Pandemic diary excerpts - Susan G. Letcher, Professor of Plant Biology, College of the Atlantic Day 1: March 17 (Tuesday), 2020 We could start anywhere- in January, when I first saw a news story among the videos under the forecast at weather.com: "Virus outbreak in China worries public health officials" or something to that effect, in among the stories of 70 car pileups and houses festooned with lake ice. Even at the time I thought, this could be it. Or we could start a week ago, Willow in my arms screaming while Dr. Johnson, in a mask, swabbed her little nose. Influenza B, a clear positive, and so our little quarantine began a week early. For three days she clung to me, a 35 lb lump of misery and runny boogers. I watched the campus closure unfold- I want to say implode- in slow motion, the emails rolling out and then the meetings, bad sound over a fluky internet connection; Sean Todd pointing his iPhone here and there as people spoke so that I had some chance of hearing. I never got sick; I must have some immunity to this flu strain. But the isolation is getting to me already. Or we could start on Saturday, when I spoke about the Appalachian Trail at the Southwest Harbor Library. Somebody was coughing on the sidewalk outside. I waited a few minutes before I went in. I told the people assembled, "if you have been out of the state in the past two weeks, please go home. If you've been to Southern Maine in the past 48 hours, please go home. For the rest of you, this is the last large gathering I imagine you will attend for the foreseeable future, so I intend to make it worth your while." (That expression, the foreseeable future. As if it is ever foreseeable. I think of how my neighbor Amaris in Costa Rica would amend "si dios quiere" every time we made plans. It used to amuse me. Now, not so much.) I mentioned [my sister] Lucy, whose photos make the heart of the presentation, in quarantine in Berlin. I gave the talk. All day on Saturday I wore a handmade sign saying "FLU - PLEASE STAY BACK 6 FEET." I never got sick, but I don't know if I was contagious. I wore my sign in the grocery store after my talk, to buy dried beans and rice and pasta. The shelves of toilet paper and paper towels were empty, the only time in my experience that I've ever witnessed totally bare shelves in a whole section of the grocery store in this country. It was unsettling. But there were still dried beans and rice, enough to fill a cart, and a container of smoked paprika. (If I'm going to be subsisting on rice and beans for the coming weeks- months? Heaven forfend!- I might as well have smoked paprika.) Me in my blue rain jacket with its bright yellow quarantine sign. Nobody gave me any dirty looks, and when I told the cashier it was my daughter who was sick, she was sympathetic. But when I came back to my car, someone had taped a note to the window. If you actually do have the flu, it is so wrong of you to be in the grocery store. I wish my sign had been bigger so I could have put something on there about me being asymptomatic and my child being sick. But it has stayed with me ever since, the question of how irresponsible that was. I needed groceries. Willow, whose fever has now been down for two days, was home with a sitter. I didn't want to expose her to the world, and I could shop faster without her- and do it without touching anything more than once. On balance I think I was morally justified. But that judgment has stayed with me: so wrong. I could have started this journal yesterday, when I walked out along the Park Loop Road in the wind and sun and thought about pandemics while Willow wailed disconsolately in the stroller and then slept. I thought about 1918. Nothing like this in living memory, I thought, and then seeing the dead red pines I thought, not for my species, anyway. And then an elm tree, stubborn reminder: we will get through this. Some of us. I could have started this journal last night when | spoke to my sister Alice in Arizona- both of us admitted to having thought about the lemon tree on her back patio, and the saving grace that at least she'll be safe from scurvy, come what may. She recalled a saying that she'd heard, though she couldn't recall the source, to the effect that before a disaster, everything you do to prepare feels like overkill, and then after it seems like all too little. I had a vivid memory of myself in New York after Hurricane Sandy, three days into a power outage that ultimately lasted two weeks, both routes into my neighborhood blocked by fallen trees. I was on the back porch trying to light a hobo stove that I'd made from two soda cans and a ten-year-old memory, touching the match to the dry gas fuel and watching the whole thing blow apart and thinking, well, shit. At least I didn't light it in the living room. Alice and I talked about how our seafaring childhood makes this easier, in a way. I regret that Willow won't have siblings; the power of a shared culture is something scarce and hard to overestimate the value of in times like these. Over the past weeks I have watched the maps and tracked the case numbers and seen it coming, and the fear and helplessness has grown. There are only a few parallels in my memory, and they all fall short. Y2K - that same feeling of free-floating anxiety, not sure whether the electrical grid or anything else would be there in the morning. I was young enough that it felt like a lark; I was with college friends and I thought that if we had to reinvent society we had a chance, with all of us together. Phil and Anne, Chris and Jen, Jim Maiwurm (who for some reason was never just Jim) all together at Phil's parents' house in Rochester, Minnesota. In the evening we walked out and it was icy, freezing rain glazing the sidewalks, and we all linked arms so we wouldn't fall. Would the world we knew still be there in the morning? So something like that, but not at all. The weeks after 9/11 - That feeling of the everyday, normal world being a painted backdrop that could shatter. Anything could happen to anyone at any time. Anthrax in the mail; duct tape and plastic sheeting to protect your house from a chemical attack. There was a story, perhaps apocryphal, about a couple who wrapped their house so thoroughly they asphyxiated. There was a sense in the air in those weeks, at least for me, of impending doom. Every day that it didn't materialize felt strange. So something like that. Except this time we know what's coming, exactly what's coming, but we know not the hour. The deathwatch for my father - knowing what is coming but not knowing the hour. The grim specifics. But the end, when it came, was a release. Now there is no release, only a cascading, tumultuous, tsunami-rebound of an end, and it will not be peaceful. It will be, at best, survivable. The last few weeks of pregnancy - the attention to every symptom, the feeling of being trapped in physicality, so aware of myself inside my stretched skin and the self/other underneath. But here the awareness is of symptoms, my dry throat and three (just three) discrete bouts of dry coughing today. Is it the flu getting me at last? Or is this it? That tightness in my chest- is it the pressure of holding panic at bay, or something else? This new intense awareness is watching people cough and sneeze at the library and wondering, do they have it? There's also this sense of being confined that I remember from those last weeks of pregnancy, being confined now not to my body but to my house and my solitude. Solitude with a toddler, now there's a thought. I remember an early feminist- Charlotte Perkins Gilman? talking about child-rearing as teaching savages to use a knife and fork, and how the life of the mind is impossible under such circumstances. God, i have no idea how I will do this without childcare. Not sleep, I guess. So, not wholly unfamiliar, the feeling of this time, but there is nothing that quite matches it. I will try to keep writing here, to keep a record. Why today? Because it is the first day of our isolation. Because I woke up with a sore throat, wondering. Nothing yet has come of that, or nothing beyond cancelling my childcare arrangements and house cleaning, and pledging the babysitting money to Norma [the cleaner] instead until she can start working again. Here we are, here we still are. March 18 - A lovely day, spring starting up. Willow and I read and played puzzles and ran in the yard, and in the afternoon I took her in the stroller to the pond where I'd seen beavers (who for the time we were there remained stubbornly sheltered in place out of sight). In the news today: we have passed the "grim milestone" of 200, 000 confirmed cases worldwide. We are headed for many more grim milestones, no doubt, before we see the end of this. While I was reading that news story, an ad popped up for Booking.com: "Still planning a trip to Bar Harbor, Maine?" No, not actually. And I hope no one else is, either. Spirits: decent. Supplies: good. But another news story today suggested that it could be a year before this plays out. I cannot imagine it. Perhaps I should be carving marks somewhere like Rey on Jakku. March 19 - Another day, decent and uneventful here in our island home. Books, puzzles, and a game Willow calls "taller than Mommy," where I lie on the floor and she stands next to me or sits on me, proudly proclaiming, "taller than Mommy!" She still has occasional coughs, but not many. I'm still stuffy. I took my taxes up to my accountant's dropbox in Ellsworth, carefully placing the envelope in the box with gloves on, then getting gas ($1.87 a gallon- I don't think it's been that low here since the early 2000s) and being paranoid about hand sanitizer before and after I touched the nozzle since a recent study found that the virus can live for hours on a gas pump handle. Then home. Tortilla casserole for dinner. Willow just wanted beans and squash. In the news tonight, 52 cases in Maine and now one here in Hancock County. The wave is cresting, drawing back. Yesterday: purple crocuses opening by the house. Today: lowering skies and rain. David [my stepfather] is 91 today. I called the house and we sang to him. Willow offered him some imaginary cake. Yesterday she said to me, "want a story about cakes to eat and tea to drink and no flu going around." We all do, lovie. March 20 - Lovely walk with Kate today, but sobering news: her mom had seen an acquaintance in the grocery store, just back from a trip to Italy. Perhaps not coincidentally, MDI reported its first positive case. And judging from the license plates visible on my short drive, summer people are fleeing the cities. With who knows what viral load. March 21 - I successfully caught a wild sourdough. Right here in this little kitchen, things are not so bad. March 22 - Split firewood, baked a parsnip cake, wrote my narrative evaluations for Statistics. So much not done- all the Restoration Ecology grading, for instance. And the prep for (gack!) next week, when classes start up again. Worldwide totals approaching 330, 000 confirmed cases; 80 in Maine. The surreality of these concepts co-occupying a paragraph. Willow has been wanting lots of stories about animals breaking into homes and digging holes in the living room or smashing all the furniture; rhinoceroses, pumas, armadillos. If the story is not to her liking she resorts to a sad whimper: "want a different story. Want a good story." Me too, little love. This is the one we got. March 23 - Maine is up to 107 cases. It's late, past 11; I'm working on courses for the spring. It's snowing here, heavy wet snow that may vanish by morning. March 24 - Six inches of heavy wet snow on the ground this morning, lovely but melting fast. Rationing squares of toilet paper: this is just like the Appalachian Trail. Making sauerkraut and thinking about scurvy: this is just like a sea voyage. Wondering if my lingering cough and stuffiness is an allergy or something that would kill my mother: like nothing, like nothing at all. March 25 - A long, mostly fruitless meeting with the Core Course planning team, running right through Willow's lunchtime. Then we went outside to see tracks in the snow, a fairly exciting collection for our small yard. There were bare spots where deer must have slept through the snowstorm, surrounded by many of their footprints, and also prints of a deer dashing across the front yard in discrete bounds. A fox's delicate single-file strut going down the hill and making a right-angle turn into the neighbor's yard. Tracks that might have been a rabbit- looked bigger than a squirrel, anyway. I should know the difference. Then another late night, punctuated by a text conversation with Derek [Willow's father]. He is being a hermit right now, which, in New York, seems for the best. As long as there is Netflix streaming and takeout available in NYC, he'll be fine. And if the takeout stops, God help us. Another too-late night without much to show for it. March 26 - Another day - walk in the afternoon, work at night. The weather is glorious, the news dire. Cases double every 2.5 days. The US is now the world's leading hotspot. Maine is at 155 cases, 3 deaths. March 27 - A life-giving walk in the park with Kate. Brisk north wind flipping up whitecaps on Frenchman Bay. Willow has been talking about "imaginary raisin pie" for the last few days, so I figured out how to make a pie for just the two of us: half the usual crust recipe, baked in the bottom of a Pyrex mixing bowl. One jar of the apple mince I canned last fall is perfect. My mother says that baking is an appropriate response to times like these. March 28 - Saturdays are hard. Today I didn't even manage to do the dump run. Recycling is not critical yet. I can't get motivated without the small rewards that are now denied us: coffee in town, a visit with friends. March 29 - Oh, but Sundays are the hardest. Usually it's the day I go and see my mother and David. No visiting, not knowing when (if? the word opens a looming chasm I don't want to peer into, not yet) we will visit again. I walked another piece of the loop road, Willow drowsing but refusing to sleep. Afterward she told me, "You were cold on the walk" - she's still using "you" to refer to herself- but she'd made no protest out there under the gray, rain-incipient sky. March 30 - Monday; nothing to report. | did not manage to clean the house today, not any of it. Nor did I manage to get to sleep before midnight last night. Perhaps tonight. Baking another loaf of sourdough, grading the papers that already seem from a lifetime ago: we were together in a classroom, breathing on each other. Onwards. Later - bread stuck to the bottom of the pan, and I broke my favorite bread-stirring implement (flat wooden paddle, with me since grad school days) trying to pry it out of the pan. Dammit, dammit, dammit. Maybe it is a sign to just give the fuck up on sourdough. Willow won't eat it anyway. March 31 - the bread has decent flavor, at least. I ate it - chunks pried and hacked out of the pan- for every meal today. There's a sense of not being able to waste anything, because we don't know what's coming and what resources we'll need to meet it. Willow ran around in the backyard while I raked leaves. She enjoyed a game of throwing her green elephant Turtle-Turtle down the hill. He does roll in an engaging fashion. Also today: M & D [my mother and David] brought fresh groceries and bread and oatmeal from the one store in town that has curbside pickup. I feel terrible that they are the ones out there taking the risk of picking the groceries up. I feel terrible that picking up groceries is a risk. I felt ridiculous and paranoid and sadly justified washing off everything- zucchini, bananas, frozen peas- in a dishpan of soapy warm water before I brought it into the house. What have we come to? Also today: listened to the CEO of Jackson Lab talking about his experience handling the SARS epidemic. Strangely comforting. But then I could not focus on any work and instead did jigsaw puzzles until late, late into the night. There's something hugely comforting about puzzles. The click of pieces reminds me of my father, of all the hours we spent together at the card table with The Wave or the whales or the soft-focus garden where distant tulip borders were floating globes of yellow and peachy-orange. I miss him. But at the same time I am so, so glad he died before this came along. April 1 - Not much to report. Sometimes I have a lurching sense of the loss of days. Sometimes I just do puzzles and snuggle and knit a sweater and it's OK. And then Willow goes to bed. And then | go to work, staring at the screen until my eyes blur. Rinse, repeat. April 2 - Endless rain. I tell Willow the flowers like it. April 3 - Another Friday walk with Kate, again lifesaving. Also a Zoom call with a production company in England about the rainforest. So good to get out of my head for a while. Willow (who squirmed on my lap during the call but was mostly patient) has a new rainforest floor puzzle, 100 pieces. She can almost do it all if she doesn't lose interest partway through. It's mostly nice, but there's a snake coiled around a tree limb about 10 m up labeled "anaconda." Um, no. I told the lovely ladies at the production company that I would be happy to fact-check their script, to keep them from putting any anacondas up in the trees. April 4 - 12:30 PM and I am feeling good. Or OK, at least. Kourtney is bringing us dish gloves, butter, and flour tomorrow. Last night I made a delicious macaroni and cheese with onions cut thin and fried in Indian spices (the last of the baingan bartha spice from Stella, with a best-by date of 2014 but still potent and delicious). Also put the sauerkraut in the fridge yesterday. It has a good flavor and didn't get moldy. Small victories. 12:30 AM and I am not feeling good, not at all. The uncertainties are eating me up, along with the lack of sleep. Four papers graded, 9 to go. Onwards. April 5, 6, 7 - Days running together. I am writing this late by firelight and moonlight, a brilliant full April moon and perhaps the season's last fire in the woodstove. The power went out at 9:30 and there went my night of work, aside from grading the one essay I'd already downloaded. I called the Emera outage reporting line and they already had it on the books- the recorded voice said it was an accident, a car hitting a utility pole, and service will be restored by 2:30 this morning. My mind can't help turning to the "deaths of despair." Who are the other victims of this pandemic? A news story today reports that Black men aren't wearing homemade masks because they're afraid of falling victim to being mistaken for criminals. One man was quoted in the article as saying "I don't want to die of this virus, but, you know, I don't want to die." Stereotype threat is literally killing people right now. I hate that my mind automatically turns news of a car-utility pole accident into a suicide. But right now with the bars closed, what else could it be? Oh, I want to remember the good things in these pandemic days: running in the backyard with Willow, the crocuses catching light. A Skype call with Somesville and Berlin, Willow making faces for her cousins. Today she said to me, "when this bad thing called a virus goes away, shall we go have shrimp and French fries at the Thirsty Whale?" Yes, absolutely yes. April 8 - A gloriously bright day, cool in the wind and warm in the sun. Crocuses drinking the light, grateful. We sing my mother's little song to them: "hello, hello, hello; thank you." I pulled crabgrass out of the lawn, clump by straggly clump, while Willow ran up and down the hill and tossed her toy animals in the air, first Pachycephalosaurus and then Fox. Fox has just learned to do somersaults and backflips. While I pulled out crabgrass, I thought about heroism. I thought about my high school obsession, T.E. Lawrence, and his men- that against-all-odds spirit, never carrying water to a well. No margins. I thought about women and heroism; women as heroes. For much of my early life I felt that heroism was unavailable to women, at least not the way it is available to men. I could not imagine myself on camelback, charging a railway. Not that I didn't try to imagine. But I couldn't quite grasp it, and I especially couldn't imagine how that would translate into my own life, here, now. In this relentless early April I think the heroism of women, the only region of heroism we are relegated to, is a heroism of the margins, in the margins, marginalized. Someone sent around a 30-second whiteboard animation video about Camus's Myth of Sisyphus, with its characterization of Sisyphus as an absurd hero. The care and commitment he puts into the task of raising his ridiculous boulder, over and over with no real hope of advancement, makes him a kind of hero after all: a hero of the absurd. This time as a caregiver with no break, no respite, has brought home to me irretrievably how and why women are marginalized. The only occupations compatible with child-rearing: handwork, cooking, cleaning. Not thinking. Not charging forth, not laying yourself on the line, just the steady thankless work of survival. Lawrence said the revolt succeeded because there was nothing female about it except for the camels. His conception of the female: corrupting, soft, unclean. Amazing how I have internalized that. Here is the heroism of women, though: someone had to raise the black goat-hair tents and milk the camels. Someone had to boil the rice, smother the campfires, gather twigs and camel dung to burn the next time. Someone had to push children into the world, screaming, daughters to raise the tents and sons to sacrifice themselves in the waves of wars that still sweep the continents. A woman, a hero in the only province available to her, a hero of the absurd.