Drakenews #114 May 4, 2020
If you are well, it is good. I too am well.
Above is the standard opening for a Roman letter, frequently reduced to initial letters like an acronym (Actually, I guess it is an acronym). It seemed a fitting formula for today. In fact COVID-19 hasn’t changed my life very much directly, but when I go out I’m surrounded by a miasma of discomfort and fear.
I made the decision to buy land out in the country and build in the middle of it because I didn’t want neighbors. I don’t have serious PTSD from Nam but… well, I didn’t want neighbors. I go in town daily, to the post office and to the bank if there’s a check to put in. I carry a facemask to put on when I dismount.
At home I work or do yard work. The yard work is going fine: with 22.5 acres there’s always enough windfalls or trash trees in the wrong place (generally sweet gums and evening olive) to keep me in wood chip mulch and my neighbor in wood for his stove–and me exercised. Real work–creating words on paper is going much slower–but about the same as before COVID-19. I continue getting a bit done every day except the day somebody knocked my bike down in a parking lot and drove off. I was a block away when it happened and even the bike was uninjured.
Best bet is, the person backed into my bike and shoved it over a concrete curb onto a grass strip, where it fell over. It spilled a little gas and I had to go to the bank and get the manager who helped me get it upright and back over the curb, but I rode home with no trouble. Probably just as well I hadn’t been close enough to have a personal interaction with the driver. Even so I didn’t get any work done after I was home.
My major work problem isn’t my own situation but that of my wife, Jo. She’s been retired since age 62 but she’s been doing a full schedule of volunteer work until now. It’s a big house and a huge yard, but I’m used to being alone a significant part of the day.
We continue to have very good meals. Also a lot of excellent baked goods which nobody’s forcing me to eat.
I mentioned mulch. Fire ants have built in the pile. The area on top has become crusted. If broken open, it swarms with ants who must have carried dirt at least 3 feet up from the ground to build their tunnels and chambers. (The ants work in the wood chips but not with them.) I don’t know how this is going to work out in the long term.
I continue one with nature in other ways. I work on a wooden picnic table. The other day I felt somebody climbing my leg under the table, when the wren got high enough it stopped, met my eyes, and flew off.
I was listening to BBC, waiting for the news to come on, and heard their regular program Witness History interviewing a woman who as a 9-year old girl in India had lived through a previous pandemic: the 1957 Asian Flu. This really struck me because I’d had it also, but probably in 1958, in Clinton, Iowa. I was feeling really sick in 7th grade algebra class. I raised my hand to go out to the men’s room. The teacher, a stickler for discipline, ignored me. I vomited over my desk and the girl seated in front of me. The teacher asked why I hadn’t gone out; I said, “I’d raised my hand!” which seemed enough reason to me.
I went down to the school nurse who found I had a temperature of 103. It took a good while for my mother to get to school to pick me up and I was snappish about the delay. (The nurse pointed out to mom that I was running a fever, which probably explained my bad temper. Mom was quite smart and would have figured that out by herself.)
I stayed in bed the next couple days. I was weak and had hallucinations. I don’t remember any special treatment: I’d seen This Island Earth, about an interplanetary war in which one planet was bombarding the other with meteors. That’s what I was hallucinating, except that the aggressor was driving cars up a ski jump on our moon to fly off and hit the Earth with great damage. I couldn’t do anything about it except feel despair, which I did.
Then I got better and went back to school. I don’t remember ever being afraid, just very sad about the damage all those 1957 Chevies were doing when they hit the Earth. (Incidentally, This Island Earth is quite a good movie, though the special effects aren’t up to modern standards.) I’m sure people died from the Asian flu, but I don’t remember any mention of it.
That was what the woman from India was saying also: she went back to school and life went back to normal. The media didn’t make a big thing about it.
That experience colors how I’m reacting to COVID-19. I think it was absurd that the US didn’t get airport testing in place immediately, and the shortages of really basic testing, etc, are unworthy of a developed country.
I’m now going to make a comment that can be taken as political. I know this is able to peeve some people so if you’re of that sort just stop reading now.
I have absolutely no ideology but I do speak my mind pretty directly. My comments about how the Viet Nam War was being fought when I got back to the World had my father in law wondering if I was a Commie.
I worked in local government for eight years and I saw some very stupid behavior. The old public works area was being converted to the new bus garage. One of the major problems was the sewage digester, a massive brick dome which had simply been abandoned when the sewage plant moved decades before. It was full of sewage.
The town engineer, Joe Rose, was quite able and came up with an engineering solution. The town and county had recently bought (through condemnation ) a new landfill area. It was a poor black district and Chapel Hill makes a big thing of its liberalness, but we needed a landfill.
The engineer had the digester contents reliquified and hauled in tanker trucks out to the new landfill, where he dug a large trench and dumped the digester contents. The area residents had been promised various amenities in exchange for siting the landfill. What they got was 40,000 gallons of liquid shit.
The engineer resigned at the emergency board meeting the night after the aldermen and county commissioners viewed the trench; the town manager, Chet Kendzior, left before very long also. Obviously they were capable of real public stupidity.
But neither Joe nor Chet did anything nearly as dumb as suggesting the internal use of disinfectants.
Stay well, people. And be nice to other folks; they’re having a tough time too.
–Dave Drake