132. Visible signs

When Smallpox ravished the earth, those who didn’t die were left with terrible pockmarks. English Queen Elizabeth’s came down with smallpox in 1562. She nearly died from the disease, and her skin was so scarred that she covered the pockmarks with heavy white makeup made of white lead and vinegar, which slowly poisoned her.

 

When polio stormed across the US in the 1950s, pictures of children in iron lungs were ubiquitous. And when August’s “dog days” hit in my northern Minnesota town, the bus no longer took us to the nearby lake to swim. 

 

We were afraid of polio, and the pressure to help those in the iron lungs and to find vaccines and cures impelled a national March of Dimes campaign. As a boy scout in Southern California, I and my fellow scouts solicited dimes from passersby and marched them up the curb along one of Oceanside’s main streets. Meanwhile, mothers went door to door in their March of Dimes. Defeating polio was not left to the scientists and doctors; we all participated. Nationwide empathy—as well as fear—raised money which contributed to the development of the vaccine. 

 

Covid is a trickier customer. For those who survive, it leaves no lasting marks—with the possible exception of the wasting bodies of some of the “long-haulers.” There are no pockmarks or limps to mark the survivors you encounter on the street, in schools, and the marketplace. 

 

I was talking with our smart, short-term cataloger, Charlotte, who has a degree in medical history, about the difficulties this poses. Maybe if the faces of survivors all turned bright red, or their head and body hair all fell out, vaccinations would be an easier sell.

 

The reinstatement of empathy is an even tougher task. We have watched TV screens show New York workers get bodies from homes and unload them into freezer truck temporary morgues. We’ve listened to exhausted doctors and healthcare workers describe their days and their patients. And still there are deniers, some of them working in health care. 

 

The way out of the current Covid crisis is still unclear, and the unintended consequences of the lengthening world-wide event are as unimaginable as the danger of lead poisoning must have been to Queen Elizabeth almost 500 years ago.

 

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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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11. The County Joins In

The County Joins In

Last Friday night about 200 of us gathered at the courthouse in Enterprise to show our support for Black Lives and Brown Lives Matter. Our community—the 7000 who live in Wallowa County, is very white. But there are a few of color—and now we are proud to have Mexican and Thai and Chinese restaurants.

I was proud too to be part of the Friday gathering. There were other graybeards like me, who had marched in the 60s, when we were young and thought we could change the world. But there were young people too, people with babies and teenage kids, students who had graduated high school that very day. An American Indian who grew up here told his story, and I stood next to another Indian friend. A white woman in her 20s rallied the crowd—she and cohorts made sure there were signs for those of us who didn’t bring our own

There were police everywhere—city police, state police, and the incoming and outgoing sheriffs, who walked the crowd together smiling and chatting. The theater owner and his family pulled a wagon full of popcorn sacks through the crowd—and I think took some to the cops and few onlookers who leaned against walls across the street. A few of them had guns at their sides—“to protect the police from us,” the news reporter told me.

Two or three pickups drove by with fingers in the air, but more drivers pumped fists and honked horns—some even had signs.

This morning a post from Carlsbad and Oceanside, California, where I went to high school sixty years ago, showed thousands marching peacefully to meet between the cities. It’s not just Minneapolis and Portland, but Enterprise and Oceanside, and hundreds of places in between.

It felt like the 60s, when Joan Baez linked arms with Martin Luther King, and white people joined our black and brown brothers and sisters saying “we’re all in this together; let’s do something.”

Maybe George Floyd will change the world, as the preacher said.

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