Items

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  2020-07-03

  A Taste of Normal

  I am sharing the first photograph I took on a camping trip in Mammoth Lakes, CA in July 2020. I spend a lot of time outdoors camping and hiking. At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, I cancelled my planned trips for the first four months. I also stopped hiking because local trails were so busy and I tended to avoid close distance to strangers even outside. The trip to Mammoth Lakes was setup because my sister and I decided we had to get outside. Masks were still required in many public places, but there weren't restrictions on camping. I remember two distinctive reactions to the camping trip. It was our first time being around a lot of other people in public and so we were on high alert to avoid close interactions and were wearing masks any time we went inside the little campground shop for firewood. What came as a shock was the relaxed manner the other campers enjoyed their weekend. I felt like I was outside looking in at an exhibit. I was happy to be outside, but I felt removed from all the other campers. To see others in person experiencing the pandemic so much differently than I was, felt very isolating. However, we drove to Mammoth to get a taste of regular life and it did do that as well. Our last night there, a bear wondered into the campsite. It was scared back into the woods about 20 yards from our campsite. The next morning the bear wondered back in and I woke up to it smelling around our neighbor's tent. The bear eventually went on its way. I was so grateful to that bear for giving me a story, an experience. I had felt like every day was the same since March and was just happy to see a big beautiful animal. I was also grateful to have a camping trip that helped me to feel that at some point I'd do normal things again. When something so sudden and intense like a pandemic occurs I think it's normal to feel like nothing will ever be the same again, but the camping trip and being outside felt normal enough to give me a little peace.
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  2020-04

  The Silence of Moab

  Moab Utah is a lively tourist town normally filled with visitors from around the world. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it a ghost town.
• 2020-03-20

  By the time you read this, it will already be obsolete

  They say in Vermont, if you don’t like the weather, just wait five minutes for it to change. I haven’t found it true of clouds or rain, but the news is on an hourly refresh: constantly changing, though never for the better. The world’s gone to dog time. Days have telescoped to weeks. Last week feels like a different era entirely, when kids went to school, businesses stayed open, you could grab lunch in town or take the cat to the vet. After days of pouring over graphs, I could redraw contagion curves from memory, but it all seems strangely theoretical. The number of reported cases in Vermont is still less than a block in Wuhan or Milan. And it’s never that busy here, so the towns look pretty much normal. Nationally and worldwide, the deaths are still lower than the flu, lower than heart disease, lower than car accidents, and yet the trajectories explode like a flushed grouse. While these fears, statistics, and calculations swoop through my brain, the real birds have returned: lines of geese, honking encouragement as they struggle against the wind; gangs of grackles, blackbirds and starlings descending on our feeders and glistening in the cloudy half-light. We should really bring our feeders in, as the warmth has awakened the bears. Last year the ground was frozen nearly until May. This year the snow vanished a few days before the pandemic arrived, winter evaporating as quickly as our former lives. My husband and kids, home all the time now, help me rake away last year’s leaves, uncovering bright shoots of daffodils, and yellow and purple crocuses already blooming. Soon the frogs will shout their odes to fertility from every pond, sending out an aural map of still water. Each time I go outside, my spirits lift, just a little, as non-human life goes on the way it always has, and the world tilts slowly toward warmth.
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  Image taken on 04/18/2020.

  Bear With Homemade Mask

  An attempt at humor in the midst of a crisis.
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  2020-04-04

  Bear hunt

  We waited until our 14 days of travel related isolation was up before we put bear out for the bear hunt, now we can look for bears on out walks