A Fearful Symmetry: Notes from Isolation

                                       How the hell can a person go to work in the morning
                                      And come home in the evening and have nothing to say 

                                                           ~John Prine, Angel from Montgomery

I haven’t written anything related to the self-quarantining because I haven’t anything to add.  I’m simply living out my days as we all are. I feel our voices are mostly interchangeable in this moment.

I am wondering why the loss of John Prine, a COVID-19 casualty, has hit so many of us, so  hard.  I remember when I found a copy of his first album and Mike Schohnhofen was suspicious, as if you really needed to have permission to own this album, that some secret handshake ought to be required.

When you’ve suffered loss, relatively recent and unexpected loss, facebook memories can be a mixed blessing.  Yesterday a photo of Macklin and me, Easter dinner at Alyeska after a day of skiing, 2009.  He was such a giant that whenever I see photos of him and me together I think of those Wordsworth lines, “The child is father to the man.”

Our days are routine, patterned, the same. We’re lucky: lots of work to do, paychecks coming in. We take long afternoon walks, but in a place where social distancing is very easy—it’s not the most beautiful place.  After six weeks we decide to change the routine and walk to a beautiful place.

I found out that I knew all the words to all the songs on that album.  It took his death to unlock them in my brain.

We know this will entail some proximity to human beings, but we think we can keep socially distant.

So on our way down to the Turnagain Arm there aren’t so many people.  The trail dumps us out at the beach and there are always people right at that spot, usually easy to walk away from them, and we do.

Shortly into the hike we come across a dead moose, rather small, been there a while.  We saw one many years ago in this exact spot.  Some kind of winter death.

Then we noticed that the hillside had slid in dozens of spots.  Big alluvial fans of wet dirt a couple feet thick.  We had never seen this in our ten years of hiking this beach.  What did it mean?

Then an apparently injured raven hopping around very close to a family of four.  I worry about this bird.

The tide is way out there and in between us and the water a terrain of ice floes and erratics resting on the mudflats, melting, moving, alive.

We find a spot to lay out the blanket, eat our sandwiches, wash them down with cold beer.

Aisha naps. I am reading a story by Lauren Groff called “L. DeBard and Aliette.” I chose to read it based on its selection to Best American Short Stories.  I didn’t know that it was set during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.  This book has been on my shelf for years, yet I’m only reading it now during the pandemic.

This beach is close to the airport and the large planes arriving from the south circle way out to the west over the water, out of sight, and then come back to land perpendicular to the coastline.

The small planes come in from the west, too, but they’re coming from villages, off the road system, a tenuously tie to civilization.

“The plague hits New York like a tight fist.  Trains rolling into the boroughs stop in their tracks when engineers die at the controls.  After 851 new Yorkers die in one day, a man is attacked for spitting on the streets.” ~ Groff, writing in 2006

We pack up and head up the trail.  No sign of the raven, which is a good sign.  But the people.  Too many.  They approach, indifferent to social distancing.  There are too many.  No masks, no sense of space, too close.  We are doomed, I think.  We are emotionally exhausted when we get back to the car.

At the onset I thought covid was corvid—the crow family to which ravens belong.  Maybe I confused eating bats with eating crows, a subconscious transposition.

John Prine aficionados don’t agree on what his best song is, though many say it’s “Hello in There,” a heartbreaker about the loneliness of growing old.  He wrote it in 1971, the year I graduated high school.  The lines that get me now are:

            Well, it ‘s been years since the kids have grown

            A life of their own, left us alone

You don’t hear that song in 1971 and recognize your fate there, but, well, here we are.

On April 8, 2020 799 people died of COVID-19 in New York.

“Eating crow is a colloquial idiom, used in some English-speaking countries, that means humiliation by admitting having been proven wrong after taking a strong position. The crow is a carrion-eater that is presumably repulsive to eat in the same way that being proven wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow.”~ wikipedia

That night I look at facebook memories again and there ten years to the day is the photograph of the first dead moose we saw on that same beach.  “What immortal hand or eye,/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

Looking forward to bumping elbows with you all in this strange new world we are just beginning to find our way into~