Julie visited her parents, who are in their 70s, last week. She spent three nights at their house in Oregon. She helped them plant their garden.
Because both Oregon and Idaho were relaxing their pandemic advisories, it was a good time for her to visit, or at least a better time than later in the month, when more and more people would be grouping together in cafes, stores, homes, and parks. Lots of folks have reached the point where they yearn for a normal summer with normal restaurant dining, normal barstool conversations, normal riding around in pickup cabs listening to adult hits on the radio, and normal hugs instead of elbow-bumps. If there is another peak in coronavirus cases, we figure it will come a couple of weeks after things loosen up.
I didn’t go. I stayed here and took care of Juno. I raked up the last of 31 wheelbarrow loads of lawn-waste and dumped them in a low spot in our back yard and covered them with a layer of topsoil. If I live long enough—four or five decades should do it—we will have a lawn that is flat, mostly.
I spent a lot of time reading. I crushed all the wine bottles in the metal garbage can we use to crush wine bottles in. I buried the crushed glass in the anti-rodent trench I’m slowly extending around the back yard, where we’ll have our own burrow-proof garden once global warming makes it possible to garden here. I swept the living room floor. I organized my toolbox. I discovered you don’t need a mirror to practice elbow-bumping. You can elbow-bump your own elbows.
The reason I didn’t go with Julie is that we are actively balancing risk and consequences these days. After sheltering in place for three or four weeks, visiting family who also have been sheltering in place is low risk. The consequences, however, are extreme if anything does go wrong. We do our best to minimize the things that could go wrong, and I was one of them.
Once you start playing it safe, a lot of things become either/or propositions. While Julie was gone, I was going to drive to town each day and check the mail. Instead I stayed home, to save on hand sanitizer. I was going to take Juno on a long hike. It rained, or looked like rain, so Juno and I stayed inside and played tug-of-war with her rope. On the last day of my solitude I was going to get out of my bathrobe before 2 in the afternoon, but I had to spend the early afternoon doing dishes before Julie got home.
I was going to cook myself dinners. I decided instead to make it through with a couple of giant bricks of Julie’s lasagna I found in the freezer. Safer that way.
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Julie told me that when she left her parents, she gave them hugs. “I couldn’t help it,” she said. “I didn’t know when I’d be able to hug them again.”
She gave me a hug, too, when she came in the door. That hug was probably more dangerous than the ones she gave her parents, because after leaving their house, she had visited the Ohs—Costco, Winco, Trader Joe’s, Home Depot—and had loaded up the car with groceries and hardware and cleaning supplies. She had worn a mask and glasses and gloves, and religiously applied hand sanitizer every time she got back in the car, but she had still spent long exposed hours in the mercantile pest-pits of Idaho’s Treasure Valley.
For Julie, shopping had been scary. People with no protection had been clustering in the store aisles, talking loudly and acting like there wasn’t a lethal virus going around. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, some of it indicating the virus is harmless, or is an engineered bioweapon designed to take down the world economy. Some people believe the pandemic is a fiction invented to make President Trump look ineffective in a crisis. These folks hug each other and trade arm-punches and pats on the back and yell rude things at people who are wearing masks.
At Costco, at least, they won’t let you in the door if you’re not wearing a mask, so you don’t get yelled at until you get back to the parking lot, where angry men sit in cars while their wives shop. Coronavirus is gendering the shit out of things.
It took us an hour to unload the car and put everything away.
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Uncertainty has become our watchword. When we speak with friends, especially ones who have businesses, we’re careful not to ask them how they are doing. We don’t want to hear bad news. But bad news is the risk you take when you make conversation. Usually it’s about lost jobs or deferred trips to the doctor, or deepening loneliness, or a sudden realization the future won’t be what it was supposed to be. Your first impulse is to give advice.
Chances are that advice won’t help. If it’s about the economy or the pandemic, you won’t know if your advice is any good, and neither will the person you give it to.
You can advise people to buckle their seatbelts. Quit smoking. Don’t drive while texting or drunk. Be kind to other people. Be kind to yourself. Bring your mask when you go to Costco, because they’ve quit giving them out at the door.
That’s about all the good solid advice I can think of at the moment.
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Julie and I will have been married 24 years on August 17 of this year, and the time between that anniversary and our 25th was to be our grand jubilee—more of a grand potlatch, in our case, as it was going to burn through our discretionary income for the next decade. Between those two dates I will turn 70 and Julie will turn 50. As part of the festivities, I planned to continue to give readings from my March-published A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World, warning bookstore audiences and university environmental studies departments about the eventual impossibility of industrial civilization.
One of those readings was going to be in a gallery in London, and we had decided that once there, we would see a dozen West End plays and then travel through Wales and Scotland for a month before returning to Idaho. Later in the winter, we would visit Vietnam, where we had been for ten weeks in 2010, and where we had been fascinated by a tourist industry that was new, and raw, and careening toward disaster. We wanted to go back and see what had happened. We wanted to look up the people we had met. We wanted to find out if their plans had worked out.
We suspect their plans have worked out like ours have, which is to say their plans are all gone.
For us, money earmarked for a celebratory year has been transferred back to savings. Instead of a parade of celebrations, we’re watching an endless series of days-at-home, which has given rise to routine, and routine has given rise to ritual, and ritual has concerned itself with balancing our lives on the low-risk/extreme consequences axis.
We practice sympathetic magic, which means, in our case, we plan in the short term what we used to plan in the long term. The future has gotten shorter, but we still need to have one. Julie and I submit detailed policy proposals to each other for afternoon Post Office visits, breakfast take-out orders, the exact times and routes of afternoon walks. Sometimes, for a Zoom get-together with friends, we include a whole three tomorrows in our plans.
But three tomorrows is about the limit. We have no idea what will happen to us in a world where low risk is getting harder and harder to arrange. We have no idea about the future in a world where cause-and-effect have agreed to a no-fault divorce, at least in the minds of the people opening up the Idaho economy.
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Time has a macrocosm, which we know as geological time. It has a microcosm, which we’re living in, day-to-day-to-day. It used to be that there was a middle range of time, which was where we placed our lives. We planned years of education for decades of careers. We signed up for mortgages that lasted 30 years and got married for life. (Julie and I are still married for life, in case you’re worried. It’s just that when you’re almost 70 in a world with a pandemic that’s selecting out old people, you don’t know if for life is a long-term plan or a short one.)
But that middle range of time, if you believe Pleistocene actuarial estimates, is not something that a quarter-million-plus years of human evolution has prepared us for. Tribal life didn’t design us for successful careers in the financial services industry, or to lead decades of slow and steady growth at a company. Only rarely do we find ourselves designed for quiet deepening wisdom as writers or artists. Maybe that’s why we go for the Big Short, the quick bonanza of embezzlement, the deliberately blown housing bubble, the massive stock buyback that results in a hundred-million-dollar bonus, the best-seller, the triumph at Sotheby’s. We’re not built to live in that middle range of time, that cycle-breaking three score and ten, which is why when we do live in it, we get so anxious and crazy.
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Maybe that’s why Julie and I have adapted to our days. They are uncertain and temporary and terrifying and familiar and comfortable all at once. We are still mourning a long-term future that has disappeared, probably forever, but can look at that mourning as a needed part of our lives, a head-start on the inevitable loss of the short-term.
In the meantime—in the meantime we’re finding the meantime to be strangely consequential. We’ve put away ski equipment for the summer. The house is clean. The yard is raked, and a bumper crop of Russell Lupine is gracing the ditch bank in the back yard, getting ready to bloom after the first warm night. Our sole rhubarb plant has begun to unfurl dense leaves. A food order from Amazon has arrived on our front step, and Myla, the local UPS driver, left a Milk-Bone for Juno with it, a warm gesture that meant as much to us as it did to Juno. Julie’s cooking has turned into a nightly jubilee. I have discovered a heretofore unsuspected ability to speed-load the dishwasher. Things around the house I should have fixed years ago are fixed.
I’ve been rereading Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World, with its descriptions of witch-burnings and ignorance-inspired child abuse and all the other ceremonies of darkness with which humans propitiate the future. Sagan presents science as the only salvation for our consciousness—and given what we do to others in our scientific ignorance, the only salvation for our souls.
Something a lot like scientific ignorance is behind the events we watch each evening on the PBS Newshour. Terrible things are happening in this world, and we come away from each episode with another day’s worth of survivor’s guilt and survivor’s knowledge, knowing that for us the world is fragile, but for others—many, many others, who no longer have homes or jobs or money or mothers or fathers or children—it is irretrievably broken.