Unusual for this time of year: the garage swept, the workbench clean, the tools stored away in their proper bins, skis flat-filed and waxed. After sweeping up a half-gallon or so of mouse turds, I have remembered to keep the mouse traps baited and set, and as a result have caught eight mice, six in March and two thus far in April.
I place the mice I catch on the fence rail behind the garage, and the crows that frequent our compost pile in the winter watch from the trees along the highway. One of them—the alpha crow, Crow #1 for short—usually arrives within a minute. In a graceful dive-and-glide, Crow #1 comes in an inch above the rail, seizes the mouse in his talons, and heads for a rook nook in a nearby hillside cliff face. Once there, he swallows the mouse whole. It takes a little head-bobbing and gulping to get it down.
Over the years, I’ve concluded that Crow #1 hates to share. He doesn’t waste time savoring a dead mouse bit by bit. He swallows it quickly, and then takes off again for the fence, where lesser crows are sometimes perching, looking for mice he might have missed. He drives them off by hovering over them, screaming insults, and threating to violate social distance. Then he perches on the rail, supremely alone and proud, digesting, watching the other crows pick through the compost, malnourished vegetarians all of them.
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My turd sweeping and mouse trapping and Crow #1’s gulping and head-bobbing have occasioned a re-reading of the hantavirus chapter in Laurie Garrett’s thick 1994 book, The Coming Plague.
The parallels between hantavirus and the new coronavirus are striking. Both were previously unrecognized versions of known viruses. Both cause acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), which drowns victims in lung fluid. Both cause kidney damage. Both have come from a wild-animal reservoir: bats in the case of coronavirus, rodents in the case of hantavirus.
But hantavirus causes death in an estimated 60 to 70 percent of its victims. Garrett points out that thousands of pneumonia deaths happen every year, but because most occur in the about-to-die-anyway cohort, few are tested to determine what kind of infection they have. As a result, we don’t know how widespread and deadly hantavirus really is.
Rereading Garrett has caused me to wear a mask while sweeping out the garage, and gloves while I bait the traps and take mice from them. If I find Crow #1 beak-first in the snow below the fence rail, I’ll spray the garage down with Clorox and try not to kill myself in the process.
It’s occurred to me that if I die of hantavirus or Clorox-generated lung edema anytime in 2020, I’ll likely be listed as a COVID-19 fatality. If Crow #1 dies of starvation, his death will be ascribed to the pandemic’s economic collateral damage. There’s a lot of uncertainty in this business.
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Yes, The Coming Plague is on my bedside dresser. Laurie Garrett is a fine writer and it’s comforting, during this pandemic, to find someone in solid control, even if it’s only solid control of the language. I don’t find the book morbid, but I do find it sobering in its insistence that only luck had kept a global pandemic from happening as of 1994. In its index, there isn’t an entry for a coronavirus of any kind.
In the bookcase, yet to be reread, are William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone and The Demon in the Freezer, and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. I’ve already reread Camus’s The Plague.
After I listed The Plague as part of my cheer-up pandemic reading list, I had friends ask me if I was really serious about them reading anxious literature in already anxious circumstances.
Of course you should read it, I said. It’s a story of human endurance against lurking-in-all-corners evil. It tells how adversity, even as it brings out the worst in some people, brings out the best in others. It shows how doing what you can to be kind, when and where you can, is the highest and best use of your life. If those things don’t cheer you up, I said, I don’t know what will.
As for the other books, I find them cheering, too. They are evidence that Man Proposes, God Disposes, as long as you have a definition of God that encompasses lethal microbes, malignant intentions toward humanity, and bullying crows. It’s nice not to have personal responsibility—much less guilt—for the mess we’re in, to know that humanity is subject to forces so far beyond its control as to make even the idea of free will into the fakest of fake news.
It’s easy to conclude that there are no humans moving and shaking human events. All our names, not just the tubercular John Keats’s, are written in water. Our works, no matter how much fuss and bother we caused when we were living, melt away in the same instant of geologic time as the rest of us. If you want to see who will be moving and shaking things long after you’re gone, switch on your electron microscope.
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The pandemic has been a proof-of-concept exercise for people who would effect worldwide change with a biolab. We now know that a pandemic can wreck economies, paralyze air, sea, and ground traffic, alter geopolitical balances, quell protests, and derail environmental movements. It can energize the kind of eat-its-own populism that emphasizes border security, germ-ridden immigrants, hatred of science and reason, and taking things back to where they were in an idealized and oddly empty past.
It doesn’t matter if the pandemic started from bats or pangolins in the Wuhan wet market or in a military installation in any of a half-dozen countries, the proof-of-concept is the same. Now that CRISPR gene-splicing technology is widely available, and vastly cheaper than a nuclear weapons program, it’s easy to imagine that such technology will prove irresistible to the utopian thinkers and social tinkerers and military men among us.
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I think of explaining this to Crow #1 when he drives the more craven crows off the fence rail, especially if I put more than one mouse on it at a time.
“Leave the other mice for the others,” I say to him. “One mouse makes a meal. Two make gluttony. You’ll cause resentment and anger among your fellows. They’re going to gang up on you when you’re sleeping and peck your eyes out and tear off your feathers and eat you. And then somebody new will emerge as a new #1, and he’ll be a worse tyrant than you were, having learned from your example. Haven’t you heard about what happened to the old Bolsheviks, after Stalin came to power?”
Crow #1 considers this. Despite limited spiritual ambitions, he’s highly intelligent. But it’s a kind of cold, reptilian intelligence that doesn’t admit to mercy or error. He’s heard of Stalin. He’s learned from Stalin. He looks at me, and utters a guttural croak that I translate as, “More mice. Now.”
“What about hantavirus? Maybe, for your safety, I should stop putting out mice altogether.”
He’s not worried by my words. Crow #1 can take care of his own safety. He’s done it all his life. “More mice.”
I used to believe that Crow #1 liked me and saw me as a kind and generous human being, not like the other human beings that poisoned or shot crows when they grew so numerous that they would eat crops in the field and break the branches of roosting trees and cover sidewalks with crow shit.
Instead, I fed him mice. Having watched him for years and never spotted a sign of gratitude or empathy, I now know he doesn’t just hate sharing, he hates the sharer.
“More mice. More.”
“I may not always be here. There’s a new virus going around. One day I may be carted out of this house dead, and nobody will put mice out for you.”
Crow #1 thinks this over. He’s wondering if my body will be draped over the fence rail for him. He’s thinking contentedly of more bodies to come. He’s lucky I never let my thoughts get away from me, else I’d get the shotgun and see how well crow-under-glass would serve as Sunday dinner.
“More mice,” says Crow #1. I’m back in the house now, and he’s just outside my window. He looks like he’d fly right in and peck me to pieces if he could. He’s hard evidence that what you project onto the world can come right back at you.