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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118. The Spike

Although we in Oregon are comfortably near the lowest of the states in terms of percentages of incidence and death by Covid, we have joined the country in the current spike. We’ve trolled along at about 300 new cases each day—until this week, when we flirted with 600 cases per day, and passed that on Friday.

And Wallowa County, where our vaccination rate hovers somewhere between 50 and 60 percent, we’ve had days and days of 0 new cases—until this week. It was 3, then another, and then 5 cases on Thursday. There is news of another local death too, a woman in her late 50s. 

Small numbers, but we are a small place, 7000 of us plus the travelers from New York, Wisconsin, California, Washington, Idaho, and North Dakota. Can we assume that most travelers are vaccinated? I haven’t seen stats on that, but imagine they are split like the rest of us. Even with Fox News now, at least at times, advocating vaccinations.

Why is it so hard! The illogic of it is startling. The White House and some Republican governors are reeling.

I think it is our radical individualism and the belief in total personal control. Yes, air travel is safer than car travel by the statistics, but I am in control in my car—until another car crosses the center line. And yes, vaccinations might have worked with polio and measles, but I know or know by hearsay about someone who got the Covid vaccination and died. I’ll take my own chances.

Or, more combatively, “don’t mess with my freedom to live and do as I want,” and I don’t like shots, or don’t like doctors or anyone else telling me how to live, what to eat, how to take care of my heart or my overweight or smoking or drinking or couch-addicted self.  Just leave me alone!

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64. “Freedom"

 One day after quarantine  

I’m home again, had a nice steak dinner with my two grandsons, who’ve safely quarantined here while I was doing so at a friend’s cabin. The grandson who tested positive and set this whole thing in motion had a few days of mild symptoms, but is healthy now. We’ll have turkey on Thursday, quietly.

This morning the radio news said that a million people each day are crowding into airports and airplanes going somewhere else for Thanksgiving. A piece in the Washington Post profiled a more conservative cross-section of Americans who are making accommodations—space heaters in patios, individual serving plates, zoom Thanksgivings. One woman said her husband would not be joining a smaller, masked group for the traditional dinner because he was “grumpy” that his presidential candidate had lost, and refused to agree to the precautions for the holiday meal.

My first thoughts were with the millions who are traveling, and then to the woman’s husband and the red-hatted people,who’ve become ubiquitous on TV with shouts for “freedom”: freedom to go on eating, drinking, and celebrating—and traveling—like they did in some idealized past. 

What do those freedoms have to do with the Martin Luther King, John Lewis, and the Freedom Marchers we watched on TV last night as I described the Civil Rights movement and the leaders I’d followed and idolized to my grandson! John Lewis wanted the freedom to vote, without having to correctly guess the number of jellybeans in a jar or reciting parts of the constitution. Nelson Mandela waited 27 years in prison for the freedom to participate in the life of his country without the walls of apartheid.

How do you measure those freedoms with the freedom to travel and crowd and breathe close and sing in choruses when solos are healthier and your own freedoms might infringe on the health and lives of others?

Say “freedom” once, twice, and the third time “Me and Bobby Maggee” rung in my ears. And freedom shrunk to a nostalgic hunger for something gone…

Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose

Nothin', that's all that Bobby left me, yeah

But, feelin' good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues

Hey, feelin' good was good enough for me, mm-hmm

Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee

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