John Rember
For the Express
It's been 15 years since my byline has appeared in the Idaho Mountain Express. That's at least two generations worth of Ketchum Time, which occupies the same temporal spectrum as dog years. One of my worries about another stint as a columnist is that driving through Ketchum from Sawtooth Valley on my way to Costco every two weeks might not be enough to keep up with the cast and set changes.
My previous column was called "View From the North." This one is called "End Notes," only partially because in 15 years the world has accelerated toward apocalypse. It's also because I'm a lot closer to my own end. I'm 55. I used to consider guys that old—old. Now I just consider them blessed with wisdom and perspective. Not being able to ski moguls without listening to your vertebrae rattle like castanets is a small price to pay for wisdom and perspective. Even being within shouting distance of your own end is a small price to pay.
So here are a few end notes for you from where I stand, 15 years closer to the end than the last time I sent a column into the Mountain Express:
• The ghost town on the north end of Ketchum has gotten bigger, but it's still a ghost town.
• The commute to Hailey has become the commute to Gooding and Shoshone.
• Folks in Ketchum have gotten wealthier, but they haven't gotten happier. But most of them have learned simple household Spanish.
• David Reinhard, the assistant editor of The Oregonian who writes a regular column published in the Mountain Express, gets paid more money by the Republican National Committee than I do. He also doesn't tell the truth as often as I do.
• There were still days on Baldy last winter when I was the youngest skier on the mountain.
• Real estate values in the Wood River Valley are not tied to the inherent value of the real estate. Instead, those values are tied to tax law and interest rates and to the assumption that "they aren't making any more land."
• De facto, they are making more land. Rep. Mike Simpson's CIEDRA bill is transferring 160 acres of federal land to the city of Stanley for luxury home sites, setting a precedent that will change the way that developers look at federal land.
• At least until oil and natural gas production hits its peak. Then a lot of things will change, starting with the price of gasoline. But forget about breaching the Columbia River dams. That power is going to be needed for air conditioning in a world where it's too expensive to run gas-fired power plants. We're also going to need that power to make a lot more nuclear power plants.
• At some point in the lifespan of an empire, things begin to go wrong. Any decision that is made becomes a bad one, any leader who gets elected becomes the wrong one. It's the way civilizations die, along with a lot of the people in them.
Does all this seem too curmudgeonly? Wisdom and perspective will do that to you if you let them, and to stay happy I have to remind myself to think of at least seven optimistic things before breakfast every morning, and try not to Google "End Times" more than once a week. Because "End Times" will call up 748 million entries, almost none of them qualifying for before-breakfast contemplation, and at least one of them predicting a nuclear blast in Manhattan as I write (somewhere between July 26 and July 28). If you're reading this, the apocalypse people were wrong once again, but their latest scenario does serve to illustrate that the larger world is most-of-the-time beyond our control and that sometimes it does intrude into our lives, no matter how comfortable we've been able to make them, and that the most we can do is to be good to each other and try to brighten each other's days. That's the best wisdom I can offer at the moment. I'm sorry it has nothing to do with wealth and taste.
Editor's note: John Rember, a resident of the Sawtooth Valley, is the author of "Traplines: Coming Home to Sawtooth Valley." His new column will appear in the Idaho Mountain Express once each month.
