Her flight had been canceled once. We were on our way to the airport to pick her up for a second try. Boise to Denver/Denver to Birmingham.
The school in Caldwell, Idaho where she’d been teaching sixth grade math—her first job out of college, through an outfit called Teach for America—had closed, probably for good, a few days before the start of spring break. She had nothing to do in Idaho. She didn’t feel, after only a few months there, a marriage to the place, for better or worse, until death did her part. So she decided to come home.
Which proved a dicey proposition, a coronavirus conundrum with no good answer. Would it be better to drive home, so she’d have her car and avoid the petri dishes of germs that are airliners and airports? Maybe, but was three days and two nights on the road a better idea? Tickets were less than $200. Flying it was.
The whole family would covid together. Mother, father, daughter, son. All adults. The youngest, the daughter flying in from Boise, age 23. I’m the oldest, at 57. Not quite old enough to be certain to die from the virus if I get it, but at least a fighting chance.
I-459, the beltway encircling Birmingham’s southern half, with barely any traffic at 8:30 on a Saturday night. The wife drives. I’ve had two beers, so I’m too snookered, according to her.
“It’s so dark out here,” she observes.
I want to say that dark is what happens after the sun goes down but I bite my tongue, probably because with the deep plunge of her sundress neckline, the wife looked reasonably hot when I returned that evening from cutting the pasture at the farm. Not bad for a 56-year-old woman who should by now be a grandmother but probably won’t ever be. But then it may well be that she looks hot because I’m horny and there’s no one else to see. And I already know that no matter how hot she might look at 56, nothing on her works down there anymore, so it’d just be a waste of time.
If God were a man, he’d have not made men fertile unto death, but women only unto fifty. All the existing setup does is torture good and faithful men who have the ill fortune of living past the shelf life of their wife’s vagina.
But the wife is right. It is dark. None of the streetlights along the interstate are lit. Did they turn them off to encourage people to shelter in place? And there’s very little traffic. It’s like driving down a rural highway in the wee hours of the morning, except this one has three lanes going either direction, slicing through the most densely populated area of the state.
The airport is brightly lit. Like a beacon of warmth, a shining city on a hill, beckoning the poor, oppressed, huddled masses. It’s all but empty. A few cars to meet the one arriving flight—the one the daughter’s on. A traffic cop on a motorized tricycle, like a Segway, but geekier, patrols the no-parking zone to ensure no one realizes the uselessness of parking ordinances in such circumstances and justifiably ignores them. Maybe the cop thinks by enforcing ordinances that used to matter he’s doing his small part to make the pre-coronavirus world seem less distant. Maybe he’s just pretending that his job still matters. Maybe he’s just an asshole. It could be all three. The scowl on his face as we stop and pick up the daughter makes the last one seem a certainty.
We get the daughter home and settled. I silently wonder whether it was a good idea bringing her home, not because of the fireworks that will inevitably ensue betwixt me and her (why worry about the inevitable?), but because her brother has had two bone marrow transplants. He’s on immunosuppressants. He’s 26, but the virus could be deadly for him (and, of course, for us). And traveling across a coronavirus-infected country is a good way to be exposed to the virus. If she picked up an infection along the way, the family might be in for a rough and tumble ride.
I imagine—nobody knows for sure, of course–that most people get the virus from the people with whom they live. A living mate gets the virus from somewhere and brings it home. With all this staying at home, the home becomes a petri dish for culturing the virus, as much as the plane or restroom or restaurant or Uber was the petri dish from which the person who brought it into the home got it. The virus has got to love how easy we’ve made its transmission. Since there’s no way, save for those few who grow their own food, to completely shut one’s self off and away from the world, it’ll keep spreading from the public petri dish to the one at home. The virus hates the Amish. Or anyone else wise enough to have rejected mainstream society for having recognized how unreliable and unsatisfying are the comforts it offers. Those doomsday preppers don’t look so foolish now.
The US government passed a whopping $2.2 trillion emergency coronavirus measure. Almost none of it will be directly spent battling the disease. The measure mainly aims to ameliorate the economic effects of the virus.
But the economic effects of the virus are what we have made them. Coronavirus is not bubonic plague. A third of the earth’s human population is not about to die from it. When all is said and done, the number of people who die specifically from the virus—not from old age or other diseases the virus made untenable—will be something much less than one tenth of one percent of the world’s population (7.7 million out of 7.7 billion). In other words, maybe 10% more than the ordinary annual deaths of about 60 million will die from the virus. A rounding error up that, since the virus kills the old at far greater rates than anyone else, will be a rounding error down in the following year as it pushes some old people to die a bit earlier than they otherwise might.
The virus didn’t have to plunge the world into the Greatest of Depressions. After years of post-Cold War euphoria, the world economic system must have been to the virus like an octogenarian with heart and kidney issues—tottering on the edge with only the slightest nudge necessary to push it over.
If the financial crisis shook our confidence in the ability of government authorities to manage and control economic outcomes through financial system tinkering, the virus should shake our confidence in everything else. And especially in the foundational premise of modern life—that there is such a thing as progress and that such progress can make human life better.
We are in the third decade of the 21st century. We claim to know how to genetically modify organisms to suit our needs, even to the point of selectively changing the human genome. Yet a tiny strand of RNA floating on the periphery of life can alter its own genetic code just so (i.e., mutate) in a manner that brings the most powerful human nations on the planet to their economic knees?
We should never have believed in progress. There’s no such thing. Never has been. People are people. All our clever tool making over the eons has not changed that reality in the least. Since the advent of sedentary agriculture people have died by the millions from infectious disease. Because we’re social creatures. We like to congregate. Pathogens love us for it. And they mutate far quicker than we can develop artificial defenses to them. All’s we’ve got is our immune system. For the young and healthy, it’s often enough. The old or weak are culled.
The world order that arose after World War Two, with the West preeminent under a protective umbrella of American military might, is entering its 76th year. About the age when the virus becomes mostly deadly among individuals. The existing order is equally susceptible. It is old and creaking. $2.2 trillion is an act of desperation. Like putting a septuagenarian on a ventilator. How often do such measures work? And even if perchance they do, how much time does it buy a septuagenarian? A few years, at most?
For me, this had already been a strange time. I spent the first two months of the year looking out the window at the pouring rain as Alabama made up in spades for the rather mild drought it had last autumn. I had outside work to do on the farm and at home and couldn’t. Then, about as soon as the heavens parted a few days to reveal that burning ball of fire was still there, the one that’ll soon have us cussing at its oppression, the world went mad. It stopped and asked everyone off. The wife and son invaded my space to work/school from home.
I don’t know where this all leads. I lay no claim to understanding the mind of God. The world happens in the moment, each one pregnant with possibility. A neat little summation of what the virus might teach comes from a Franciscan monk’s summation of ancient male initiation rites. Richard Rohr, head of an outfit called the Center for Action and Contemplation wrote on a recent daily meditation that ancient cultures tried to teach their young men that:
- Life is hard
- You are not important
- Your life is not about you
- You are not in control
- You are going to die
It’s been true since the beginning of mankind. It’s no less true today, not even if we throw $2.2 trillion of stones at the temple to try and change the mind of the universe. Even as there is no temple to which stones might be thrown.
Dogs are the primary beneficiaries of the virus. Our year-old Aussie shepherd puppy is loving it. She gets 2-3 walks a day. Has everyone gathered unto her like a Southern matriarch at a family reunion. It stands to reason then that dogs are the secret force powering the virus. What creature, aside from the coronavirus itself, has benefited most from our sheltering-in-place? Dogs. Think about that the next time your little canine friend looks lovingly in your eyes like they’ve been unnaturally selected to do. It’s a dog/coronavirus conspiracy that got us here.