The Last Word On Nothing

This is my first pandemic, and I had no idea what to expect. Which is sort of on theme, because the the overarching feeling I’ve experienced inside the COVID-19 pandemic is uncertainty. Will I get sick? Will my loved ones die? How long will this ordeal last? Will we ever have a vaccine or a cure? If so, how soon? None of these questions have certain answers. 

By late March, it was clear to me that a lot of people were going to die. I’d been reading the scientific reports, and I have journalist friends on the infectious disease beat who were freaking the fuck out. I was scared. A lot of people were going to die (more than 112,000 in the U.S. alone, as of July 2, per the CDC) and I wondered which of my loved ones would be among them. What if it was me?

For much of March and April, I felt like I was living in a sacred space — the respite before the inevitable calamity. The virus was coming, and this brief moment before it sickened me or my loved ones felt like something to savor, to relish. It wouldn’t last.

So far, I’ve been extremely fortunate. Although friends of friends and family of friends  have become sick or died of the new coronavirus, my loved ones and I have thus far escaped the virus. That may be a sign of my privilege as a white person, as the latest figures show racial disparities in who becomes infected, with Black and Latino Americans being three times more likely than whites to contract covid. Those are the numbers so far, but with the pandemic still raging, the statistics are changing rapidly. This crisis isn’t over. No one is safe. 

And in that respect, the pandemic is really just business as usual. What it has shoved in our faces is the fact that despite our assumptions, we don’t actually know what tomorrow will bring. Uncertainty is a fact of everyday life, it’s just that we can usually ignore it until we’re hit with something totally unexpected. The pandemic has shown us that our confidence in the future is an illusion. We are always living in that brief time between now and the death that will eventually come for us.

My way of dealing with this amped up uncertainty has been to relish in the one thing that I do have, which is the here and now. In a weird and sometimes wonderful way, life has seemed to slow down. I find myself noticing things in more detail. I am more attuned to the sounds, the aromas, the sights and the feelings of this precise moment.

This morning I went for a run on a familiar trail. I’ve spent many, many hours in this special place in my local habitat. I’ve run, biked and skied along this trail network in every season. Somehow, this repetition has made the place more hallowed to me. It’s where I belong, and the changes that happen gradually over the course of days and months are what allow me to mark the passage of time. On each outing, I note the movement of time via the melting of the last snowbanks, the emergence of wildflowers, the mushrooms that appear after a good rain and the changing water levels in the lakes. 

Today, I found a whole meadow covered in my favorite alpine wildflowers — elephant heads! I couldn’t help but rejoice in the moment. I first became acquainted with these beautiful flowers when I was an undergraduate researcher at the Mountain Research Station on Niwot Ridge in Colorado’s  Indian Peaks. Also known by its latin name, Pedicularis groenlandica, this pink flower grows in wet alpine areas and it really does look like a bunch of elephant heads on a stem. Really, what could be more joyous than that?

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elephant head photo by Yellowstone National Park Flickr

field of elephant heads and closeup of elephant heads by Christie Aschwanden