152. Coyote Story?

 If you know Isak Dinesen, the Danish author, it is probably through the book, or more likely the movie, Out Of Africa. The picture that comes to your mind will be of Meryl Streep saying “I had a faaam in Africa,” or of Robert Redford, as the dashing bush pilot, Denys Finch Hatton.  

 

I had a professor who was obsessed with Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, romantic and darkly magical stories told as if spoken aloud with themes and people of previous times. It was written and published before Out of Africa, and gained American following in the 1930s. I took up his obsession, and read many of her stories and stories about her before I read or saw Out of Africa. 

 

It’s been decades, but Covid and the world’s responses have me thinking about those stories and Dinesen’s strange and utterly unusual life. The reason I say this is because she thought God was a jokester. The craziness and evil in the world did not elicit a kind and powerful God, and I guess the theology needed to explain such a one was too much for her. There was also good company in jesters to kings and American Indian coyote stories. And her own life.

 

Dinesen grew up wealthy. Her father committed suicide when she was young. She fell in love with someone from her social class, was rejected, and married his twin brother. That got her to Africa, which she loved. But the marriage got her syphilis, and a divorce. After the divorce she fell in love with a bush pilot and safari leader named Denys Finch Hatton (Redford), who died when his plane crashed. She returned to Denmark—and wrote.

 

***

Covid came on us, swept the globe but especially the United States, like a plague. Our medical teams and scientists developed a vaccine in record time—and during the Trump administration! Trump and his people minimized the disease and a sizeable part of the population rejected the vaccine. Many of the anti-vaxxers worshipped and praised their rejection to each other in churches. Churches have accounted for some “spreader” events.

 

Enough of us got vaccinated and/or got ill and recovered from it to slow the Covid’s progress. The virus bided its time while people fussed and argued over the efficacy of the vaccine, and over its distribution. The virus developed new variants that are worming through the population—especially attacking the unvaccinated. 

 

The numbers of new cases are skyrocketing—while the impacts of the most aggressive variant appear to be milder. What is next?

 

One could, I am sure, draft an outline of scientific and political Covid decisions that will explain—or at least fully chronicle it. Or one could think that some coyote was pulling the strings and laughing as we humans stumble through the next chapter of the Covid virus.

 

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151. The Day after Christmas

 Day after Christmas

 

It came and went like a flash. I baked and gave away 30 some coffee can brown breads—my usual Christmas gifting. In return I was showered in gifts, real things like a bottle of Ouzo, a Pyrex bowl, a mystery spice that smells of Middle East, and 30 pounds of grass-fed beef; and gifts of spirit—kind words about my work and my own words in these short blurbs anchored by the Pandemic.

 

The gift that warmed my heart was the grandson who came home from his new mill job in La Grande, with the woman—girlfriend—I knew only from afar. He’s had a tough few years: an enthusiastic try at college broken by personal problems and the pandemic; a try at Portland with his mom in early covid days that brought him home without a job and with the disease. This was before the vaccine, and he weathered it as I quarantined it, and started writing these blog posts. 

 

He healed, had some lingering after-effects, but they stopped when he got his first shot of the vaccine. He went to work at Safeway, minimum wage, the night shift. Did not like the shift or the working conditions, but plowed on. The Covid rescue $1400 and his first paychecks let him buy his grandma’s old Subaru, and he kept saving money while he looked for other work. He landed the mill job a few weeks ago, and had enough money for first and last and deposits and all you need to set up house in an overpriced apartment. (They are all overpriced now. In my day they said housing should be no more than a quarter of your income; now it’s closer to half for young folks starting out.)

 

They came home and we had ribs on Christmas Eve, and opened presents on Christmas morning. It was a Christmas of what Dylan Thomas called “useful presents”: gloves and thermal socks, coats and cooking gear, the kind of gifts that would have been shoved aside with a shrug a few years ago, but were warmly welcomed this year.

 

The new woman in his life was a pleasure. She’s had her own troubled life, and has a job lined up working with troubled teens. And she has local family ties. I liked her, liked them together.

 

As we careen towards New Years, I think of these things and the granddaughter coming home for the New Years polar plunge. Last night, belly full of a fine Christmas meal with friends, I thought of Dylan Thomas’s Christmas poem, and “I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

 

Most of us will weather this Covid; some will grow stronger from it. We’ll do it by family ties and leaning on friends. 

 

The best of New Years to you and yours!

150. Silver Linings

This Covid year (going on two) has had plenty of grim and sad in it. Like almost everyone, I’ve had friends get sick with it and know a few who have died. Voluntary and forced isolation, and the endless debates over vaccines and masks have become numbing.  

But, this magnifying glass of Covid has also made way—in books, articles, and the workings of my own mind—for good things, important things that might never have reached daylight without it. Add that it’s caused us to reach out to old friends and relatives through magical Zoom, and encouraged stock-taking and life changing from many, including some people I know.

A handful of us from the Oceanside High class of 1960 zoom frequently to retrace old stories and catch up on current events. I’ve watched nephews grow through high school and baseball tournaments, and a brother and sister-in-law settle into a new home in a new town, and spent more time with my sisters and their children than at any time in the last 60 years. 

The place I work and the people I work with at the Josephy Center have risen marvelously to the challenges of the pandemic. Our artsy staff put together over 2000 “art bags” of projects for children and families, and gave them away through clinics and out our front door. Our “Nez Perce Treaties and Reservations” exhibit this summer drew praise. And we were able to purchase the Josephy building from our angel landlord.

Most importantly, the true history and current injustices that have been uncovered and magnified during this pandemic cannot, as author Rebecca Solnit points out in a recent Guardian article, be covered up again. The world now knows about the water situation on the Navajo Reservation, the boarding schools in Canada and the US, the poor health care and disproportionate impacts of diseases in communities of color and the poor. It knows about disproportion in police treatment as well.

The books that have been published about the awful treatment of Indians, Blacks, Asians, and Latinix in our country cannot be erased—despite the best efforts of schoolboard crashers. The not-white faces of athletes, actors, newscasters, scientists, that appear on our screens will not go away.

And my friend Kim Stafford, recent poet laureate of our state, posts new work almost daily. I get weekly thoughtful updates on Covid and life in Idaho from friend John Rember. And, I “get to” write these pandemic blurbs.

When we awake—in fits and starts as has always been the case with plagues and epidemics—there will be new things to grapple with; Covid times will fade, but with good fortune, the silver linings will not. 

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149. Zoom-bombed

Ok, so I am old and sometimes grumpy and can’t keep up with much of electronic technology. But I can be outraged at pornography. Yesterday I had planned to read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” at noon from the Josephy Center via Zoom. The hacking started just as people were getting on to say hello and Merry Christmas and listen to the story. It was shouts and insults and very explicit video of very young people playing at and having sex.

 

There was pornography before Covid, and political divisiveness, petty crime and homelessness. But once again Covid seems to have upped antes, broadened divisions, and emboldened those who have no use for civil society and a community of wide but healthy differences. Instead of problem solving we get escalation, even exhilaration—at the expense of civility. 

 

Covid has disrupted education and closed businesses—while making others incredibly rich. It’s confused travel plans, distanced relatives, and escalated differences within families and among nations. And it has engendered fatigue among health care workers and uncertainty and distrust among ordinary citizens. 

 

Meanwhile, weather is ripping the country apart, from California fires to Kentucky tornadoes. Climate change deniers have grown silent, but that is no compensation to the lives lost and torn apart with wind and fire. 

 

So, is zoom bombing—I learned the word for it yesterday—the pranks of bored teenagers? Or is it the calculated magnification of the voices of sick people of all ages who can’t find places in this changing, chaotic world? And if it’s that, what can those of us looking for normalcy and compassion do about it?

 

It might be another crazy thought from an old and increasingly grumpy guy, but what sprung to mind yesterday, after the shock of it, is that we need nationwide lessons in community and civility, and that doing away with the military draft not only gave us our longest wars, but further divided a fractioning country.

 

Vietnam ended—in my humble opinion—when the military ran out of poor and brown people and started after the sons of white doctors and lawyers and their PTA and Good Housekeeping moms. I say this because I marched with them, and watched their sons get drafted out of the Peace Corps. 

 

Not everyone has to be a soldier, but every 18 year-old should take a year away from parents’ homes and clean bed pans or build trails in some distant place with others doing the same damned thing. And learn to get along with the others—as soldiers have learned forever that they could.

 

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148. 1918

Frustration is setting in, and the more we go, the more we look like 1918.

In 1918 there was a war—and we have several. They had refugees and crowds, and so do we. They had flu deniers, and so do we. They wanted to get on with life, and so do we.

In 1918, the influenza virus attacked young adults in the prime of life. Soldiers, crowded on trains, in barracks and in trenches, were the virus’s perfect vectors. It could take its time and travel aboard ship across the ocean, through the barracks and trenches, and work its way to the far corners of the world over a period of two and three years. 

Health care people and systems worked hard to contain it. They closed churches and public meeting places, advised masks, tried to puzzle a vaccine. They fought to identify it, thought at first it was a bacteria, worked to sort its impacts from those of pneumonia, saw that it often moved to that more familiar disease. Some of today’s pneumonia talk—claims that it is not the Covid that kills, that a lot of deaths attributed to it are actually other things—sounds similar.

Scientists and historians debated at the time and for decades after on its origins and means of arrival in human hosts. Like our Covid, it probably started with a flier—most likely ducks in the American Midwest. The resolution of the mystery was quietly carried on by a few scientists while the virus itself raged. Like the fight over China and the potential of lab origins that sometimes finds voice today.

History says that these viruses, from Medieval plagues to AIDS to Covid, don’t care what we think; they make their own ways in the world, oftentimes booming and subsiding, but rarely, without massive human intervention like we had with smallpox and are trying to do with polio, going away completely. They mutate and hide in small places, small populations, waiting for another chance to surge. They use up a crowd, then slow until another crowd emerges. 

In 1918, in San Francisco, it was the Armistice in November and the Christmas shopping season—and fatigue—that once again crowded churches and stores without the masks they’d carefully worn only months before. 

Unlike the slow and workmanlike Influenza virus of 1918, Covid has to dodge vaccines and testing and tracking. But it gets to travel on faster planes in a more crowded earth.

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147. Statistics—and nature’s own remedy

I can’t remember where I read or heard it, but I swear that President Harry Truman once said that a 5% unemployment rate wouldn’t hurt him, but that “when 25 percent of the population seriously fears being in the 5%-I’d be in trouble.” 

I think about this when I hear covid infection, vaccination, and death rates. And I wonder how the percentages will play out, how I might adjust Truman’s theory to fit today’s Covid facts. It’s of course more complicated, because infection itself ranges from mild to serious, and deaths might be miss-attributed to other causes.

But still, what might today’s numbers and rates of infection tell us about tomorrow? And how do we or can we compare this time in this pandemic with its own past, with what is going on in other states and countries, and even with 1918. For example, we have passed 800,000 deaths in the US; there were 675,000 US deaths with the 1918 pandemic. Our population—326.7 million, is over three times that of 1918—103.2 million. If we were at 2,500,000 deaths now, would it make a difference?  

Here’s another statistic: Covid deaths in Trump voting counties across the country are three times higher than in Biden counties. Will this make a long-term difference?

And here is the sweet one; nature—maybe—is finding its own remedy. First reports are that the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus might prove more transmissible but less deadly than past variants. Which might mean that the vaunted “natural immunity” that is touted by some, might actually rise up with massive, but light, infections across the Trump counties and the hold-outs elsewhere. When that happens, some might decide to get vaccinated, and, although all studies show that natural immunity is not as strong as the vaccines, enough people will be infected quickly enough to reach some kind of herd immunity.

Previous plagues and epidemics have wound down when the virus did not have enough ready hosts; a kind of herd immunity of 80 or 90% of a population was either vaccinated or had become ill with the disease. 

Uncertainty is our new best neighbor—but maybe…. 

 

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146. Hanging On

I’m reading Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, the first of a set of 1950s-60s novels that follow the lives of Swedish families as they leave what binds them in the old world to find something better to hang onto in the new. This first book describes shrinking landholdings as families grow, and the harsh laws that give government and church power over the lives of individuals—especially the poor. Some choose to leave. Moberg describes those who stay—rich and poor, and those who leave, mostly poor. 

The poor farmers and farm families who made the early emigrant voyages in the 1850s traveled on crowded sailing ships, adrift from land, at the mercies of sea law and the sea. They hung onto the rails above the sea, and when the sea roared they held onto their bunks in the locked hold. They were often sick, louse-ridden and doubtful of their consequential decision to leave the safety of home—which mid-journey appeared to some sweeter from a distance and the foreign life at sea. They hung onto religion—or despised it; held onto children and watched them die; blamed partners and blamed themselves for the journey; they practiced home remedies and used up the captain’s medicine chest. They hung on.

It might sound corny, but our pandemic is like a raging sea in a strange world—with an unknown world on the other side. Some of us get sick; some die. Children get left behind, and parents lose children. The weather and the Covid calms—and then surges again. No one knows whether it will be over in another six months or a year—or many more. Sometimes it seems a new variant might take off and kill millions before medicine, science, government and religion can make their next counter moves.

We all look for things and people to hang on to: partner, parent, friend, doctor, vaccine, diet, mask, religion, charismatic leader or soothsayer. The worst is to be alone—or to have a mother or grandfather trapped with Covid in a nursing home or hospital you can’t visit. Their aloneness is as bad as your own.

We hang onto the past—the way the world once was, or as we remember it. We hang onto a vision of normalcy, the way that things should have been and might be soon, the graduations, weddings, and trips we’re supposed to be on. And we hang onto dreams.

The guts of the grasping and the hanging on that we see on news shows and in social media, that erupt at school board meetings and in mandate protests, are all there in Moberg’s account of Swedes heading to an unknown world in 1850.

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