50. Seven friends and my own fears

As of now, 44 people in Wallowa County have tested positive for Covid-19. Six of them are people I know as friends; that number could be higher. All have been hit recently, and again, as far as I know, only one hospitalized and all OK. The seventh friend is a woman who used to live here and now lives in Bend; she was seriously ill and unconscious in the first spring round of Covid. 

About thee weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night and stumbled into the bathroom. My head was spinning, as it sometimes does when I just bounce to my feet too fast, but this time it wouldn’t stop spinning. I got back to bed and made it back to a fitful sleep, woke early and stumbled through the day with what felt like a hangover. 

 

And I started thinking, going through the signs of Covid. I didn’t have a cough, I didn’t have a sore throat or trouble breathing. I went on my morning bike ride and found that I could smell the fall leaf turnings and chimney smoke; I recalled tasting the morning coffee. 

 

But even then I began cataloging the people I had been in contact with: co-workers; old Peace Corps friends who had parked their RV in my driveway overnight a few days prior; people in stores…. 

 

* * *

 

My friend Bob announced his contagion on Facebook, said that he was generally careful about masking and distancing, but had made a trip out of the county and been careless. And brought it home. Another friend is announcing on Facebook, and others are self-quarantining.

 

It strikes me that this Covid must be working its way into the minds of many Americans as it has mine. And that others are rejecting it wholesale with denial. 

 

Caution is prudent, but we cannot be personally immobilized. I have fear for us, and hope that we continue to act prudently. But I have fear of deniers. People hold onto incorrect beliefs tenaciously, and deal with realities by irrationalities, raising their voices and trumpeting their denial. 

 

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49. Fatigue

I’ve heard “Covid fatigue” and “election fatigue,” and distance-learning fatigue is settling in with students, parents, and teachers. Add working from home fatigue; after a honeymoon period of working in pajamas, chatter about work and life over coffee and lunch sounds good. 

 I’ve taken my own fatigue to reading about the last really big one, the Spanish Flu of 1918. It killed a lot more Americans—over 600,000— than the World War I, but it got swallowed up in that war and in puzzlement over the disease itself. 

 

The puzzlement: 100 years ago health care officisals scurried after treatments and tracing; they quarantined, masked, closed theaters and opened schools to care for children at risk in crowded tenements. And like now, these efforts were global—as was the blame. It became “Spanish Flu” because Spain was a neutral country in the war and did not censor its newspapers. The flu was rampant in America and in the trenches, but nothing was written about it and when it was covered openly in the Spanish press it became the Spanish Flu. 

 

It’s eerily familiar now, with some wanting to name Covid for a country, and countries competing over vaccines and remedies; a small group plugs away at tracking origins, just as researchers have tracked and speculated on the origins of our 100 year old cousin flu. 

 

Meanwhile, the spread of the Covid-19 virus waxes and wanes. The numbers of positive and negative tests, of new cases and deaths, tick on giant doomsday clocks on our computer screens. 

 

It’s exhausting—fatigue sets in. But pay attention: Most of the people dying are young—no sweat off me, the frat party exhaustee says. “Underlying conditions,” you say, and you are robust and healthy and… but what about that recent sore throat and cough? And how well do you smell? And was that really someone you know who showed up on Facebook with a positive test and asked please for you to wear a mask? 

 

They wrestled with that 1918 version for at least three years, hid or disregarded it sometimes, thought it was over sometimes. Even today some researchers are chasing its chemical truths, settling on origins in pigs or ducks, worried that we humans keep getting into the ways of wild animals and that domesticated ducks are in the millions of ducks and still get involved with their wild cousins. 

 

It’s exhausting, and we’re not yet one year in.

 

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48. A Good Day

The days are definitely getting shorter—and colder. We’ve had soft freezes a few nights; next week temperatures are due to drop to the mid-20s. Serious fall, but it’s October, and bright sunny days sometimes wake after those cold nights.

Friday was like that, with afternoon temperatures all the way to the mid-60s. Enough reason, some thought, to have a late afternoon-early evening gathering in my font yard. I called and texted, and said I’d light a fire, order up a pizza, and see what people could conjure out of their kitchens. 

A dozen of us spread—not huddled—around a fine small fire, distanced and unmasked, taking advantage of our great outdoors. We put the pizza, beer and wine, a cake, quiche, chips and an assortment of plums and apples on a table and took our turns feeding and drinking, moving chairs to make small conversations with one group and then another.

The talk was of hikes, ski-times, places we like in the Wallowas, people we like who weren’t here—some gone all together. Horace Axtell, the Nez Perce elder most of us had seen and heard often enough to bring a smile at the mention of his name and his stories, is gone. We noted that. Our sculptor had sold a piece and someone brought me a birthday fabric hanging. 

I’d had a birthday earlier in the week, when the weather was snotty—so this was one excuse for the Friday gathering. But mostly it was friends jumping on a fine October day to see each other—and maybe forget about the disease and politics that has dogged us for months. 

We hadn’t counted on the sunset, but the streaks of red wove in and through clouds across most of the coming night sky. That took up some conversation, and an I-Phone image of it the next day confirmed its brilliance.

These one-minute-on-the-pandemic musings let me let off steam and get my insightful insights out to friends. But they’re also becoming a kind of diary, and somewhere out there, when this pandemic and all the strange accompanying aberrations of whatever normal behaviors were seven months ago are forgotten—or have become permanent, they’ll be reminders of my life journey as it slides into its 79th year.

I wanted Friday in that memory book.

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47. It’s Absurd—or is it “Dada”?

The president is less than two weeks out of the hospital with Covid and is gushing to a packed, scantily-masked Florida crowd that he’d like to rush into them and “kiss everyone in that audience.”

His opponent is crossing the country—masked—to speak to smaller crowds who are also masked and socially distanced, and sometimes even sitting in their cars.

The election is three weeks away. 

The senators drone on about a new Supreme Court Justice and what she has said and might do that make her fit or unfit for the court; the nominee parries that she can’t answer anything [meaningful] because she might be called on later to recuse or to hear the issue in question: ACA, Roe v. Wade, Citizens United, etc. etc. etc.

The Dow is up 200 today—or is it down? Or was that yesterday? 

Thirteen men are charged with a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and the Virginia governor was reportedly next on their hit list. 

Close to home, Ada County (Boise) is back in the “red zone,” which means schools are again all remote. Ours are “in person” and attracting far-off grandkids.

Eugene and the U of O—and Michigan State and the State of Nebraska, are full of the Covid.

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There was a 1952 play, “Waiting for Godot,” in which “plot is eliminated, and a timeless, circular quality emerges as two lost creatures…, spend their days waiting—but without any certainty of whom they are waiting for or of whether he, or it, will ever come.” 

They called it “theater of the absurd.” People were still shaking from the Holocaust and the War, McCarthy was ranting about communists and Ike was worried about a military industrial complex, but returning G.I.s and the rest of White America were creating our largest ever Middle Class. 

Some artists wondered what it all meant, if it meant. One wrote Waiting for Godot.

Before that, before the “Absurd” there was the First World War and “Dada.” Dada poems were letters and sounds in no particular order that resembled no real sentences or even words: psss…. Shhhh…chaa…..ughhh.. eee…. And artist Kurt Schwitter’s Dada house was filled with random objects in random order as meaningless as the poems.

46. Focusing on racism

I’ m about to turn 78. One would think that “focus” is a lesson learned long ago. And maybe there have been times in my life when I was able to focus intensely for days, weeks, or even months at a time. 

My first months in a Turkish village come to mind. I walked village streets and sat in coffee houses, visited the gunsmith’s shop and rode the “dolmush”—a van crammed with people, grain sacks, and chickens—from the village to the city once a week with a Turkish-English dictionary in my pocket. I wrote words down, and at night I worked that dictionary and a grammar book so that I would do better the next day.

The coronavirus is like that, like living in an alien village for the first time in your life. In early weeks I wore my mask and washed my hands dry. I distanced and became religious about morning bike rides, daily dog walks, and afternoon swims in cold Wallowa Lake. A conscious health regime was my Turkish dictionary. 

All the while I worked at the Josephy Library, assembling books and papers on Nez Perce and broader Indian history. A book group we’d started with The Real All-Americans, a story of Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School, went virtual with Nez Perce writer Beth Piatote’s Beadworkers. And then, with BLM and the lens Covid-19 was shining on race, we read White Fragility. Viral disease itself was our next book, Pale Rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World. 

I began reading for the first hour of each morning. I plowed through books as I haven’t done for years. And then I began these short meditations on disease and race—the hour of reading now followed by an hour of writing.

I learn by reading—and with writing. The act of writing elicits relationships of reading and experience, and new thoughts come to mind. I see clearly now that I did not prepare my Brown son and Brown grandchildren for the world; that I did not link the consequences of their Indian-American heritage to the American-Indian heritage that is my daily work, nor, importantly, to the general history and practice of racism in America.

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45. News of the Day

We’ve had five new cases of Covid-19 in Wallowa County in the last five days. That brings us to 34 total—not many in a county of 7,000 souls and thousands or hundreds of thousands of tourists this summer. But one a day would be 140 in Portland, twice what they had yesterday.

I guess what it means is that Wallowa County is no longer on the sidelines, that this surge of the virus has us in the middle of things. It tells us that we are not immune, that merely living or visiting here is not enough, that we, like the rest of the world, must take precautions around this disease. One a day for 20 days or 100 days would make us a news item, shake our 7,000 souls, and send tourists to other places.

The “rest of the world” is not a flippant phrase. From college fraternities in Eugene and East Lansing to world cities in Italy and India—and now rural places like ours—Covid-19 drops like spot flames from the big fire, seemingly where it pleases.

Including the White House. Say what you will about President Trump’s own talk about the virus, a bevy of chauffeurs, chefs, pilots, advisors, health officials and doctors have worked hard to make sure the virus would not get to the president and his family. But it did. And how will that affect the machinery of government and the upcoming election?

There are stories of success. New Zealand has been zealous and mostly successful in keeping Covid-19 at bay. Every day a new school or college pops up with its prescription for operating “normally” in abnormal times: yesterday Cornell, and before that Colby College, St. Olaf’s and Northeastern University. 

But this bug—no, not a bug, but an invasion of RNA that hijacks cells in our bodies and uses them to replicate itself and pursue its own aggrandizement—is a persistent thing that will be with us for awhile. 

And like spot fires and other random acts of the universe, we don’t know what the news of the next day will be. Or what message that news will carry to Joseph, Oregon.

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44. The Brawl

I try to steer clear of straight-out politics in these meditations in Pandemic times. But I can’t completely ignore last night’s event, which was advertised as a debate. 

Coronavirus is on the rise in many places here and abroad. Over 44,000 cases and 970 deaths in the country yesterday, and even here, in Wallowa County, we’ve had four new cases in the last week, pushing us past 30. 

We don’t know if the African-American attorney general in Georgia presented evidence against the two policemen who actually shot Breonna Taylor. We know that most of the protest in Portland has been peaceful; and we know that the Proud Boys and others on the right have showed up with weapons, but we don’t know if some of the left-side protestors are willing or eager to be violent. 

We know that fires devastated some small towns and many families in the Willamette Valley, and that California is still burning. And we watch the hurricanes and floods on TV. 

In the middle of all this, of fire, peaceful protest and violence, unresolved police on Black killing, and the uneven spread of Covid-19 across Indian reservations and Black and Latinx communities, in the middle of all this we get a brawl.

I winced as Trump stormed, Biden smirked, and Chris Wallace tried to wrest control of it. A friend I watched it with said it was the World Wrestling Federation; Amy Walters said on Public Radio this morning that it was more like a middle school food fight.

I wasn’t surprised by Trump’s attacks and talking over Biden and Wallace. I wish Biden had stayed stone-faced for more of it, and let Wallace handle more of the president’s rages on his own. He did himself no good in calling Trump a “clown.”

In the end, I felt dirty, like I’d been in a mud-wrestling match or snuck into a dark-alley porn show. And I couldn’t help but see Senator Joe McCarthy’s flushed face in Trump’s, couldn’t not hear the threat of communists and homosexuals in our midst. 

And I waited for Joseph Welch, the Army counsel in the McCarthy hearings, to speak up: “You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?”

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