“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there someday.” – A. A. Milne
I guess our main challenge in these days of pandemic is staying safe. But we seem to be equally challenged with keeping it interesting – despite the restrictions. This is where I am really grateful for all the Potomac River access paths we have in Piscataway Park, which I’ve taken to walking on a mostly daily basis. I’ve found it a little difficult to paint during this period, but after meeting with my art group I was inspired to haul my paints along on a walk and paint one of my favorite spots down by the river.
It has been hard this last couple of weeks to think of anything light-hearted to write about. Not because of the virus--for all the death and suffering, at least it's natural. No, I'm talking about the televised murder of George Floyd, and the popular uprising from this last straw, which brought to light even more brutalities captured on video.
I'm sick and saddened by racists who insist that the possibility of systemic racism in our policing doesn't even need to be looked into (I'm talking to you, Bill Barr), and by liars and sophists who claim that holding police accountable for their brutality amounts to mere "political correctness" (I'm talking to you, Jeff Sessions). And by those who have been made complacent by white privilege, who needed a global protest movement to awaken them to the need to address a problem that's been festering all their lives (I'm talking to you, Dorn).
Abuse of the powerless by the powerful has been part of the human condition since forever. Like it or not, the systematic abuse of non-whites is a cornerstone of the American story.
We can't change the past, but we must change the future. Changing our story hasn't been easy or gone unopposed, and won't be completed without more mis-steps and backslides, but it has to happen. If you believe that the system needs to change, take heart, and work to make it so. You are doing right!
If you believe that law and order is so important that the risk of an occasional abuse is justified, at least come to the table and work to minimize that risk, and ensure that all enjoy the benefits of law and order, and the risks of abuse aren't disproportionately passed to people of color. I did a post a while back (here) about the human tendency to want someone else to pay the price for our own good fortune. This started way back with human sacrifice, and some will argue (and I agree) that we are still practicing that today, under other names like Law & Order. We need to stop the sacrifice of human lives!
And if you believe that the benefits to you of a strong (even militarized) police justifies the risk of injury or death to someone of color, then you are saying that black lives don't matter to you as much as your own life and comfort, and you should carefully read your Bible or the Declaration of Independence, or whatever you draw your spiritual identity from. If you still aren't swayed by reason or compassion, then I hope you will be swayed by force of numbers this election day.
Thank you, I had to say that. Next time, I'll be back with another post on the lighter side of living each day in fear of the deadly coronavirus.
Thanks for listening.
Dorn
6/11/2020
BLACK LIVES MATTER.
– In which Dorn cruises down the back roads by the rivers of my memory.
Art courtesy Lona
ig Brother Zuckerberg is definitely still listening in. Kathleen and I were driving one morning recently, and Kathleen says out of the blue, “I think we should get an RV! I’m sick of staying at home, and an RV is really the only way we could safely travel around and see things!”. We were in my pickup truck, which has no internet or even a fully functioning radio, but somehow he heard, because the very next day on the internet was an unsolicited article from Bloomberg, “Scared Americans Desperate to Travel Are Buying Up ‘Covid Campers’”.
Jeff Green explains in the article:
Cooped-up Americans desperate to get out after months of lockdowns are dreaming of doing something—anything—that resembles a vacation. But a majority of them worry a second wave of the coronavirus is coming, and think politicians have pushed too fast to reopen. Unsurprisingly, when it comes to getting out of Dodge, the close-quarters of an airline cabin are a no-go. That’s where the “Covid camper” comes in.
Toad, Mole, and Rat satisfy their wanderlust in Kenneth Grahame’s classic The Wind in the Willows
Too true! Kathleen’s argument for a Recreational Vehicle made sense to me, as it apparently has done to stir-crazy covid shut-ins all across the country. Though how to implement such a step right now, when we haven’t even gone into a building other than our home since February, will take some thinking.
But there’s nothing to stop me from taking a trip down memory lane to times past when we’ve worked or played in mobile digs. As Toad says, “Oh, the open road!”
Back when Kathleen and I were first courting, we decided it’d be a lark to go camping on Assoteague Island. And by camping, I mean driving there in her new Chevy Vega hatchback with the back seat folded down, and when we were done frolicking on the dunes or whatever, we’d just sleep in the back. And it worked, in theory.
In practice, by the end of the day of fun and sun, one of us was completely bright red with sunburn (who knew that could happen?) and the other was covered head to toe with mosquito bites. And the back of a Vega hatchback with the seat folded down is (a) so cramped that two people couldn’t lay side by side in the back, (b) not really flat, and (c) hot, if you didn’t want to open the window and let the insects in. But we were young and in love, so everything worked out all right in the end.
Note on pictures: none of these are the actual vehicles from my past. In fact, they might not even be the same models. But they are a good likeness for what I see now in my mind's eye.
A bit later when we had settled into married life, we bought a big hulking used Jeep Wagoneer station wagon, which we called “the Whale”. One of its chief selling points was that our girls would someday be of driving age, and I thought it would be useful to have a car which when they said “Daddy, I need to borrow the car”, I knew they really needed it. The thing screamed Family Car—it even had fake wood exterior paneling, as I recall.
This was our vehicle of choice for our camping excursions when the kids were young. It was our first 4-wheel drive car, and we were immensely proud of that. I remember once we had gone on a jaunt to somewhere in Virginia, where they let you park and pitch your tent anywhere, and we decided that the best place was at the top of a grassy meadow only accessible up a 45° grade (I am exercising dramatic license here. I call the slope 45° to give my story credibility, but I distinctly remember it was at least 75°, maybe even 95°. Especially on the way down.)
(Our Jeep did not have treads)
We were too tired to think clearly when we arrived, but hell, we had 4-wheel drive, so up we went! By morning, we weren’t nearly as tired or careless, and the prospect of driving down the slope we drove up the night before was positively terrifying. But there was no way around it, so eventually we did it. We backed down, because (a) we couldn’t turn around or I was sure halfway through the car would start rolling down sideways, and (b) anyway I sure didn’t want to look down the slope we were driving on.
On the way back to civilization, we lost the rubber on one of the tires and had to limp back on the steel belts because we didn’t have a working spare (Did I mention I was still in my “foolish” phase? This was the same road trip where I hopped out of the car at one point to pick up a snake skin on the road to impress my woman with my man skills, only to realize that the snake wasn’t done using it yet).
My parents had taken us on several extended driving-camping trips across the country when I was a youngster, and I wanted to recreate something like that for our own girls. One year, back in the 1980s, there was one of those gas-shortage summers we used to get back then. But there were some signs that it wasn’t as bad out west. We reasoned that this was the perfect year for a driving trip, because (a) maybe there wasn’t really a shortage out there, and (b) everyone will stay home because of the gas shortage, and we’d have Yellowstone Park and the Rockies and the Grand Canyon all to ourselves!
So we did it. To maximize our out-west time, we flew into Denver, where we rented the biggest car on the lot for our trip. It was a shiny new Chrysler Cordoba with genuine Corinthian leather interior! We packed our family tent and all our supplies (which we had cannily mailed ahead to save on airline luggage) into the spacious trunk, along with the rented snow chains that were de rigueur wear for some of the places we planned on going. The thought of driving such a posh car through the rocky wilderness just added to the adventure!
The trip was a great success. We saw all the best western parks, we made friends with a chipmunk in Yellowstone that turned the Cordoba into his mobile home for a one-way trip to Arizona, when we finally flushed him out, and his hoard of our chips and sunflower seeds, during a trip to a laundromat. (Hey! I was obviously still not out of my foolish phase, and hadn’t yet heard of invasive species, or plague squirrels.)
The girls liked it for the most part, but sometimes bemoaned the lack of such amenities as curling irons and flush toilets. (This happened before cell phones were invented, so no one complained about not having one of those.) One of the girls’ favorite stops was late in the trip, when we were tired and dirty from camping and decided to just crash in a motel. With a pool! I can’t blame them for liking it. Though this didn’t occur to me at the time, for them a motel was as big a novelty as a geyser or a gorge. Bigger, since they had now already experienced those.
This motel stop presaged a new phase in our lives, where the kids got too busy to come along, work made for short vacation windows, and our bones grew increasingly achy. This caused us to transition away from camping and other mobile-house trips to vacationing at hotels, motels, farmhouses and hostels.
We returned to the caravanning life, sort of, when Kathleen’s job as a nurse included a regular mandatory on-call weekend, where she was required to stay within 30 minutes of St. Mary’s Hospital (which was about 60 minutes from our house). We got ourselves a beat-up old trailer, and set it up on a friend’s property down on Breton Bay, MD, 20 minutes from the hospital. Here Kathleen would stay when she was on call. Sometimes I’d stay too.
A third of a century later, my memory can classify those times as fun. The trailer was snug, even for just two. It was almost warm enough if you kept under the electric blanket, and staying there gave off an aura of adventure. If Kathleen wanted to make a phone call, she had to climb a nearby telephone pole à la Green Acres. (If you aren’t familiar with the Green Acres telephone pole meme, then you are clearly not old enough to be a Third Ager, and what are you doing reading this?) Incoming calls weren’t an option (still no cell phones), and more than one night’s sleep was interrupted by a knock on the door by the State Police bringing word to Kathleen of some medical emergency. Good times!
Let me close with a link to my favorite mobile-home cartoon, Mickey’s Trailer, even though I’ve shared this before (here). I’ve got to put it up again because (a) it’s just so good, it bears watching twice, (b) it perfectly captures the whole mobile home vibe, and (c) when I was young and my parents took us on those cross-country roads trip in our popup tent-trailer, one of my most vivid memories was going to Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and seeing this movie short playing at the nickelodeon arcade there.
I had talked (here) about my strategy for scoring some toilet paper before our stockpile ran out. I had orders to sellers with uncertain supplies, made six weeks ago, four weeks ago, and two orders made one week ago. I also had a couple of unsolicited volunteer offers. By some alchemy of time and commerce, many of these gambits were coming to fruition—if they were going to be successful at all—last weekend.
The six-week t.p. order from Amazon arrived, as did one of the one-week orders from the local grocery store, and one of the volunteer offers. All the packages of toilet paper were quite large, so I think we’ll be set maybe until the supply chain restabilizes. So our strategy for solving the Cottonelle conundrum has got to be called a success.
* * *
We haven’t had as much luck with our handling of some other commodities. Kathleen ignited a Facebook firestorm when she bemoaned our continued inability to order spaghetti online or from local stores. All we can find is the dreaded American Angel Hair pasta.
Among the many responses she got were: commiseration from those with similar stories, gloating from those whose local stores seemed well stocked, some suggestions for online ordering of overpriced pasta from gourmet sources (which haven’t worked for us, yet), and several reminiscences, recipes, and remonstrations about making pasta from scratch. Mark Zuckerberg helpfully offered an unsolicited news article about why spaghetti is so scarce.
We tried making some pasta at home. It came out pretty good, although Kathleen thought it tasted suspiciously close to Angel Hair.
A little research proved her taste buds were right, as usual. Spaghetti is typically about 2 mm in diameter, while angel hair pasta is about 1 mm. By A = (π/4)d2, a typical spaghettus has a circular cross-sectional area of about 3.1 mm2, while an Angel Hair pastum has a cross section of about 0.8 mm2.
From my pasta roller settings, my spaghetti was rectangular in cross section, 2 mm wide by 0.6 mm thick. (The pasta purists among you will rightfully argue that the very lack of circular cross section makes it not spaghetti at all, but rather a “modified fettucini”.) Whatever you call it, my pasta’s cross-sectional area of about 1.2 mm2 made it much closer to Angel Hair than to the desired product. Next time, I’ll roll the stuff out thicker to get a spaghettier flavor, I’m sure. Still don’t know what to do about the rectangular aftertaste, though.
* * *
We were too successful buying red meat futures. We heard the news that the coronavirus was making its way through the meat packing facilities, resulting in meat shortages. So I broadcast orders for red meat among multiple meat-ordering pathways, hoping that at least one of them might still have a supply.
Unfortunately (for us) the word that beef was scarce had not yet reached the meat delivery pipeline, and every one of my orders was successful, resulting in a full stone (look it up) of beef showing up at our house in the space of two days.
This might not seem like much, but it was something of a calamity for us when you consider (a) I had sworn off cow meat last fall (here), and although the duration of the beef-fast (or cow-lent, if you will) was now long over, it had its intended effect of reducing my craving for red meat; (b) Kathleen has never been that much of a carnivore; and (c) our refrigerator and freezer were already completely full from all the other hoard-buying we were doing.
But we managed to squeeze what we didn’t barter away into our freezer by sacrificing the sacred space reserved for ice cream (if we could just figure out how to get that mail-order) and kicking all the vodka out. Desperate times call for desperate measures, y’all.
– in which Dorn talks with one of the Fraternity of the Recovered.
s time goes on and the pandemic continues its inexorable spread, the number of people who have recovered from the virus mercifully continues to rise. What must it feel like, I wonder, to go through greater or lesser amounts of misery and uncertainty, and emerge on the other side? How heady is the realization, “I survived it, and I’m now immune and uncontagious!”?
Soon everyone will know someone with a story of a successful fight against the disease, but for those of us who aren’t there yet, here’s my promised interview with an actual covid recovered.
To preserve her privacy, and to protect her from the ever-present threat of plasma-poachers, I will refer to her only by her initials ER in this interview. Without any further ado, please enjoy the Interview with the Immunati.
–Trentin Quarantino
* * *
TQ. Thank you for speaking with me today, ER. I know my readers must have many questions about what life is like post-covid. ER. It’s a pleasure to be here, Trentin. Or it would be, if I were actually here, and not conducting this interview by videoconference. You know I’m not contagious, right? Probably?
TQ. It must be a very freeing feeling to not have to think twice about who you come within 6 feet of, or who might have touched the railing before you did. I know I still have trouble wrestling with the idea of reducing social distancing, even if I rationally believe I’m not at risk. Do you find that becoming immune to the coronavirus has changed the way people treat you? Do they look at you with a mixture of awe and envy, perhaps tinged with a bit of horror? ER. That’s right Trentin. I’m the new variable in the equation, a new curve in the modeling. I think some people are still wary of my ability (modesty prevents me from calling it a ‘superpower’) to walk among the living without worrying about who might be carrying the virus. Most, like you, continue to treat me the same way they would treat anyone else they interacted with—that is, with caution, or without, depending on if they believe in the coronavirus in the first place.
TQ. I see. Does peer pressure force you to continue to wear a facemask and engage in protective health measures, even though for you they have now become empty rituals? ER. Yes, I usually find it easier when engaging with people who are still susceptible if I dispense with trying to explain that I’m not contagious, and instead just wear the mask and exhibit the other appropriate cues of social responsibility, even though medically these rituals don’t benefit them or me (probably).
TQ. That’s twice now you’ve said probably. Is there some doubt as to your immune status? ER. There is, actually. The virus is so new that we don’t know for sure whether recovering from it even conveys immunity, and if so, for how long it lasts. Experience with other coronaviruses, and common sense, tell me that if my antibodies won the internal battle against covid-19 once, that critter will think long and hard before it tries messing with me again. But you never know. Plus there’s an additional complication. Every indicator says that I wrestled with the coronavirus for weeks, and have now recovered, except one key one: I test negative for covid antibodies. I’m a “stealth” Immunati. Probably.
TQ. (Unconsciously moves chair a few inches further away from the videoconference screen). Yes, well, um. Elizabeth, I mean ER, you mentioned that some of the people you meet don’t even believe in the coronavirus, or at least don’t believe in its unprecedented health dangers. Do you find more people with this belief in your home state of West Virginia? ER. I’ve told you before Dorn, I mean Trentin, I don’t live in West Virginia, I live near West Virginia, in western Maryland. But yes, when I go to West Virginia I rarely see a face mask. It’s a relief to be able to take mine off and still fit in.
TQ. In addition to the emotional freedom it can provide, there must be a significant financial advantage to no longer needing face masks, gallons of hand soap, sanitizer and toilet paper. Has being freed from these expenses significantly boosted your standard of living? What do you spend all this money on instead? ER. I still use soap and toilet paper, Trentin. I’m an Immunati, not a savage. With the money I save on face masks we’re remodeling our house.
TQ. Your husband Mr. Rohring spent several weeks coated in a film of your virus-infested cough droplets, without developing symptoms. Do you consider him also recovered and immune, asymptomatic, or just a ticking time bomb? ER. Oh, Bill has always been a firecracker! Seriously, we’re just hoping for the best.
TQ. While you no longer face health risks from the coronavirus, the threat of economic disruption is still equally present for Immunati and non-Immunati alike (what do Immunati call them anyway? “humans”? “mortals”?). Do you find yourself weighing the pros and cons of re-opening the country differently now? ER. We Immunati call those uninfected and unrecovered from covid-19 “muggles” to their faces. Among ourselves, we call them “virgins”. And while it does lift some of the personal worry to believe oneself immune, the health risks for my friends and family are still very real, so I don’t think my views on that have changed much. The economic hardship being felt by many during the pandemic is also real, and there are no easy answers, no matter how hard some try to convince themselves that there are.
TQ. Well, thanks so much for sharing, ER. As a token of my appreciation for you taking the time to be with me virtually, here’s a (virtual) T-shirt with a logo I designed myself, that might make it easier to say it loud! Immune and proud! ER. Thank you, Trentin. My pleasure at talking with you is every bit as real as this T-shirt.
