113. Spectator

Spectator

As this pandemic winds down in Oregon and the US, it occurs to me that I’ve been living in a fantasy land, a place removed from the major traumas of the disease and its oil-spill-like spread across the country. Sure, it came close when my grandson brought it back from Portland, but friends and the local medical community rallied around and we moved on.

And yes, a few people I know have died, but they were elderly, and specific circumstances in each case make them anomalies. Here in our high-mountain, low-population perch, we’ve largely gone about our business. The low population density, the fact that our agriculture is ranching and grain and not row-crop, and the fact that many of us live outdoors as much as we can regardless of Covid, have helped insulate us from the disease’s worst runs in neighboring places. I.e. We do not have farm-labor crews traveling in tight vans and living in cramped housing; we do not have french-fry or other ag-business industries. 

The community responded by supporting restaurants with take-out, and we bundled and ate outside when we could. Builders—outside workers—have kept busy remodeling second homes and building new ones for urban escapees, and we wait in line for plumbers and electricians.

It’s like the 1840s when the Oregon Trail marched by a mountain ridge to the west; the Wallowa Valley Nez Perce, the wålwa'ma band, were not pressed by settlers from the nearby Grande Ronde Valley until the 1870s, almost a full generation after the missionaries and first settlers had traipsed along the Trail. 

The Covid has not made a similar run at us, and we sit here, somewhat smug, in relative safety in a stormy world—just as our country comes now to a sense of normalcy and smugness about it as the big world outside rages with Covid, drought, fire, and other signs of the biblical apocalypse.

It’s happened before, and we’ve been dragged into the muddle in 1914, 1941, etc., in Europe and Korea and Vietnam, war intertwined with influenza, drugs, and PTSD. The all-volunteer military has un-democratized war, so that only a handful—a small percentage of us—has been impacted by Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and “traumatic brain injury.” Like Afghan TBI, NFL TBI comes to us remotely. 

But there is a world out there, a world of wars, natural disasters, climate change and refugees—and Covid, still raging across South America, India, and now Malaysia. It’s sometimes hard to reconcile being a spectator in such a time and place. And I wonder whether it will creep back weeks or months from now—maybe with a returning Volunteer soldier. 

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