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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This post is not implying a resemblance between the current pandemic and the perfect storm of disasters that hit Florence in the mid-1300s. Nor is it evidence for the half-assed notion that out of disaster comes good. It is only to say that sometimes beauty has deep roots. This first ran January 17, 2012.
To the left is a courtyard in the Church of the Ognissanti, All Saints, in Florence, Italy. You can’t see it in this picture, but above the little staircase, near the top of the doorway, about where the arch meets the wall, is a small sign. It’s something like the one below: In 4 November, 1966, the waters of the Arno came to this height.
Florence is full of these signs. Most of them are from 1966, which was the most recent and worst of centuries of regular floods. They happen every 15 years or so, 56 of them since the first historic bad one in 1177. The Arno floods because the local weather swings wildly between dry and rainy and when it rains, it doesn’t stop. I was there in 2010, when it rained for 10 days straight, and while the Arno didn’t flood, for days it was ugly: it was a thick brown and fast, full of waves and whorls, making a continuous low roar. Florence is in the Arno’s floodplain, so when it does flood, it takes out the bridges, people lose their homes and businesses, ancient art and books are destroyed, people die. The flood in 1333 wasn’t the worst, but its timing was bad and for the next 15 years, Florence was visited by one disaster after another. And after disaster came the Renaissance.
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