on the couch for a month or so, until the sun stops sinking behind the southern horizon at four in the afternoon. When there’s a little more daylight, and a little more snow, we’ll start skiing the backcountry.

That’s as much of the future as I feel confident to predict. In the meantime I’m spending evenings with a bunch of Russian nobility. I worry about their ability to access French fashion, and who of them is sleeping with whom, and whether or not their serfs should be given land, and which of the Tsar’s army officers are good for their gambling debts and which are not.

You can get caught up in these matters, especially when you remember Anna Karenina is a cultural artifact. It’s not really fiction. It was based on real people, ones careless, pampered, and cruel. They ignored the signs of their times: the pain of the poor, the waste and useless luxury of their social lives, and the criminal injustice they were a part of. They turned away from anything unpleasant in their lives, even when they caused it, and the generations that came after them paid dearly for it.

We hope nobody has to pay for anything Julie and I did or didn’t do. We didn’t mean to end up in a world that is less just than we were told it was in high-school civics class. We didn’t mean to live in a country that has failed to take care of its least fortunate citizens. We didn’t mean to end up in a small warm house with a pot roast in the oven and skis in the foyer and feel guilty every time we see three-hour food lines on TV.

We didn’t mean to end up in a valley full of third and fourth houses, but we did. In these dark days of December, with an election still threatened by martial law, with COVID vaccines still awaiting distribution, our valley seems meaner and colder than it did sixty years ago, a warming climate notwithstanding.

Maybe he believes he lives in a country where a heretofore unknown street gang—the Deep State Democrats—has suddenly shown itself to be organized and committed and corrupt enough to destroy this country’s democratic institutions.

That is some organization. That is some commitment. That is some corruption. I don’t believe any of it. Having been a Democrat long enough to know that they are unorganized, self-destructive, and attract more than their fair share of boy-scout types, I’m pretty sure the Democrats couldn’t steal a middle-school student council election.

If there’s a deep state, it exists in the laws, customs, and behavior of our nation’s civil servants, who collect taxes, enforce zoning laws, run prosecutor’s offices, and attempt to control pandemics. They’re rule makers and rule enforcers. They often enough find a perverse joy in being obeyed to the letter, but they do keep the country running day to day. They are averse to making policy, and instead focus on making sure their own little bailiwick is a tidy and rigid place where it doesn’t matter who’s president. If a political appointee tries to change their agency from above, they will ignore, sabotage, or contravene orders. They are a force for inertia. Deep inertia.

I believe Donald Trump and his followers thought they had this election fixed. The right people were in place to manipulate votes, and enough doubt could be cast on mail-in ballots that they would be thrown out by friendly judges. Secretaries of state were in position to invalidate the votes of entire regions. Election officials had been bought, not with cash but with a wink and a nod that promised increasing power and higher positions in Republican politics as long as they did what was expected of them.

The outrage expressed by Trump, his base, and his supremely cynical enablers comes from having the kind of organization and commitment and corruption they accuse the Democrats of, but still coming up short. When the votes went for Biden, it must have looked to them like the Democrats had done everything they had done, but better. The alternative was to think that all their planning, all their fervor and sneakiness, all their elaborate propaganda, all their vote suppression and map sessions, all their last-minute phone calls to state legislators—all of these, they would have had to realize, weren’t good enough. It was less painful to suppose the Democrats had out-cheated them.

Is it hard to understand why Trump thinks Joe Biden is part of an organization that requires absolute loyalty, absolute secrecy, and absolute dishonesty?

Is it possible to think that Trump’s inside knowledge about how bad, perverse, and ugly human beings can be comes only from his outside?

________

Let’s not go there yet. Instead, let me remember a bunch of people who weren’t bad, perverse, and ugly. They were all eighteen years old, and in my first-year writing classes at the College of Idaho.

A thought experiment I asked them to perform was to imagine our classroom as the center point of a sphere with a radius of a million miles. “Look how tiny this room is in relation to the size of that sphere,” I told them. “Extend the radius out to Mars and Venus and Mercury, and we’d be that much smaller. If the sphere were to include Pluto, it would be so much bigger than we are that for all practical purposes, this classroom wouldn’t exist. We’d be a misplaced zero in a vast computer program, a raindrop in a hurricane, a dollar in the federal deficit.”

Then I asked them, “In this scheme of things, where is the center of the universe?” Silence.

“Include the galaxy,” I said. “Include the Local Group, the clumps and threads that connect the Local Group to other galaxies. Extend the radius of our sphere all the way to the furthest quasar our radio telescopes can detect. Where is its center, still?”

Lots of frowns. A hand up, finally. “Here?”

“Bingo,” I said. “Right here. But there are twenty-five people in this room. Not all of us can be the center of the universe. Which one of us is?”

Another hand up. “The professor?”

Big smile from me. “Six weeks into college, and you’re finally learning something.”

Then I spoiled it all. “When you start with your own point of view, of course you’re going to be the center of things. But you’re not. And no one in the universe is going to care where you think its center is anyway, especially if it’s a sentient dung beetle a billion light years away with its own point of view.”

A voice from the back of the room: “I thought this was a writing class.”

It was an exercise in right-sizing. If I could get them to see how small they were in relation to the universe, and how impossibly far they were from its center if it had one, I might be able to teach them to look around and write down what they saw, simply, honestly, and with humility. I might be able to convince them that other people had their points of view, too, ones different from their own and worth thinking about. I might be able to convince them that a human touch, a helping hand, a declaration of friendship or love or respect can turn indifference into something better.

________

One of the things that college students get for their tuition money is an understanding that the world is far less black-and-white than they thought it was in high school. That’s why—I’m sorry to put it this way—people who have graduated from college vote far less frequently for demagogues than people who haven’t. They’ve been taught critical thinking, which means they have learned to recognize, time and time again, that reality is full of paradoxes and contradictions. Trump offers a simple world to live in, one where the Chinese are bad, immigrants are bad, NATO is ripping us off, liberals exist to be owned, the two types of people are winners and losers, and if you vote for him, you’re a winner.

The world the educated live in is a lot more complicated, its issues far more gray than black and white, its joys more of the cerebral cortex than of the limbic system. Those people getting their diplomas have, for four years, endured writing professors telling them to live, if they can, in a messy human world, one full of loose ends and frayed edges and dubious victories, one constantly demanding repair and forgiveness and, most of all, the hard work of seeing clearly.

“Sure you can be famous,” I told my students. “In a few short years, you could be playing center field for the Yankees, filibustering in the U.S. Senate, arguing before the Supreme Court, doing brain surgery, accepting a Pulitzer, or running your own start-up life-extension company. Maybe all at once. But there are better and more human-scale venues to excel in, better and more humane people to be.”

I don’t know that I ended anyone’s superhero dreams with these words. If I did, I hope that their lives were kinder and gentler for it.

________

Once you decide you’re the center of the universe, you can eliminate the evidence that you’re not, simply by shrinking the universe to fit the limits of your perception. I joked with my students about being the center of the universe, but I had colleagues who took their universes and their places in them far more seriously. It was an occupational hazard, one that resulted in some seriously tiny universes.

When you know more about your one thing than anybody else in your faculty meeting, you start seeing the world, including your colleagues, through the lens of your specialty. Fellow faculty appear as insects if you’re an entomologist, delicate crystals if you teach geology, dubious business plans if you’re in the Economics Department. If I walked into a faculty meeting after teaching a playwriting workshop, I could see flawed scripts taking their seats beside me. I could see happy endings or tragic ones, plot twists, flat spots in the action, full-length plays that had all the substance of one-acts.

Such distortions are harmless, mostly, unless you decide that they’re real instead of artifacts of your perception. Make that sad decision and you’ll be stuck in character for a too-long run, with stupid lines and audiences loudly unwrapping the cellophane from hard candies, and you’ll never again be the person you were before you passed the audition.

________

When you look at Donald Trump as a victim of this process, it’s obvious that he wasn’t in one of my writing classes, at least the ones that focused on the pitfalls of unselfconscious points of view. These days he sees himself as occupying a bigger sphere than most people, and he’s very much in the middle of it. He’s found a lot of people willing to go along with that perception. The ones who won’t are his enemies. The ones who will are his friends. Friends or enemies, they’re all bit players and extras in his drama.

(If only that last rewrite hadn’t added that subplot of the pandemic. It didn’t add any lines for him, and he had to ad-lib, which he’s not good at. Eventually, he just pretended that part of the script wasn’t there, and that he could move the play forward on character alone. That’s a big mistake if you’re Donald Trump.)

Pandemic or not, Donald Trump’s superhero dreams stayed intact until he lost the election. That loss threatens more than just his dreams. The character he’s playing has gotten bigger and louder to compensate for the disappearance of the human being he once was. He cannot let the final curtain come down without his role vanishing, and when it does, there’s not going to be much left but an empty costume in the prop manager’s laundry hamper, and orange greasepaint-stained tissues in the greenroom wastebasket. If he insists that the play have an extra act, he’s going to keep lots of people up beyond their bedtime. More and more they’re just going to want to get their coats and go home.

________

Toward the end of those long-ago writing classes, I would begin to read student essays that were full of researched facts rather than opinions. They sometimes contained self-deprecatory humor, which always earned them a higher grade. (Self-deprecatory humor is one of the ways you can bring a hifalutin discussion back down to human scale.)

Also, instead of grand pronouncements on global communist conspiracies or illegal immigrants or the violent subtexts of Barbie Dolls, I got heartfelt meditations on what it felt like to be the first in the family to go to college, or on the effects of a sister’s corrective cosmetic surgery, or on the difficult relationships between two cousins, one a citizen and one with no possibility of citizenship. Students stopped playing it safe. They started sharing their joys and tragedies, and when I read their writing, I started seeing them as human beings. It made it hard to judge them, which was a problem when a big part of my job was to give them grades, but it made it easy to love working with them.

At the end of the semester, they were no longer stuck at the center of their respective universes. They were far more free to roam the one we all shared.

________

It takes years of practice if you’re going to write to human scale, and years more if you’re going to live to human scale. That’s what I would have told Donald Trump if he had ever signed up for one of my writing classes. I don’t think he would have paid much attention to me.

Even if, by a miracle, I could have shown up at his military academy as his new composition teacher, I don’t think I would have been able to get through to him. He had already mistaken the shadow he cast for himself, and he liked that vast darkness for its size and its effect on others. If I had told him that being human is a kind of Goldilocks endeavor—not too big, not too small—he wouldn’t have believed me.

“Being human is for losers,” he would have said.

I have no idea who will be inaugurated as POTUS on January 20. I do know that if it’s Donald Trump, he or his backers will have depended on the complicity of the Senate and Federal Judiciary. His second four years will rest on legal technicalities, never-before-used constitutional provisions, and the historical precedent (the Hayes-Tilden election of 1876) that brought this country Jim Crow, lynch mobs, the Tulsa Massacre, decades of virtual slavery, and the reconstitution, as a nation-within-a-nation, of the Confederate States of America. It’s easy to imagine that a second Trump term will result in recognizably similar outcomes.

Here’s something else I imagine: a second term will destroy Donald Trump. He is, as his every television appearance reminds us, a poorly aging mound of flesh, well along in a relentless process of corporal and cognitive decay. Big, angry, obese men don’t get discounts on their life insurance policies. Sometime in the near future, Donald Trump, through a combination of rage, age, and what looks like frontotemporal dementia, will be reduced to either a corpse or a nursing home resident.

That his nursing home might be the White House is not without historical precedent—Woodrow Wilson had a severe stroke in early October of 1919, and spent the remaining seventeen months of his presidency unable to talk or walk, his condition kept secret by his wife, Edith, who acted as his proxy. One wonders how Melania would do.

The end of Trump will not mean the end of his policies. He’s created a momentum toward cruelty that’s not going to go away. Too many people have discovered the pleasure of humiliating their enemies. Far too many people have been taught to blame their poverty or misery or lack of education on people of different races or tribes.

Trump has accomplished a lot of division during his time as our leader, and it’s impossible to think that he did it all by himself. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I’m not sure if he’s in control of the forces that back him or if they’re in control of him.

Something There Is That Doesn’t Love A Wall, Robert Frost once wrote. If he were alive today, Frost would be writing Something There Is That Doesn’t Want These States United.

If there are indeed behind-the-scenes disintegrative entities powerful enough to swing the election for Trump, they’ll be powerful enough to put down the meat ax and pick up the scalpel. If the Electoral College anoints Donald Trump, it will do so with the knowledge that it’s anointing President Mike Pence.

________

As long as I’m playing the prophet, let me say that the vaccines available by Inauguration Day will begin to diminish the pandemic and restart the economy, although for the poor and unemployed, it will be too late. The economic forces in play before the pandemic—financialization, inequity in wealth, automation, the increase in jobs with no apparent usefulness, misallocation of resources for housing and infrastructure—have all been strengthened by the past six months, and they won’t go away because we all get vaccinated. Unfortunately for the people alive a generation from now, the pandemic distracted us from problems they will be facing. Instead, it let us concentrate our energies on ways to save the wealth, health, and comfort of Baby Boomers.

As a Boomer, I can appreciate that, but I also know that when a civilization doesn’t put the welfare of its young people first, it dies sooner rather than later.

As a Boomer, I’m in one of the COVID-vulnerable groups, which means I’ll probably get vaccinated before a bunch of other people. Young people can usually survive COVID without serious lasting effects, which is wonderful, but they cannot experience climate change without serious lasting effects. They cannot thrive in an industrial economy—because there won’t be an industrial economy—when the amount of energy it takes to get a barrel of oil out of the ground and refined into its various products approaches the amount of energy in that barrel. They are already experiencing a financial system that rewards the few and impoverishes the many, and poverty has killed far more of them than the coronavirus has killed of their elders.

The vaccines are evidence that our civilization can throw money, intelligence, and accumulated knowledge at a disease, and within a short time make it go away. It sounds like a no-brainer, but we need to identify the more virulent diseases—economic, cultural, climatic—where young people are the vulnerable group, and we need to work just as hard for cures. The effort will require empathy, sacrifice, and good will. These qualities seem to have disappeared among the people who have the wealth and power in this country.

Our oligarchs suffer from a different kind of poverty, but it’s just as lethal as the financial kind. We need a vaccine for it, and at-risk volunteers to test it on.

________

I’ll admit that I’m worried by the prospect of an mRNA concoction rewiring the genetic material in my cells. That’s what viruses do anyway, all the time, but still, it’s a huge moment of trust in science and the good will of pharmaceutical companies when that needle slides into your arm. Every one of the many vaccines in development is years away from being declared fully safe, which makes me worry even more.

Still, Julie and I will get the vaccine when we can. At some point, trusting a civilization that has spent the last century lengthening the lives of its citizens seems reasonable, especially if you’re like most people and are still alive because of it. It will be the end of the pandemic for us, one way or another.

I hope that shortly after my vaccination, Julie can get vaccinated as well and two weeks later, still kicking, we can finally go on a book tour for my end-of-the-world book. Our universe will expand considerably the minute we get in the car and head for motels, bookstores, and real sit-down restaurants while they still exist.

________

If I keep away from the news, our winter of discontent turns into mere winter. A great white calm has descended upon Sawtooth Valley. A car or pickup goes by on Highway 75 every five or ten minutes, but the plows have been working, and snowbanks muffle the sounds of its passing. If I listen closely, I can hear the sounds of the woodstove fan and the hum of the refrigerator, but that’s only when we’re not listening to NPR or a podcast or music. During last week’s storm, we had a couple of short power outages, and we realized how routinely noisy our household is, even in the quiet months.

For the past three afternoons we’ve been out skiing. The sky has been dark blue, clear and cold, and we’ve put tracks in new powder on a hard base. We had watched, with dismay, when a rainy day melted a foot and a half of powder down to four inches of slush, but then it got cold again. The slush froze to a hard, stable base layer that will be with us until April. Then it snowed another six inches.

A skiff of snow is in the forecast for today. I’d prefer something in excess of a foot. I don’t care if I end up shoveling roofs this winter. I’m hoping for a giant snow year. I’m hoping for two weeks of fresh powder every morning, and then another two weeks of the same.

What’s on the ground is fast, easy-turning snow, but we’ve taken it slow. It’s easy to get tripped up, skiing in November—a half-inch of frost on a high rock can ruin your day, and a ski under a downed log can ruin your winter. Reports from Galena and Banner Summits indicate that people are out there on their rock skis, pushing the season, but we’ll wait until it snows another foot before venturing onto the steeper slopes.

It has been a thrill just to glide along in shallow snow, slaloming between sagebrush when we get going fast enough.

I had forgotten that I had sharpened and hot-waxed our skis last spring before putting them away for the summer. It was evidence that the past and some of the people in it are more generous and forward-thinking than I normally give them credit for.

________

It may be our informal quarantine, it may be the season, it may be the time of life, but lately I seem to have signed up for an elementary school memory-of-the-day. It’s similar to the word-of-the-day you can get in your morning’s email, except it appears in your mind’s eye instead of on your computer screen. I have spent long moments thinking of things I haven’t thought of for sixty-odd years.

Once it was the face of a classmate, who inspired me to say to my parents, after my first week of first grade, that I had finally found a girlfriend. Once it was a leather ski boot attached to a wooden ski with a beartrap binding, sliding personless toward the rope-tow lift-line during afternoon ski lessons. Once it was our principal telling our fifth-grade class that the fourth-grade teacher had killed herself and we should be nice to the fourth graders that day. More than once it was our crazed third-grade teacher beating hell out of some little kid for singing the wrong verse in the right song, something third-graders really can’t help doing. Once it was our principal coming into class to tell us that President Kennedy had been shot, and that we should call our parents and go home if we could. Once it was simply an image of our principal with tears on his face, not because anyone had been murdered, but because he had helped move a giant freestanding coat closet in the school hallway, and where it had stood he had found twenty dollars or so in loose quarters, and had realized that over the years, bunches of little kids had lost their lunch money to the cracks in the closet’s floor.

These memories are as real as yesterday’s skiing through the sagebrush, with Juno running beside me, growling and barking as gravity started to widen the distance between us. They’re considerably more real than starving children, contested elections, power-mad oligarchs, demented rulers, venal senators, and a civilization not expected to outlast the decade.

That makes me sound heartless, and maybe I am. Certainly I’m heartless compared to my grade-school principal. Almost everyone is.

________

It’s a bit frightening to have the past emerge bearing far more substance than the present. It may be that Donald Trump’s troubled relationship with the truth has sucked the substance out of his days and ours, but at this point it’s hard to see his story as anything but that of a ghost with no past at all.

It may be that when a country starts living a lie, sacred ceremony becomes empty ritual, laws become the clever tools of interest groups, history becomes a murderous fiction, and everyone you see on a television screen has been told what to say. As George Orwell discerned, memory has no place in a world where political power dictates the truth. Maybe what I’m experiencing is memory fighting back, demanding its due, presenting incontrovertible images instead of questionable narratives.

One thing’s for certain: everyone, even Donald Trump, reaches a point in life where memories are all that’s left, and if there are no memories, nothing’s left. The same truth applies to countries, and it’s being applied to this country as it selects a new president. We would do well, for the sake of the kids, to remember what’s happened over the last five centuries on this continent, especially when we make decisions that will affect the next five centuries. It’s a way of getting back some of the reality that has been taken from us.

As an added benefit, Julie starts feeling guilty if she’s been directing domestic traffic all day, and I can usually nurture her guilt from an embryonic abstract emotion into a full-grown literal apple pie steaming in glorious olfactory reality upon the kitchen table.

None of this would work if I didn’t have absolute confidence in Julie’s desire to make our marriage a place where we can both thrive, or if she didn’t have the same confidence in me.

Over time, the confidence we have in each other has become the most precious commodity in our lives, something I wouldn’t have believed when I was, say, twenty-nine, athletic, good-looking, bartending at Slavey’s in Ketchum, and determined never to get married. (I had plenty of confidence in myself at twenty-nine. I didn’t realize that it meant nothing unless it was backed up by the confidence of somebody else.)

Julie and I back up each other’s confidence. And that’s a seriously cheerful thing to write about.

________

Another cheerful thing is that twenty inches of snow have fallen in the past few days. We’re still pulling winter clothes and ski boots out of the crawl space, and restocking packs with emergency-overnight-in-below-zero-weather supplies. (You tend to get careless about the cold and the dark when you’re skiing through long sunny afternoons in April. What is vital equipment in December gets removed from the packs to make room for brie, salami, cashews, chardonnay, sliced apples, chocolate-covered espresso beans, and sunscreen. April is a good month for lunch.)

Now we’re refurbishing first-aid kits and finding places in our packs for years-old granola bars (January is a bad month for lunch). I’ll hot-wax our skis. I’ll spray our bindings with WD-40, which stinks awfully, but once sprayed, the bindings don’t get clogged with early-season snow and they don’t make annoying squeaks when you walk uphill. I’ll adjust our collapsible poles so they won’t collapse in the middle of the season’s first pole-plant.

When we’ve done all this, we’ll start skiing the old logging road above the Rocky Mountain Ranch. As I’ve already noted in this journal, we’ll have the option of going slow on the way out if we ski out of the track when we come back down.

Over time, if there’s a week or so of dry weather, the track will get nicely icy and it will be possible to hit dangerous speeds on the way out. Juno gets overworked at those velocities, so halfway back to the truck I usually pick her up and carry her. Since she’s harder to carry than she was as a puppy, I ski as fast as I can for a half-mile or so.

It helps if she’s tired. If she’s not, she gets nervous and squirmy ripping down a track on skis, with trees whizzing by on either side of us. I tell her she’s an honored member of the 40-40 Club (40-pound dog doing 40 miles per hour), but even when she’s tired, she growls at me when I take her in my arms. “Stop struggling,” I tell her. “We haven’t hit a tree yet.” She’s not convinced.

When she was a puppy, I’d put her in a backpack and cinch up the top with only her head sticking out, and she liked that better. It’s too bad they have to grow up, right?

________

More cheer: Our new woodstove is more efficient than the old one, so we have achieved a functional increase in the size of our woodpile. We also blew a tire getting the new woodstove home from Idaho Falls, and I realized that I couldn’t depend on the other three because they were getting, like me, old and bald, so after a masked-up trip to Hailey, we have four new aggressive-tread tires on the pickup. Les Schwab gave me a deal, and the pickup looks twenty-nine again.

Also, the snowblower started after a few pulls of the rope starter. I cleared the driveway, the path to the woodpile, and the deck. It’s still snowing, and according to the weather report I’ll have to snow blow again tomorrow and maybe the next day. No problem. Snow blowing is a cheerful exercise in November. It gets a bit tedious in January and thereafter. But it’s still November.

________

I’ve been trying to find cheer in being seventy, and it’s not as much of a struggle this morning as usual. I’m still alive. I’m still able to pack a couple of armloads of wood into the house whenever the wood box is empty. I still have my wits about me. Also, I’ve finally accepted the fact that I’m no longer an athletic and good-looking twenty-nine-year-old, bartending at Slavey’s in Ketchum.

Instead, it’s come to this: for seventy, I’m athletic. I’m no longer those other things. When Julie has to take a photo of me for publication, we have to get the light just right or I look a lot like Mark Shields on the PBS Newshour.

I’m happy to no longer be bartending at Slavey’s or anywhere else. (Slavey’s is now the Warfield Distillery and Brewery. Like a lot of other businesses in Ketchum these days, the Warfield looks mostly empty and dark when you drive by. But Christmas is coming. It remains to be seen if Ketchum in the winter of 2020-2021 will stay dark and empty, or if it will host a season-long festival of superspreading.)

But that’s not really cheerful. Here’s something that is: I’m not in the least envying my twenty-nine-year-old self. He was, as I remember, a difficult person to live with. He was playing fast and loose with his future (my present) and I’m lucky to be here today, with body and mind more or less intact.

He was not always nice to the people around him. As a bartender, he learned to be adequate. As a friend, he now and then fell down on the job. As a skier, he over-skied his abilities. He called himself a writer, but he wasn’t. He was publishing short stories, and people seemed to like them, but he mistook good luck for skill and hard work.

That year, flush with tips and getting free employee meals and free employee drinks (one per shift), he bought a Sun Valley season pass and skied a hundred days. Over those hundred days he broke five pairs of skis. Once, he went down the Warm Springs side of the mountain without turning, trying to break two minutes top to bottom. He might have, except he hit a patch of ungroomed and icy bumps between the two Warm Springs lifts. He bounced through them at seventy miles an hour, stuck both ski tips into a steep mogul, broke one ski and ripped the bindings out of the other, and did five or six rag-doll somersaults through more bumps before sliding to a stop. He walked unhurt to the bottom of the mountain.

Not an isolated incident.

Now and then I try to reach back forty ski seasons to be a small still voice in his head. “When you have to choose between fast or slow?” I whisper. “Slow, especially when you’re skiing. Nice or nasty? That’s easy. Nice. Sad or angry? Sad. Sad or cheerful? Cheerful, unless you have to blind yourself to the world you live in.

“By the way, a lot of things you think are free are going to cost you plenty. Cherish words that come easy, because there will be a time when they don’t come easy. Don’t break anyone’s heart, and that includes your own. Always quit drinking an hour before closing time. Save some cash while you can still get 5% interest on a savings account.”

He doesn’t hear me. Stupid kid. I’m about to give up on him.

________

A good friend—my age—says we have lived in the best possible time to be human. “Born in 1950 in America,” he says. “Can’t get much luckier than that.”

I believe him. At least I believe the luck part. I didn’t die in nuclear war or from Agent Orange or get AIDS or get on the wrong plane on 9/11. But beyond that, our luck needs to be qualified. If you were white, male, straight, middle-class, had parents who put your well-being ahead of theirs, graduated from college, enjoyed your work, saved enough money for retirement, had a circle of long-term friends, didn’t get divorced, stayed away from foam-at-the-mouth politics—1950 was a great year to be born. It still doesn’t let you escape being seventy and having to look back on all the things you would have done differently if you’d known then what you know now. You also can’t escape the enormous burden of not screwing up the life you have left.

________

Which makes it obvious, I suppose, that I’m not really going to give up on my twenty-nine-year-old self. I need him and his mistakes and small cruelties as cautionary examples.

I’ve known people who reached a certain point in their lives and cut off all contact with the people they once were, due to shame or embarrassment, mostly. It can be done, but it turns you into an emotional cripple, and emotional cripples are not cheerful. You die lonelier and more miserable than you would have if you’d welcomed your shameful past selves into your psyche. Those shameful past selves might be properly impressed with what you’ve done to improve them, for one thing.

The person I was when I was twenty-nine presents me with images and snatches of dialog that make me cringe. He still says things that are tactless and tasteless. He recalls, with unpleasant intensity, trusting people he shouldn’t have trusted, and the people who trusted him when they shouldn’t have. He let good-hearted people believe he might improve if they worked hard enough to improve him (which was true, decades too late). Overall, he was nasty when he could have been nice, promiscuous when he could have been faithful, stupid when he could have been smart, and went skiing when he could have read Dostoevsky. (I still go skiing when I could be reading Dostoevsky.)

My twenty-nine-year-old self must have had some instinct for self-preservation. Somewhere in the middle of that winter, he realized that bartending wasn’t a recipe for conscious development over time. His job kept confronting him with overdoses, suicides, emotional breakdowns, bankruptcies—he had run out of fingers to count them on. At some point, a still small voice did get through: “If you keep this up, you’re gonna die.” He didn’t notice whether the voice sounded like mine, but I like to think it did.

He eventually quit bartending and used his meager savings to go to grad school. There he read Dostoevsky and a bunch of French postmodernists, who all had the same lesson: once you’re in a society or occupation or family, you don’t have any free will to speak of. But you can leave those things if you find them toxic, and switch to better ones. That’s where free will resides: in picking a collective to be a part of. You cannot, however, choose not to be a part of any collective at all. Do that, and you’ve chosen emotional death.

After grad school I got a job teaching college, and that was the best stroke of luck of all.

________

It has been a happier-than-usual morning, thanks to Julie’s request. I came up with more cheerful things than I thought I would, mostly by looking inward instead of outward, toward memory instead of toward a frightening future.

You can go blind, thinking and writing this way, especially considering what is going on outside this valley. But for today I’m content to focus on the collective Julie and I have chosen: ourselves, the friends with whom we have Zoom cocktail hours with, the friends and family we email and call, the friends we see at a distance across parking lots or decks, the friends we sometimes even invite for well-distanced dinners. It’s not a terribly cheery group, because we’ve all got our eyes open to what’s going on in the world. But everybody tries to be kind. Everybody speaks the truth, and everybody makes an effort to speak it gently. That’s cause for cheer, and it gives me hope we’ll all get through these dark pestilent months with laughter and good fellowship.

I didn’t think this country would make it to a 46th president. For months I’ve been convinced that Trump would steal the election by any means possible, even mass arrests of Democratic officials. I thought recent spikes in COVID-19 would provide an excuse to strategically close polling stations. I thought Texas-style vote suppression would happen in Arizona and Georgia. I thought William Barr would make like Jehovah and smite Trump’s enemies.

None of these things happened. While it is clear that we’ll have recounts and ballot challenges, it’s also clear that the Trump campaign will ask the courts to step into some slimy territory, and the courts, including the highest one, will not want to smite Trump’s enemies if it’s going to ruin their shoes.

There’s been a dawning realization among the judiciary that credibility has become scarce and valuable. It’s a thing to hold onto if you’ve got it, and that gives judges, no matter their partisan leanings, a handy excuse to rule based on facts and simple justice. Such rulings will not be friendly territory for the convoluted technical challenges contained in the Trump campaign’s filings.

________

I still think we could have mass arrests of Democratic officials. The last century has been full of arrests and massacres and civil wars when an authoritarian leader didn’t like the outcome of an election. We all know it can happen. Most of us, even Republicans, don’t want it to happen.

And before it can happen here, a lot of people who have sworn to defend the Constitution will: a) have to violate their oath, or b) ignore the down-the-line consequences of far-out-on-a-limb rationalizations that they are defending the Constitution, or c) believe in the absolute Constitution-transcending goodness of Donald Trump and the corresponding evil of Joe Biden.

Sandra Day O’Connor is on record as regretting her vote, as a Supreme Court Justice, that put George W. Bush in the White House and enabled the endless and futile Afghan and Iraq Wars. At the moment, Chief Justice John Roberts is still dealing with Bush v. Gore, in the form of messy partisan expectations that the Supreme Court will decide the 2020 election. There’s no doubt that he views O’Connor’s regret as a cautionary example.

I think Roberts will oppose putting any Trump campaign litigation on the docket, no matter how hard Alito or Thomas lobby for it. Barrett, the newest Justice, may have the common sense and the sense of self-preservation to recuse herself from any decision having to do with Donald Trump. If she doesn’t, I hope Roberts will appeal to her sense of institutional preservation.

(As an aside, if Stalin were alive today, he’d be saying things like, “How many divisions does the Supreme Court have?” Roberts is smart enough to know that the only power the Court will have in the future lies in the integrity of the justice it dispenses, and an intact country to dispense it in.)

________

I was sure Trump was going to get elected the first time. I was also sure he wasn’t going to last a year in office, because it wasn’t hard to spot him as a serial liar and, after Nixon, I didn’t think that people, even Republicans, would tolerate a serial liar as President. I regret being right on the former, and wrong on the latter.

Republicans and the rest of the American people have a much higher tolerance for lies and the liars who tell them than I thought they did. Possibly that’s because a lot of voters don’t remember Nixon, just like voters of my generation had little memory of Warren Harding’s administration trying to steal the country’s strategic oil reserve. (If you want to know more, type “Teapot Dome Scandal” into your search engine. It will make you realize that executive branch lies didn’t start with Nixon, something I naively believed in 1968.)

I have realized that a low tolerance for lies and liars is not something I have in common with the average Trump voter, who might say that lies are what politicians do in order to be politicians. I do believe that some politicians do tell the truth, or try to. I fervently hope that Joe Biden, whatever lies he may have told in the past, has become one of them.

We need someone who won’t lie, no matter how much it hurts, because to keep this country intact, we need to have a president we all can trust.

I’ve been using a simple litmus test for Trump for a long time, which comes not from my experience as a writer but from my years of building fence, digging ditch, and pouring concrete. It’s this: You have two guys on your crew, and one of them is honest and one of them is a bullshitter. You’ve got fifty feet of ditch to dig, a quarter-mile of fence to build, and you have to set up forms for somebody’s basement. Which guy do you want to work with?

I know a lot of fence builders and ditch diggers and cement workers voted for Trump. But if Trump had been hired on any construction job where I’ve ever worked, he would have been gone after his first shift. The whole crew would have been happy about it.

Blue-collar Trump voters should recognize the obvious: the President of the United States is on their crew, and they have to depend on his skills every day. He has to see what needs to be done, and then he has to do it. If somebody’s sick, he has to fill in. If something goes wrong, he has to know how to set things right. If somebody’s reading the blueprints wrong, he has to spot the mistake before a whole week’s work is lost. Believe me, this sort of thing can happen even when you’re digging ditch.

We demand this sort of competence of blue-collar workers every day. Why don’t we demand it of a president?

Almost nobody in this country sees themselves as working on a giant construction project. But on our good days, that’s what we’re all doing, and the good parts of our history were times when most Americans saw things that way.

I don’t think many people, even in this election, viewed Donald Trump as someone helping them get their job done. I do think they saw him as someone able to punish the people on the other side, simply by his stinky presence in the Oval Office. It was important enough to own the liberals that half the country happily attempted the reinstallation of a bullshitter-in-chief. If Trump’s policies threatened to make everybody miserable, at least the other side was going to be more miserable.

The trouble is, these same people are now fearing that it’s their turn to be the more miserable ones. They’re angry and they’re afraid to have Joe Biden as president, because since they were small, they’ve believed the one great purpose of life is to get even.

_______

I try to tell the truth, but it’s not easily told. Over years of teaching fiction workshops, I’ve told my students that the truth counts, even in fiction. “Don’t tell bullshit stories,” I’ve said. “Do the work. Invent the truth.”

As you might expect, getting across the subtleties of that idea took up a semester or two. But there are ways of telling truths with fiction.

Here’s a story: Jesus encounters a madman who is possessed by demons. Jesus casts the demons out of the man and into a herd of two thousand Gadarene swine, who then run off a cliff into the sea, where they drown. The man is suddenly sane. He no longer has a problem with demons, and, since the story is set in pre-Catholic days, he’s safe from relapsing while trying to understand the Trinity. The unfortunate Gadarene who owned the herd of swine does have a problem with demons, especially if he’s mortgaged his farm for a bunch of piglets.

I didn’t make this story up. Jesus did, or Luke or Matthew or Mark. Even so, it is packed with truth:

 a) Jesus is correct. He can cure your crazy by moving your demons elsewhere, like any good family therapist. b) Marx is correct. Jesus believed that private property is a crime. c) Ayn Rand is correct. Jesus, being Jesus, is the sole owner of all the swine in the universe, and he can do what he wants with his private property, even just to make a point about his divinity. d) Jehovah (remember Jehovah?) is correct. Swine are unclean. The demons were part of Jesus’s cleanup crew. e) Satan is correct. Herd animals can be stampeded over cliffs if you get the big ones started in the right direction. Demons don’t need to possess every swine, they just have to possess the head pig, his chief of staff, his attorney general, his majority leader in the Senate and maybe his personal lawyer. In a porcine hierarchy, a few demons can go a long way.

“There are contradictory truths in every story, even the story of your life,” I would tell my students, were I still teaching workshops. “If all truths were consistent with each other, telling them would be a lot easier, and so would pig farming. So would living your life. But picking out the highest truth requires an acute critical intelligence. Some stories are truer than others.”

Write that down.

________ 

Here’s an undeniable truth: Donald Trump and Joseph Biden are both deeply damaged human beings. Biden has been repeatedly torn apart by deep personal grief. He’s lost a wife and daughter and a son and has another son who is a recovering addict. Life has, on occasion, completely wrecked him. Parts of him, I am sure, will never recover. But enough of him has recovered to win the presidency and speak to the country about what it means to have deep unhealed wounds.

I’ve been thinking about Joe Biden’s grief a lot lately, because I’ve long thought—unscientifically—that grief is the cause of Alzheimer’s. The Trump campaign has claimed, since Biden became the Democratic nominee, that he’s an Alzheimer’s victim.

After listening to his speech Saturday evening, I don’t think that’s the case. There’s still an intelligent, living, breathing person in Joe Biden. He has a long history of being flattened by grief, and a long history of picking himself up and dusting himself off and getting on with life. He may not always be articulate, but he’s as skilled in the language of empathy and compassion as anyone I know. That’s what Joe Biden has made of the tragedy life has handed him.

With that ability, I think he’ll make this country into a more emotionally intelligent place.

Trump’s life is just as tragic, but long ago he chose to deny any grief or loss. It’s what comes of being born into a family where a very hard game was being played. The slightest infraction was punishable by death, which was the fate of Trump’s older brother Fred, whose only crime was not wanting to play the game. Early on, Trump learned that he had to be a designated winner, because he had seen what happened to designated losers.

Biden was lucky that he was an adult when tragedy struck. He was able to bring an adult stoicism to grief, put words to it and go on. One of the few gifts that grief leaves behind is empathy, and over time empathy makes you a stronger and more complete and less alone person.

Whatever chance Trump had for personhood was wrecked before he was born. That’s what a toxic family will do to you. His grief hasn’t gone away because he never allowed himself to feel it.

It’s hollowed him from the inside. What’s left in there is sick and lonely and stunted, and from the looks of things, demented. Refusing to deal with grief doesn’t mean it won’t eventually deal with you.

Trump is equating losing with death these days. I don’t think there’s anything he wouldn’t do to win this election, even now that he’s lost it. That’s why I won’t be sure that Biden is in the White House until Trump has gone into exile or has died or occupies Rush Limbaugh’s soon-to-be-empty chair. Barring a judicial coup, those look like his February choices. What is not possible is that he’ll have a long and honored career building houses for Habitat for Humanity.

________

Julie and I had a small celebration once the election was finally called for Biden. We opened a bottle of wine. We listened to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which we rechristened Ode to Joe for the occasion. We wished Joe Biden luck. He’ll need a bunch of it.

We hope that the next four years will see him begin to reconcile the two warring sides of America. Each half of the country wants to punish the other half. It’s become more important for most people to have an enemy they can hate than to grieve for what they’ve lost. Biden might have the moral authority and the vocabulary to show us a better way.

It’s an odd thing to wish for, but we hope that Joe Biden will be able to teach us the language of grief. Awful things have happened to us in this century, and we need to know how to see them, name them, fully accept that they’ve happened, and get to work on fixing them. It’s the only way we can forestall the greater griefs that will forever creep up on our blind sides.