March: The Surreal Month

I returned on February 28 from a month-long work assignment in Europe, just before governments there began implementing travel restrictions to control the virus. It was a slow boil in the weeks that followed, the tide swelling outward and isolating each of us on our own tiny islands. Meanwhile, grocery store staff, sanitation workers, and the heroic professionals that make up our healthcare workforce being asked to sacrifice more on the frontlines.

Under quarantine, we were all given new transparency into other lives. That void on so many people’s social media feeds — once filled with the photos of so many travelers of the same monuments and brunch plates and wildflowers ruined by the throngs of “Like”-seekers — now invited a more intimate gaze.

Yoga teachers earning money through live-streamed courses from their Wuhan apartments. Italians singing to each other from their balconies. Everyone baking, as if they were the first ones ever to think of it, as if only just discovering their hands.

The routines I still maintain from before the crisis have changed in ways big and small. I still drink coffee and read on my porch in the mornings, but its been weeks since I last saw the man with the kind smile who would come by to collect bottles. The cemetery I pass on my daily walk to the park seems to be growing all the time, “Closed” signs marking the businesses which serve as tombstones for the lives we all led until a pandemic forced a six-foot wedge in between each of us. Dreams deferred. Over 10 million people newly jobless in a matter of weeks.

It’s the really dangerous routines I worry about, though — the routines that make the rivers and oceans rise, that punish the weak for the sake of growth, for the sake of punishment. Our leaders and titans of industry write the ending first, then put together the preceding story to underwrite our agreement or at least to weaken our dissent. 

COVID-19 is a zoonotic disease, believed to have originated in the bush-meat wet markets of Wuhan, China. Diseases like this could become more common in the coming years as industrial agriculture forces non-human animals into smaller, less sanitary spaces, and as we follow our illusions of infinite growth deeper the last remaining Nature. 

On March 31, NPR and PBS published the results of a joint investigation that showed the oil and gas industry as the principal authors of recycling propaganda that has been fed to us for decades. Make them feel okay about using plastics and they’ll keep buying them. And we did. Will we again?

Keystone XL pipeline moved forward. Emissions standards rolled back. The flagging coal industry reached for a lifeline. Smog returned. 

Is this the way it ends?

In the backyard of that Garden Street house, where we lived during my formative years, there was a hollowed out crabapple tree. From the time we moved to that house, I felt a special reverence for that tree. Now, whenever I think about how every spring it pushed blossoms to its gnarled and sagging branches, despite the deep scars it bore of age and abuse, I tend to remember it as a beautiful symbol of resilience.

When we emerge from our isolation into the springtime of a changed and changing world, I hope we’ll have a new sense of commitment to our communities. If we can’t hide the scars this public health crisis leaves, I hope we’ll have the courage and foresight to forget about our bank accounts and focus on the imperative to build resilience against the coming challenges.