Antarctic Stare

By: | April 27, 2020
Early explorers at the South Pole. Wikimedia Commons.

Many years ago, when I was working as a river guide, a little boy accidentally knocked a girl’s front teeth out with his paddle. The girl was in pain, and understandably distraught about losing her permanent teeth, which had only just grown in. But there were still several miles of river left, and we needed her to calm down and get back in the raft, so we could paddle downstream and get her to a dentist as quickly as possible.

My friend, a river guide named Colleen Hardiman, crouched down in front of the bloody-mouthed girl and told her: You look beautiful. The girl stopped crying and agreed to go downriver. 

To no one’s surprise, Colleen went on to all kinds of badassery and is now in charge of field equipment and logistics for a company called Polar Field Services, which provides gear and training for researchers in the National Science Foundation’s Arctic Research Program and other scientific programs in Antarctica. She organizes the warehouse, repairs equipment, and outfits scientific groups before they go out into the field, often teaching them how to use their gear. She helps to review the field plans that scientific groups submit, and when appropriate, say: “Ooh, that’s really dangerous. Let’s talk about how you’re going to do that.”

Colleen spends a lot of time in the field, including a 7 and 9-month stint at the McMurdo Research station in Antarctica. She was getting ready to go back to Greenland when the pandemic hit, and is working from home until she can go back to the field. As someone who spends extended periods in one of Earth’s most isolated and extreme environments, it struck me that Colleen might have some good ideas about how to cope with sheltering-in-place. I also really just wanted to talk to her – it had been too long since we last caught up. 

Emily: Colleen, how are you? It’s so nice to hear your voice!

Colleen: I’m really good! I’ve just moved in with my boyfriend. I should be in Greenland, but I’m a full-time employee and working from home right now, so I am very lucky. 

Emily: I have been thinking about you, because the other day I was staring into the middle distance, looking at nothing, and it reminded me of something I heard of a few years back, called the Antarctic stare. As I understand it, this is a kind of mild fugue state that people sometimes experience during long periods in an isolated and extreme environment like the research station where you work in Antarctica.

Colleen: I know exactly what you’re talking about. It has to do with a thyroid hormone, and the dark, but also isolation. People have all kinds of funny nicknames for it. You are kind of in a state like we are now, this perpetual Groundhog Day. You wake up, you go to work at the exact same time every day. I knew who I was going to pass in the hall. I knew the cadence of their footsteps. I knew their smell. Our jobs were challenging, but they were also repetitive. It made you feel numb, like you just didn’t care about much.

Emily: My concentration has been shot lately. When Pete is talking, I often can’t remember the beginning of his sentences by the time he finishes them. Does this sound familiar?

Colleen: Yep. At the station, sometimes you’ll catch a whole table full of people just staring outside at nothing. The two winters I did were dramatically different from each other, and in retrospect, it was all about coping strategies.

Emily: Please share. 

Colleen: Unbeknownst to me, I had way better coping strategies the first winter. My mental health is intrinsically connected to exercise. That first winter I was really diligent. About six days a week, I did an hour of exercise a day with a small group, and it was intense cardio. We were sweaty and shaky by the time we were done. 

Emily: Other than exercise, what helped?

Colleen: It was all about the things I could control – like, I made myself get up at the same exact time every day. It was also about surrounding myself with a support system. Friendships happen quickly and fast because of the place and the situation. Also making plans for the future, like a New Zealand trip when I was done; I took up a lot of mental space with that. That was a good thing, to remember that the Groundhog Day was going to be over at some point. 

Emily: What kinds of lessons do you think carry over now?

Colleen: Exercise I have fully rediscovered. I mean, I’ve always enjoyed exercise, but I’ve just realized that if it’s not every single day my mental and emotional capacity will reflect that. The other thing is remembering that it’s going to be over — but that’s the hard part with this. I mean, there’s going to be vaccine, right, but when? Even afterwards, I feel like our society has changed so much that it will never look like it did before. So that’s a hard one.

Creating some reason to celebrate, even if it’s just with my boyfriend. We try to get takeout every Friday night. Once a week, we’ll patronize a restaurant and look forward to it and treat it like a date — something that makes it not Groundhog Day. That puts time in the perspective of one week at a time, instead of one day at a time. One day at a time may work for some people’s psyche and emotion, but, oh God, I feel like I need more perspective than that.

Emily:  The other day Pete and I passed over a strange threshold. You know that feeling when you say the same word over and over and over again, and at first the word loses its meaning, and then it becomes hysterically funny? It’s absurdity — we’ve crossed into a realm of absurdity that you can’t actually easily access under normal conditions.

Colleen: I know what you mean. At the station, you’d see a table of people throwing inside jokes back and forth, and everyone is laughing in a way that is so true, that you think, wow, these people are connected. But if you were a passerby, and you heard what they were talking about, you would have no idea what they were laughing about. 

Emily: What are some upsides to spending long stints in a dark, confined environment? 

Colleen: I thought about this lately, and one of the silver linings of this odd career or life I’ve chosen is that I put myself in these places were there are fewer resources, fewer vices and fun things, things that, when you come back, you can really appreciate. Smells are intense, feelings are intense – not putting on layers of clothes – all of those things are so much sweeter. Also: food, food, food. When I leave Antarctica I like to go to a grocery store and get whatever I want – you want those strawberries? Get two boxes. 

Emily: How long do you find the stare lasts?

Colleen: So, something kind of crazy and cool, and also I think very common, is that when you leave Antarctica, the feeling [of numbness] goes away, like, overnight. You land in New Zealand, where it’s springtime, and everything is blooming and green and alive. You exit one world into another world, and you leave the stare behind.

Pandemic Moments

By: | April 24, 2020
Purple flowers

I’ve lived in my apartment for more than 12 years. In early April, I realized for the first time that there are wisteria in the back parking lot.

I suppose this is because I only caught onto wisteria, as an event, in April of 2019. I was in Kumamoto Prefecture in southwestern Japan. A friend and his wife took me to see the wisteria at the shrine in their neighborhood. Those wisteria weren’t even in full bloom yet, but they were popular enough to have grandpas in wisteria print jackets directing traffic into overflow parking. These wisteria in the parking lot? I guess it took a pandemic for me to notice them.

Continue reading →

The Soundscapes of Silence

By: | April 22, 2020

People who have come to visit say that it is quiet here. Now it is even quieter. Fewer car drive by, fewer planes fly overhead. In the hour before dawn I no longer hear the train whistle. My neighbor used to leave early each morning for dental school, 50 miles away. Now there is no hum-and-rumble that is a Subaru engine starting up.

At first, I didn’t even notice these sounds were gone. What I noticed were the birds. So many birds. They started up around 5, around the same time, I understand now, as flights and train whistles and people heading off to early-morning destinations.

This new quiet has opened up soundscapes that we haven’t heard before. Andreas von Bubnoff, a journalist and professor based in Germany and New York, is listening in. (I know Andreas through SciLance, a group of science writers that has been meeting up online for 15 years.) He is the co-founder of the Pandemic Silence Project, which is collecting sound recordings from around the world to capture the soundscapes of the pandemic.

Continue reading →

Dear Spleen, How I Miss You

By: | April 17, 2020

Spleen, I’m so sorry I let you go.

It was some years ago, now, and I was in surgery for a thing that looked like pancreatic cancer, but, thankfully, wasn’t. You may recall what happened, that I had a truly unusual autoimmune response in a neighboring organ–a sort of fishnet tissue growth took over the tail of the pancreas–and that you got a dose of it, too.

That must have been scary for you, being in that cellular straight jacket!

So, they freed you, Spleen, snipping your connections and pulling you from your tucked-away spot under my ribcage. An unplanned splenectomy–I was just as surprised as you!–and in my grogginess later I didn’t think to mourn your passing. I heard you were unceremoniously tossed into that bin of misfits marked “biological waste,” and I did wish I’d been able to take you home in a jar, at the very least! But I’ll admit, then, I was more worried about losing part of that pancreas, your fine colleague, which happily turned out to have no ill effect at all.

Now, here we are less than half way through a global pandemic (I still can’t believe we are in the midst of such a thing), and I am looking back on you with great fondness, wishing you were here. You’ve been called inessential, but you’re no appendix or gall bladder–rest assured! I’m just sorry I never thought, before now, to express my appreciation for your years of service. So, I hope you’ll let me thank you here. In verse, of course.

Continue reading →

One Voice, Many Vaccines

By: | April 15, 2020
Mazes and Labyrinths (1922)

Twenty biomedical companies. Seventy nations. An aggressive search for COVID-19 treatments and vaccines is underway worldwide. Yet even 21st-century technology can’t match one man who curbed a major influenza pandemic spreading across the United States in 1957. 

Pioneering virologist Maurice Hilleman, now oft-forgotten, detected that pandemic from across the globe, convinced reluctant U.S. health officials to take notice, and single-handedly fostered a vaccine that became publicly available. All in just four months.

An irascible, no-holds-barred Montana farm boy born in the midst of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic, Hilleman survived diphtheria and Great Depression-era poverty to earn a PhD in microbiology and chemistry at the University of Chicago. Practical and impatient, he turned down the prestige of academia and primarily worked in industry, at the pharmaceutical company E. R. Squibb & Sons and later Merck & Co, where he led vaccine research for 25 years. 

An iconoclast who slung swear words like the proverbial sailor, Hilleman helped develop an astounding 40 vaccines: to prevent measles, mumps, rubella, pneumonia, meningitis, hepatitis A and B, and other infectious diseases. The measles vaccine alone has saved an estimated one million lives a year. “Maurice’s genius was in developing vaccines, reliably reproducing them, and [taking charge] of all pharmaceutical facets, from research to marketplace,” biographer Paul A. Offit, MD, told the British Medical Journal for Hilleman’s obituary in 2005. The New York Times later noted that researchers credit him with “saving more lives than any other scientist in the 20th century.”

Hilleman worked under the public radar yet touched most people’s lives. He was chief of respiratory diseases at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research when a new H2N2 type of influenza, termed the Asian flu, hit in 1957—eventually causing more than 1 million deaths worldwide and killing an estimated 70,000 to 116,000 in the U.S. The number of American deaths could have reached 1 million, public health experts estimated, without the quick arrival of 40 million doses of vaccine that fall. With a reputation for emphasizing safety and reducing vaccine side effects, Hilleman nonetheless led that vaccine’s rollout by ignoring anyone who might slow him down, including federal regulators.

Continue reading →

Accidental closeness

By: | April 13, 2020
But are they six feet apart?

A couple weeks ago (or the other day, I’m not sure which since time all blends together now), I put a cup of sugar out for a neighbor who complained she couldn’t find any at the store. As I turned to go inside, I saw our mail carrier walking up the flight of stairs between the street and my house. We exchanged hellos. I was standing between her and the mailbox, so I offered to just take the mail from her so she wouldn’t have to walk all the way up to the box.

As she stretched out her gloved hand to pass me two envelopes, and as I awkwardly extended my arm to receive the mail, both of us straining to stay as far apart as possible, I realized my error. As she walked away, I’d broken the cardinal rule of isolation: unnecessary interaction with a human who does not live in my household. 

I wish I could say I remained calm about this extremely minor transgression, but my first reaction was panic. The mail could be infected! The carrier could be infected! I immediately ran into the house and washed my hands. For hours, I replayed the interaction in my head. Had I put the carrier in an awkward position? Had I exposed both of us? How many interactions like this has she been forced into every day? 

I thought about what I could’ve done instead. I could have said hello and darted into my house, but given how I was standing between the carrier and the mailbox, that would have seemed weird and rude. I could have asked the carrier to just drop the mail where she was and to back away slowly, as if she was a character in a shoot-’em-up action movie delivering the bounty to me, the mob boss villain, but that would be even more unhinged. 

Now that very little happens in my daily life (a highlight of this week: seeing a one-legged crow), I found myself talking about this interaction with friends. “I accidentally interacted with my mail carrier,” I would say. And friends knew exactly what I meant. They would tell me about their accidental interactions, too; a person who got too close at the grocery store, or a neighbor who reflexively inches closer and closer during a conversation held 6 feet apart. It is natural to be close to one another, to interact, but now, maintaining space is a form of politeness, conscientiousness. It will take us awhile to learn these new rules of interaction. 

As we’re adopting new ways of being, I’m heartened by all the efforts to care for each other even if we can’t be physically close. My neighbors left a note on our door offering to lend us their gas lawn mower, because they know we only have a push mower. A friend participated in a parade in which she and other teachers drove their cars through the neighborhood where their elementary school students live. Doctors are pinning photos of their smiling faces to their gowns to reduce the psychological distance from their patients and remind patients that underneath all that protective gear is a real person, there to care for them.

But I can’t help but wonder about the long-term toll of physical distancing. If just four weeks of isolation has bred enough paranoia in me that I felt anxious after a simple, low stakes interaction, what will another four weeks do? I can imagine a future me, relieved to be able to meet up with friends at a brewery again, reflexively hugging everyone as if we’d never been apart — but then feeling weird about it afterward. Or even worse, maybe future me will avoid those hugs and turn down friends’ offers to try sips of their beers, lest we swap the virus. Only time will tell, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this pandemic so far, we’ll get there when we get there.  

Image: Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Wikimedia Commons.

Clovis and the Virus

By: | April 10, 2020
Covid-19 distribution / Ice Age fluted point distribution

Not long ago, a friend who lives nearby, a skilled hunter of arrowheads, found a beautiful fluted spear point. It came from between his house and mine, along a ditch. The find was stunning, what I think has to be Clovis technology from 13,000 years ago, its point as sharp as the day it was made. I’ve held it in my hand, turning it over and over, one of the finer pieces of stonework I’ve seen. He found it, oddly, while picking up trash along a rural ditch. He figured it had to have been dredged up during modern history, dumped to the side, out of place, no known provenience, showing up here out of the blue. Maybe not entirely out of the blue, though, this point is part of a much bigger puzzle.

A week ago I snapped a shot of the coronavirus map for North America. This was before red dots merged and turned the US into a record breaking blot. Next to it, I placed a map of fluted projectile points from the Ice Age, dating to about 13,000 years ago. The two maps struck me as remarkably similar. What might be behind this?

Continue reading →

Guest Post: How to be alone

By: | April 8, 2020

I have been a newshound for a long time, but ever since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak, my consumption of the stuff has reached absurd levels. I spend hours checking headlines and Twitter, desperate for some fresh morsel of information: an update of confirmed case numbers (local, national, global), an official who said something bracing or stupid, anything. The worse the news, the better. It feels more real somehow. “You can’t go on like this,” my wife told me during one recent bout. “It isn’t good for you. You can’t possibly read everything.”

Try me. My family lives in Seattle, where the outbreak in the U.S began. From our house we can see Kirkland, the suburb where the first coronavirus cluster bloomed out of a senior care center. Since late January we have watched as the virus spread in horrifying slow motion, the numbers ticking up, then leaping, and now who knows where or when they will stop.

A few weeks ago, when an epidemiologist tweeted that the virus had likely been creeping about the region undetected for weeks, I felt a strange giddiness that I took at the time to be relief. Covid-19 was among us and life as we knew it had not ended, right? But then it started to. All the schools closed, first for two weeks, then six weeks, and now for the school year; the libraries were next, which hit my wife especially hard, since she considers them the spine of a functioning society; then most of the stores, the playgrounds, the parks. Now we are locked down, allowed out only for essential business.

Continue reading →