126. True Believers

In San Angelo, Texas, anti-mask movement leader Caleb Wallace became infected with the coronavirus and has been in intensive care for the past three weeks, according to his wife, Jessica. They’ve done all they could, and he’s being moved into hospice. Jessica, pregnant with their fourth child, has been masking, and plans to get vaccinated after the birth. She still agrees with her husband about the right of the individual to decide on masking and vaccination. 

 

Caleb’s father, Russell Wallace, also came down with the virus and was in the hospital with his son for 13 days. He’s improved enough to go home. But, according to the New York Times, “Despite his own illness and his son’s dire condition, Mr. Wallace said he still firmly believes that masks are ineffective and that the government should not mandate masks or vaccinations. He himself, however, has decided to ‘look into’ getting the shots.”

 

At Embers restaurant in Joseph last night, I sat talking with friends, and mentioned that I had just come from the Joseph Market, where no one was wearing a mask. My tablemates all had stories of being in local stores and seeing the same thing—although it seemed like masks are making a comeback in our biggest store, Safeway. 

 

The family at the next table got up to leave, and the man of the family paused to say that we probably didn’t know that the whole coronavirus thing was politics, promoted by “you know which party.” Any attempts to engage in conversation were trumped by politics and comparisons to abortion, where he imagined our table respected the rights of women to make that decision. The fact that the one issue—Covid 19, was about the health of neighbors, family members, and friends, while the abortion issue centers on the health of two, mother and fetus, was raised but not accepted. 

 

The man said that he would have to get vaccinated for his job. 

 

I struggle for the lessons here. Some people believe that personal choice is an absolute right that trumps all others (in which case one could argue for the right of the mother to end a pregnancy—but that’s another road). The impacts on family members and others, the fact that health care systems are being overwhelmed, and that medical needs of non-covid patients are threatened—people might in fact die—does not phase true believers. 

 

On the other hand, mandates—by employers, insurance companies, schools, states, and stores—might work, and save some of the rest of us.

 

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125. “Freedom"

You—the unvaccinated—are free from the fear of smallpox, because I and millions of others around the world were vaccinated against it.  It is now gone—after centuries; after killing millions of American Natives when the first Europeans arrived with it; after George Washington gave his troops at Valley Forge a crude form of vaccination against it; after milkmaids in England showed milder cases of it and the first modern vaccines were developed; after the World Health Organization made it a priority to vaccinate the world, and enough were vaccinated so that the last major outbreak in the US was in 1949, and the world was declared free of smallpox in 1980.

You—the unvaccinated—are free of the fear of polio, because polio vaccines and massive polio vaccination programs were mounted in the 1950s and 1960s, and because the Gates Foundation and Rotary International have conducted major vaccination programs around the world—through wars, droughts, and objections by some that the vaccinations caused sterility and all manner of side effects. Polio hangs on in our midst, believe it or not, with many, including people in our own community, who survived the disease as children and now live with “post-polio syndrome,” a consequence of polio-weakened muscles that become debilitating with age. 

You probably don’t worry about measles, as I and my parents did when I was five or six and was put in a darkened room for a week lest eyes be damaged, an outcome that sometimes accompanied the disease. You were likely vaccinated against measles and other childhood diseases as children, even though you will not pass that gift on to your own children. 

If you are under 40, you probably didn't get or need vaccinations against smallpox and polio, and if you got measles, mumps, etc, or not, enough of your neighbors did to keep those diseases at bay.

The lesson is that your—and my—freedom often rests on the good work of others, and it always goes back to some common consensus among a broader community that we are all in this world together, and it is our obligation to consider the well-being of our fellow humans as we consider our own. 

In fact, it can be argued that if we look out for our fellow human-beings we will in the long run be looking out for ourselves. Vaccinating myself and my family members gives the Covid less room to run in our community—and in the world. Less opportunity to mutate and become deadlier (it’s already happened once, with delta now raging). Less likely to come back to me.

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124. Seasons

Yesterday felt like fall—and it’s only mid-August. But the last days of June saw 100 degrees, and felt like a hot August.

 

I don’t know what it’s like to live along that imaginary equatorial line, where the length of days and the warmth of the sun doesn’t change with any calendar. But a few score miles off the line, seasons of dry and wet seem to be normal; and further away, in what we call “temperate” zones north and south, the length of sunlight each day grows and wains, and the earth’s rotations and distances from sun make for seasons. We count four: spring, summer, fall, winter. 

 

Covid and climate change seem to be radically disturbing our calendars—and our seasons. Hot in spring and now it cools down—for a day or two. It looks like summer is coming back. Will we have a fall? 

 

Fire season across the West has grown, until California counts no season at all. They are on the pyretic equator. Tornados, hurricanes, and torrential floods are blurring their traditional seasons in the Southeast. Droughts in Africa, the Middle East, and Central America are mixing with leadership failure and war and causing mass hunger and migration. 

 

And even the Covid seems to be defying its expected seasons. We had been warned of a fall or winter spike; it’s happening now. Unless this isn’t yet the spike! Wallowa County, which almost completely escaped the first wave and a few since, now sees 6 and 10 new cases daily.

 

All of this has created great confusion in schools. It took decades to come to the “school year” shared by most American towns and cities. We were mostly agricultural, and the school year become gradually longer with fewer farmers, but we’ve held onto late spring to early fall—in our county irrigation to harvest—as summer vacation.

 

And sports have become attached to seasons: summer to baseball with better weather; basketball to indoor winter; and football to the fall. A little rain, mud, or snow didn’t stop a football game. Seemed—until artificial turf and indoor stadiums, to define the sport. 

 

After all these years, football is my favorite season, though I watch little of it on TV, and can’t tell you who won the last super bowl—in basketball season! I can remember the coastal dew and smell of the grass at Oceanside High School in 1950s California, the warm and slanted light Saturday afternoons at UC Riverside in the early sixties. I don’t have much memory of specific games or of personal achievements, but remember teammates, 3-a-day practices, bus rides, and the band playing on Friday nights. I think I could still sing the alma mater.

 

In all, I only played six or seven years of football, deciding as a senior in college that rugby was a better sport. But watching son Matt and Joseph High play and lose to arch-rival Enterprise on a snow-covered field in Joseph, and him leave it all on the field in a near win against the same team the next year; and watching grandson Trey’s crushing tackles and an impossible fingertip touchdown catch in a state 6-man championship game which he and his proud teammates won, ginned up my own old dreams of fall.

 

But Covid gave us football in March and basketball in April this last school year, with track squeezed in on the ends. And now Covid is peaking out of its season, and what with Covid masks and smoke blowing in from California’s extended fire season, there might not be a high school football season this fall.

 

“Season” seems to be losing its meanings. 

 

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123. Déjà vu all over again

I just reread the San Francisco pages in Alfred Crosby’s America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. It was first published in 1976, a second edition in 2003, the year that SARS-CoV-1 was identified.

San Francisco had an aggressive chief of their Board of Public Health, Doctor William Hassler, who organized the city’s health care systems into districts; established one hospital to isolate and deal with flu patients; closed schools and churches; recruited medical, dental, and nursing students and some teachers to care for patients; used quarantines and promulgated a city-wide mask mandate with punishment for violators. 

Waves of the flu passed—I think there were three major waves in 1918; we are in the middle of a third or fifth wave of our pandemic now—and history and commerce went on. Stores and churches reopened, masks were thrown aside, and crowds gathered to celebrate the Armistice on November 11, 1918, and, even as flu cases began to rise again, to shop for and celebrate Christmas and the New Year. 

Efforts to rein in the new surge with masks and anti-crowding measures failed miserably as the citizenry had had enough of restrictions and fought to retain their now-new freedoms. Merchants wanted to make up for lost sales with a robust holiday shopping season. Christian Scientists and Civil Libertarians claimed that masking was “subversive of personal liberty and constitutional rights.” Ninety percent of San Franciscans ignored the new mask mandate. 

The wave subsided in San Francisco and across the nation. Crosby says, in his preface to the 2003 edition, when AIDs was circling the globe and SARS 1 had newly emerged, that we don’t know entirely why, and that “we don’t know yet what made the 1918 virus so dangerous.”

He also says that in a world with three times the population clustered in ever larger cites, with faster travel, a “population of the animals with which we exchange flu viruses… vastly larger than they were in 1918,” history is likely to repeat:

“There is a bitter pill of a joke currently circulating among infectious disease experts. The nineteenth century was followed by the twentieth century, which was followed by the . . . nineteenth century.”

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122. Smoke and Covid

The fire news today is about the smoke from the Dixie Fire in California impacting the lives of people in faraway Utah and Colorado. Smoke travels, and some say that sunshine actually makes it more toxic as it moves. A thick haze covers Salt Lake City and asthmatics, old people, and yoga groups have moved indoors. 

A friend responded to my last pandemic post— “I told you so,” saying that “there is no solution as long as people believe it is about ‘freedom’ and not the common good.” I couldn’t help but think of that as I read the fire news. California’s—and Oregon’s—fires crush towns and families in their immediate paths, but their smoke impacts towns and families over a much wider region. Dixie, at over 400,000 acres, is California’s second largest ever, but smoke from Western fires is now routinely discovered over eastern cities—and must be blanketing the entire country in its thin layers.

You can leave your burnt out California house and town, but the entire country is depending on Westerners to control our fires. Likewise, the unvaccinated in Florida, Missouri, and Texas, with government officials cheering them on with shouts of “freedom” are endangering me. And like the small fires closer to home—Elbow on the Grand Ronde, and the Snake River Complex in Idaho—that flooded us with unhealthy air for a few days, the unvaccinated in my own community endanger neighbors and even vaccinated family members, shopkeepers—and me.

We might remember the Golden Rule: Do onto Others… We are all in this together, and even more so now with a virulent version of the virus. The weak, elderly, and anyone unlucky enough to have current health problems, are in the path of the unvaccinated. Even though Wallowa County counts remain relatively small—but rising—our medical facilities are looking west and north to larger medical facilities they might need for patients too ill to treat locally. And finding those facilities filling rapidly with their own populations. 

I understand that there are medical reasons for some to reject vaccinations, but, beyond that, I would like my neighbors to look out for each other—and me. 

Personal freedom always has its edges—soldiers in war know that, and so did old-timer Al Duckett, who explained to an exasperated landowner at a Planning Commission meeting 50 years ago, that “I can’t build my outhouse right next to your well, even if it’s on my own property.”

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121. “I told you so!"

It must begin in childhood, the urge to be right, and to remind others when our rightness—about the depth of the water, the strength of the tree limb, or the coming disapproval of mom, dad, or the teacher—is ignored. Even when we don’t say it aloud, we love the feeling of “I told you so.”

Many, many of us in the vaccinated world worry about unvaccinated friends and relatives, and pour ridicule on the unvaccinated we don’t know. “Serves them right,” we say—or think. “How can they not get it,” we say.

Last week at the rodeo, I watched from the Rotary food booth as crowds of people waited to get in to the gate, stood in line to get our burgers, and marched away from the last event in a welcome drizzle of rain. There were no masks, although I thought that people were inclined not to bunch up, to wait their turns in orderly single lines. Some awareness there, I thought. And most of my friends who did go are quite surely vaccinated.

As the crowd marched out in the rain, many went on to the Thunder Room for more beer, loud music, and the chance to dance. That, I remember thinking, is surely a spreader event. Maybe a super-spreader.

I and many friends—I know because we talk about it—look at the daily stats out of the Oregon Health Authority. We watched Wallowa County get a small surge—ten Sunday to beat our one-day record, and enough in a week to put us in red on the national "infection percentage" map from the New York Times. 

There are enough local infection stories to allow us of the vaccinated to think and sometimes say “I told you so,” but the upsurge that must be associated with Chief Joseph Days Rodeo does not make super-spreader category, does not allow us the self-righteous feeling of I told you so. 

And yesterday, when Wallowa County showed only one new case, I caught myself a bit sad, because “I told you so’ had been beat back. I jumped to “they came from everywhere and took it home with them.”

What uncharitable thoughts. “I told you so” didn’t make you better when your mom used it, and didn’t make your friends more careful when you used it. 

It’s no solution for the Pandemic. 

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120. Free

The explosion of Covid illness across the country, including in our mostly well-vaccinated state, is distressing. The uptick in local cases, and repeated reports of people misunderstanding simple facts about the virus and vaccination, are more cause for worry. 

 

So, it is time to take a break—and think about something liberating, something(s) free.

 

In the last two weeks, just from what I’ve seen on my morning walks, I could have picked up a lawn mower, two kids’ bikes, books, tables, chairs, and cooking stoves—one electric; one gas. There are still yard and garage sales, but the new deal on the side streets in Joseph is “free.” In fact, my neighbor and I put one up, and a month later I cannot remember what all was on it. It all went away, save one 101 Dalmatians 250-piece jigsaw puzzle—maybe they counted the pieces. 

 

What’s this all about? Maybe some, like me, put stuff in storage years ago when remodeling, went to look at the storage place—$50 a month—and decided there wasn’t $50 worth of stuff in it. Maybe some of this “free” is sparked by downsizing and upsizing, moving from city or suburb to country or the other way around. 

 

Or maybe, living more restrictive Covid-era lives this past year, we’re noticing the things in the closets that don’t fit or we don’t wear, art work we no longer like, the broken Flexible Flier sled we never got around to fixing, the exercise equipment that never caught on, the books we read and didn’t like. The kids outgrew those bikes years ago; and the old computers and computer desks, cords from who knows where, the couch we’ve come to hate, and that cook stove—I never wanted gas! 

 

The Soroptimist Thrift Shop gets pickup loads of this stuff, but what days are they taking stuff and what can they no longer take? But bless ‘em—they sell our old dishes, plates and glasses for 10 cents each, and give away $20,000 in scholarships each year.

 

Jane Fonda, the wonderful actor and wondrous activist, said recently that she was done buying new. I don’t know what it will do to the economy, but maybe we should try free and Soroptimist cheap for a while—and have the kids put up lemonade stands. 

 

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