Yesterday, Julie got her second vaccination shot. Today, she is feeling generally malaisy but is functioning well enough. She’s been reading all morning and we took a walk out to the river to see if we’ll have high water this year. It doesn’t look as though we will, not without Biblical-level rains in May. We’re not counting on it raining at all.
We’re not counting on much these days, especially if it hasn’t happened yet.
One notable exception: we believe Julie will be her usual cheerful and healthy self by tomorrow. That may be wishful thinking, but friends who have reacted badly to their second shot have told us they felt fine after a day, and better thereafter. I started feeling better after my second shot, but it could have been the placebo effect. It could have been the small feeling of safety, although I didn’t really feel safe until yesterday, when I could finally stop worrying about Julie’s vaccination status. Maybe other old men felt fully vaccinated if they got the shots and their spouses had to wait. I didn’t.
I’ve heard of people bursting into tears when they were declared vaccinated, but neither Julie nor I felt that kind of unadulterated relief. For too long, we’ve been imagining what it’s going to be like to be around people again. While it will be good to see friends face-to-face, it will also feel reckless and weird.
We have been careful for so long that it seems like careful is all we know how to do. Masks and hand sanitizer and hunkering down indoors have shaped our lives for over a year. We have grown used to them. We like them. We feel vulnerable without them. Even if new cases of COVID stopped tomorrow, we’d find other microbes to mask against, other reasons to become agoraphobic.
Pfizer’s CEO went on record a week ago about the need for booster shots six months after a first full vaccination, and yearly thereafter. He was just trying to sell stock, but it was not welcome news for us non-stockholders. The CDC immediately pushed back, stating that nobody knows how long the Pfizer or any other vaccine will be effective. The CDC, as usual, emphasized what we don’t know over what we do.
The CDC knows what it’s talking about. Nobody knows what the future will bring. You can count on that.
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Also, the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted of the murder of George Floyd, the man whose neck he knelt on for nine-and-a-half minutes, cutting off his air. I did feel a great moment of relief when I heard the verdict, because if the jury didn’t convict Chauvin after viewing that video, I would have lost all faith in the rule of law in this country.
I’ve tried to hold onto that faith in the face of a lot of uniformed murderers being let off in the past decade, but a lot of people have stopped believing in justice, on both the left and on the right. Faith is just an obstacle to action for these people. They like the idea of the rule of law going away. They’re looking forward to the time when the law and any implied justice appended thereto is irrelevant.
When the jury delivered its verdict, it felt as if the country backed away—a little—from the end of civil authority and the beginning of the end of our country.
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Since the end of my weekly journal entries, I’ve been reading a lot, mostly science fiction stories from the 50s and early 60s. You can get a hundred of these stories for ninety-nine cents on Kindle. True, these are stories published in poorly-proofread pulp magazines with bug-eyed monsters chasing half-naked women on their covers, but they are useful object lessons in cultural anthropology.
Your ninety-nine cents will buy you a lot of unconscious racial bigotry, a lot of semi-conscious misogyny, a lot of adolescent-boy fantasies about the perfect girlfriend/wife/mother (a sort of Holy Trinity for adolescent boy science fiction authors). But you’ll also get a presumed future, a future that could actually happen, that has some relationship to the past and the present, that is susceptible to the occasional educated guess or bout of magical thinking. It’s something you can’t have at any price these days. But it once existed, if these stories are to be believed.
They tell of a future where people will survive nuclear war, at least to the extent that they can huddle in ruined basements and snag the occasional dog or cat for a meal. They can survive on an Earth that has 350 billion people (not a misprint, just a couple of hundred years more of an exponential curve on a graph). Absent biowarfare and hydrogen bombs, they live in a techno-Utopia, with faster-than-light travel, vat-grown chicken, free energy, underwater cities, asteroid mining, robots and androids, all-knowing computers, talking aliens—the list goes on and on.
Contrast these worlds with ours, and you’ll see that a hundred stories of pulp sci-fi for under a buck is a bargain.
It’s a bargain for me, because I don’t think Julie and I can presume a future that has any connection to the present. That’s because the present we’re in doesn’t have any connection to the past. You can make predictions of course, because that’s what human brains are wired to do, but you have to wait around for results.
You might think you’re able to predict the present, but the year 2020 has shown that it takes us a long time to even grasp what happened yesterday.
It may be that we have a future. It’s just that we won’t realize we’re in it when we get there.
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My other reading has been Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which gets around the question of having a future by saying that a human life, whether it lasts for three hundred years or three days, is so small relative to Eternity that its length doesn’t matter. He also says that our lives are the struggles of a little soul carrying around a corpse, which, if I understand it correctly, means that we are creatures of Eternity rather than Time. It takes a leap of faith to believe in the soul, and Eternity, but right now they’re looking considerably more solid than the rule of law.
I find Marcus Aurelius comforting, in spite of his insistence that life is hard, vanishingly short, and lacking in free will. He says there is joy in fulfilling one’s fate, doing one’s duty, recognizing that fighting evil is a losing but worthwhile endeavor, and accepting one’s defeats with grace. He advocates being as kind as possible to one’s fellow beings within the confines of fate.
Meditations is free on Kindle. Read it, take it to heart, and even if you haven’t just read a hundred science fiction stories for a buck, you’ll know that the value of literature is seldom related to its price. Also that the wisdom of human beings can live long after them if they’re willing to write it down.
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In the last week, I’ve had two inquiries about my book Traplines, which was published in 2003. The reason for the interest—that far post-publication—is the possibility that the lower Snake dams will be breached to restore salmon runs to Central Idaho.
Passages in Traplines describe my father’s guiding business and his clients, who paid him ten dollars a day to hook chinook salmon and then hand them the pole so they could pull the fish to shore. I wrote about salmon thick in the rivers and a valley bright with high water and new willow leaves and sunshine. People wanted to quote my words in books and articles that supported dam breaching.
I declined to give permission, because I no longer believe in breaching the dams or restoring the salmon runs. I’ve become a heretic. I tend to see salmon restoration as a kind of ghost dance, an attempt to bring back the world the salmon left. That world is gone forever.
Also, tourism—given as one of the reasons for breaching the dams—has become a force for evil, a phenomenon of surface that destroys everything authentic it touches. Also, the proponents of breaching see nuclear power as a substitute for hydropower, and if there’s one thing worse than tourism, it’s a world with a Fukushima/Chernobyl-level event every twenty-five years or so over the projected half-life of plutonium.
The salmon that we used to fish for in the back yard are extinct. In their place is an artificial species, one that can substitute for the real thing, at least enough for magical thinkers to pretend that things can be put back to what they were sixty years ago.
For me, the value of the salmon is in their absence. We can look at our empty rivers, slackwater reservoirs, barren spawning beds, and fish trucks spewing six-inch rainbow into tourist-lined fishing holes, and we can see how little substance magical thinking gets us. If we bring the salmon back, it will be expensive camouflage on an utterly denatured world.
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I don’t believe that you can go back into a warm and comfortable past, whether it’s 1960 or 2019. Humans, at least during their time on the planet, are stuck in the present. Geologists talk about Deep Time, evoking a past that encompasses millions and billions of years, against which (thanks, Marcus Aurelius!) we exist as mayflies. Perhaps we should start to think about the Deep Present, the place we can live if we pay attention to the Now, a place just as full of good and evil and wonder and possibility as the past, and one that we can actually live in, as long as we run to keep up.