My father isn’t Superman. He doesn’t wear shiny Spandex and a cape, he can’t fly. If he could, he would be out of there. Out of there immediately, flying up and out into the clean air.
The nursing home where my father lives is now crawling with Covid-19. Thirty-eight cases and counting, ten of those staff. His partner just died (not of the virus, interestingly, but she’s still just as gone) and he is alone as the nurses and administrators frantically wave their arms and try to contain the madness. His virus test was negative: It appears he has so far avoided infection–unless he’s gotten it in the four days since the swab was done. Which is certainly possible.
For a brief period of my life, the Hubble Space Telescope would shoot me an email with a link about once every two weeks. Then I would click and wait.
Then hundreds of thousands of stars would spill across my monitor, lighting up cells in my eyes with photons from a screen from a file from silicon chips circling earth behind a giant, almost but not-quite-perfect mirror that had just wrangled together beams of starlight shining from halfway across the galaxy.
Imagine something very close to this later-published picture, albeit in black and white.
I write that now, as a science journalist, with a sense of how cool it was. At the time it felt normal. Just out of college, I had gone to work as a data analyst for Hubble, at the observatory’s science center in Baltimore. One of my smaller responsibilities was to glance over new pictures that one of my bosses was taking of the galactic bulge, the Milky Way’s pudgy, starry midsection.
Wallace Stegner wrote, “Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras.”
That’s if you’re astronomically lucky. Most of us turn to dust or ash, and the bones we leave are eaten by roots. Few get to be fossils.
If you’re interested in making a trilobite of yourself, skeleton turned to mineral and revealed by some future wind or eroding seashore, here’s how:
Bury yourself in accumulating sediment. Slow outsides of river bends or muddy deltas will do. Think, 80 miles southeast of New Orleans. Time it with a big sediment flush, a storm or a flood. But don’t disarticulate before settling into the muck. If you want all of yourself together, not just a bone or two found near each other, make sure you are packed into matter before sharks scatter you across the ocean floor.
A few days ago, I was walking idly along a mountainside near my house when I noticed the lower branches of a ponderosa pine, heavy with bullet-sized pollen cones. Intrigued by their purplish color, I plucked one, piercing it with my thumbnail. The juice came out magenta as a beet.
Natural inks have been enjoying something of a contemporary resurgence, at least in my Instagram feed. There, I had recently noticed that the Toronto Ink Company had teamed with New York Times illustrator Wendy MacNaughton to show kids how to make inks out of common kitchen items like black beans and blueberries. So why not pollen cones? I thought, loading my pockets with the sticky orbs.
(Since this chart was made, Colorado and Nevada have joined the Western States Pact.)
It’s a cliché in art to have a sudden burst of inspiration. I was just looking at the bird, and boom, the poem just…came to me! Or, I was scuba-diving off the coast of Fiji and I couldn’t believe it — the song just wrote itself! I think of that quote from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird about how no one actually writes good first drafts, except this one writer she knows, “but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.”
So forgive me when I say that for the very first time in my adult life, I was — jazz hands — struck by inspiration. I saw this map of the U.S. showing the regional coalitions states had formed to combat coronavirus, and I knew I needed to write some speculative fiction, set in a future world where these groups might have political significance.
Can I just tell you about something funny that happened/is happening?
I’ve been working at a university, and one of the most appealing perks—given I’m not anywhere in the world of tenure or sabbaticals—is the free tuition on any course in the whole place. I could get an MBA…for free! I could become some crazy mathematician, on the side, with a steady income!
My daughter has a well-loved copy of Richard Scarry’s book, What Do People Do All Day? The book, first published in 1968, shows all the workers in Busytown at their various jobs. Kids love it. Adults love it. Four and a quarter stars on Goodreads.
But 1968 was a long time ago, a different era. And that might help explain why there’s a chapter titled “Mother’s work is never done.” Mommy Pig gets up, cooks breakfast, gets groceries, washes dishes, mops the floor, cleans the house, makes lunch, does laundry, and fends off a too-aggressive brush salesman. And here’s how it ends: Mommy makes dinner. Daddy Pig eats too much and breaks the kids’ bunk bed. And the kids HAVE TO SLEEP WITH MOMMY. “What would we ever do if we didn’t have mommies to do things for us all day — and sometimes all night?” Scarry writes.
I can think of a few things, and most of them involve Daddy stepping the fuck up. It is, by a wide margin, my least favorite chapter. (And there is an entire chapter devoted to cotton. So that’s saying something.)
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.
