Physical distancing is most conspicuous in the cities. In such places, where space is a luxury, this pandemic confers a weirdness in the streets as everyone tucks away into their cubbyholes. For me, living in a semi-rural, small New Hampshire town, where physical and social distancing is a matter of cultural heritage and curmudgeonly pride, life on the streets feels almost normal. I go for my runs and encounter a person here or there, raking the yard, chainsawing big logs into littler logs; I exchange curt nods with occasional dog walkers or other runners, but mostly, I’m alone. Yankees of the countryside are accustomed to that, and for long stretches of my runs I forget there’s a pandemic at all, until there’s a little glitch in the matrix: a woman follows up a “Hi” with a “How are you?” and slows a bit, and looks like at me as if expecting an actual response. A middle-school aged girl out running with headphones stares into my face for several beats, as if starving for human countenances that are not her family’s. A man came to appraise our house for a loan re-fi, and he warily passed through the rooms, startled when any of us appeared. Flustered at these moments, I avoided both close approach, but also eye contact, partly out of lack of practice in interactions, but also momentarily confused about what forms of contact, what forms of intimacy, were no longer permissible. On the backroad that runs by the goat farm, there is a concrete lawn ornament of two children on a bench fishing, both with blue masks over their mouths and noses.
I read a lot of news, and most of it is from and about cities, of course, since that’s where most of the people are, and most of the death. People encouraging each other to join in the 7pm applause and cheering for the first responders, but where I live, the people are so sparse that you might as well scream into the void. There is the usual backyard gunfire at its usual sporadic intervals, signifying nothing, but not much else carries far enough for the neighbors to hear.
Mostly apocryphal stories circulating online purport to show wildlife returning to the empty city streets. Most biologists who study these creatures point out that these animals have been there all along, just no one was really paying attention. In our yard, I spend hours and hours raking and weeding and preparing for the growing season, and the animals I see are the usual ones. The deer that always brazenly eat the daylilies are doing so now. The robin that flails at his own reflection all day long in the basement window has us for an audience more of the day than usual, but is indifferent to everything but his rage and the need for food that pulls him away a few times an hour.
We are sheltering here to protect our physical bodies, and those of the rest of society. We are mitigating risk, and trading full sanity for bodily safety. It’s a fair and reasonable bargain, and my body ticks along as usual, carrying laundry, running, eating. My mind, on the other hand, is in a paradoxical retreat. Never much inclined to social interaction, it seems to want less and less of it now. The zoom meetings requested occasionally by students elicit dread for full days leading up to them. An email asking me to “please call at your earliest convenience” makes me want to crawl under a table. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I want to do strange things like watch my tomato seedlings. Their progress is imperceptible, of course, but I stare at them like you watch an infant sleep, mesmerized by the rhythm of the breathing, terrified that it might stop, believing in your magical thinking that by your vigilance you are keeping them alive. Sitting by a window, not able to answer emails, or look over student work, or do anything useful, I watch the sliding passage of the shadows my houseplants cast on the walls and floor for long stretches of lost time.
My son, my friends, send me funny or weird videos to watch, and even the fifteen or thirty second ones come tagged with “watch all the way to end,” and I scoff, thinking, “Who can’t manage to get through an eighteen second video?” and then find I can’t. My morning meditation feels pointless now, with the narrated prompts I mostly ignore as my mind twitches and jumps. He says to “visualize that tiny spark of light in the very center of you” and I cannot summon it, despite having done this a million times. I try again, but I cannot bring the spark to mind. I repeat and repeat, and the image that comes instead is of myself, crouched in the center of my chest, prodding a cold ash pile in the woodstove and looking over my shoulder at me, shrugging as if to say, “There’s nothing to be done.”
I have the capacity for focus, just not on anything I am supposed to be doing. Overcome with anxiety and inexplicable dread at the prospect of responding to work emails, I instead sat at my dining room table for two hours drawing an oyster toadfish’s every skin fold and wrinkle. I want to spend my time among the living, but only the kinds that are indifferent to this disaster. The ones that perhaps note, in passing, some perturbation in the human nations, but have other, pressing concerns.
On a run last week, I saw a heron at the edge of the swamp by my house. I stopped to watch it for who knows how long. It stood completely still for a while, minutes, hours, days. Then it moved away slow along the muddy edge, beaked as a plague doctor, as impassive.
thestagecoachroad 