A year ago, Julie and I were scheduling a book tour. My collection of apocalyptic essays, A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World, had just been published by the University of New Mexico Press. It had been a long winter and we were looking forward to getting on the road. I had been practicing my signature for signing books, my smile for delivering bad news about the future of civilization.
We had reservations at the most civilized Riverside Hotel in Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, on March 19, 2020. Our plans included a soak in the hot pools next door and dinner at the Hotel. The next day, after another soak in the early morning, we would head for Salt Lake, where I was reading at The King’s English Bookshop. From Salt Lake, we would drive to Durango, Colorado, where I would visit writing classes and give a reading at Fort Lewis College.
We were scheduled to arrive in Albuquerque on March 25. I looked forward to meeting the fine folks at the University of New Mexico Press, and an evening reading at Albuquerque’s Bookworks.
Over the next two weeks, we would make our way back home, starting with Santa Fe and Taos. I was planning to flog my book anywhere in the American Southwest that would have me. In between appearances at bookstores, book clubs, and college classes, Julie and I would visit national parks and monuments, hit any other hot spring resorts on the map, and wine and dine like there was no tomorrow.
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There was a tomorrow—365 of them, as of today—but no book tour. On March 11, a COVID pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization. Very quickly, the country started shutting down. On March 13, Idaho had its first confirmed case.
We began cancelling reservations. Our 2020 calendar is marked with cross-outs through April. After April, there are blank spaces where once there would have been birthday get-togethers, solstice parties, more road trips, and visits from friends.
On March 22 the Los Angeles Review of Books published “On Having One’s Book Tour Cancelled by the Coronavirus Outbreak,” a piece I had written at the suggestion of Stephen Hull, the director of UNM Press. In it, I explained a cancelled book tour wasn’t the end of the world, but it was the end of a certain type of world, a world where you could get in the car and head for new territory, give in-person readings, and talk about economic collapse in the abstract.
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Soon after the LA Review piece was published, I decided to write a journal, along the lines of the one Daniel Defoe’s uncle had written during the London Plague of 1665. Defoe took his uncle’s work, edited it, researched its details, and republished it as A Journal of the Plague Year in 1722. Defoe had the advantage of a 57-year perspective on the events he was writing about. He knew what was going to happen next, and so did his readers. His uncle’s primary source became a well-crafted history, which only lost a little of its authority due to Defoe’s previous fame as the author of the fictional Robinson Crusoe.
I didn’t have the luxury of a 57-year perspective on COVID, so I set out to write primary-source material.
I started publishing two-thousand-word entries every Monday at 10 a.m., too often focusing on the week’s headlines, or my thoughts on the dismal politics of the world and the country. I kept track of state and national COVID deaths, and the flood of tourists that hit the valley last summer. I meditated in print on the human tendency to act in self-destructive ways.
For comic relief, I reported on our hikes, camping trips, and skiing.
The journal made the year whiz by. There’s nothing like a Monday deadline to make the rest of the week seem like a too-short break. It usually took a day to write two thousand words—I had gotten used to the length while writing for Travel and Leisure and the ski magazines—and another day to edit and rewrite. Then Julie would do an edit and I’d enter her corrections. Julie would give one more reading, alert me to any lapses in fact or taste, and post it on my website.
I adopted an anecdotal, elliptical style, one where I could throw seemingly unrelated topics together and see how they jelled. I threw in jokes where I could. I charged my readers with the responsibility of making sense of my writing, and thankfully, they rose to the challenge.
The final manuscript is long enough to make a book, written at a time in my life when I thought I was done writing books. I don’t know if anyone will publish it. At the least, I can have a few copies made up and pass them out to the CNAs when I move into the memory ward at the First Hard Frost Assisted Living facility in Stanley, if it’s ever built and if I win the contest to name it.
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I did not anticipate that we would have vaccines so soon, and I had no idea that the pandemic, masks, and vaccines would be politicized. I had no idea that after a year and more than a half-million deaths, people would still be saying the virus didn’t exist.
I didn’t predict Biden would be elected or that he would be as competent as he has been so far.
I did insist that we were living in a radically different world.
Biden seems to understand that the situation requires massive changes in the role of the American government, akin to FDR’s programs in the 1930s. He has quickly pushed through a bill that begins the transfer of the country’s wealth to poor people, something that will let the country live a little longer than it would have otherwise. He has begun work on an infrastructure bill that will put people back to work. He gave a speech that proved he’s not as demented as the last guy.
The Republican half of the country, in a kind of ghost dance, has started reopening bars and restaurants and eliminating restrictions on large gatherings. They’ve declared the pandemic over, and it isn’t the first time. As ghost dances go, this one isn’t going to have any better results than the ghost dances that inspired Wounded Knee.
In my first post, I wrote that, “With luck and wisdom, we will carry on,” a sentence that qualifies as prophetic if you leave out the wisdom part.
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As you might expect, I’m tired of sitting in a chair and staring at a screen and juggling words and paragraphs until something begins to reflect coherent thought. Given the seasonal nature of time here in Sawtooth Valley, I would start repeating myself if I continued. I’ll spare you that.
I will leave all the entries up on my website for a few months and will still post occasionally. All of you who remain signed up for notifications will continue to get them. Just don’t expect them often.
I plan on posting a short note when I receive my second vaccine jab. If something big happens in the valley or in the outside world, I’ll post about what it means to Julie and me but likely won’t spend the time figuring out what it means to the world. If we travel, I’ll take notes and work on my rusty travel-writing skills, and post anything that seems worthwhile. Maybe I’ll write about a real book tour, one with lecterns and flesh-and-blood audiences and a heckler or two.
When I was teaching fiction workshops, I used to tell my students that now and then when you were working on a story you could suddenly feel the whole thing drop down into a deeper and more solid reality. If that happened to them, I said, they had found the real story, and that was the one they needed to live in for as long as it took to see how it turned out. More than once in the past year I’ve had that sudden loss of altitude happen in the middle of one of my journal entries. A story was beginning, and I could feel the pull of its suddenly-real characters. But to follow them into a fictional world would have taken too long and I had to finish the post I was working on, which was usually about something else entirely.
Now I’ll have the time to work on some short stories and see if they enter that deeper reality. I may be done writing books—really and truly, this time—but I’m not done thinking and writing about the people who danced at the edge of my vision while I was trying to write about tourists, grief, and the politics of the pandemic. I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the dehumanization of my world, and I want to write about a world where the trend is in the opposite direction. That’s going to require that I start making things up.
It’s a good thing I’m not the president.
Which brings up the fact that the journal of our plague year may be over, but the plague is not. The world has had a tough year, and from what I can anticipate, the next few years aren’t going to be much easier. There will be a long tail on COVID, and the damage it inflicts on its survivors may last for decades. There will almost certainly be other plagues. The world economy will not get any better without huge increases in the production of goods and energy, and those increases will run hard into climate and vital resource limits.
I have written elsewhere that all we need is cheap fusion reactors that can be loaded on a flatbed and delivered to the city they will power, and cheap briefcase-sized batteries that will move a car for five hundred miles. Then we could have the 20th century all over again, if we had another Earth to have it on. I think the extra Earth may be easier to come by than the reactors or the batteries.
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I want to thank everyone who took the time to read my entries. Your presence in the world made writing a real-life activity for me, and if I ever got stuck in the middle of a piece all I had to do was visualize one or two or a dozen of my readers, and I could feel the momentum of thoughts pick up again. It was a conversation, and it continues. Thank you all.