(Since this chart was made, Colorado and Nevada have joined the Western States Pact.)
It’s a cliché in art to have a sudden burst of inspiration. I was just looking at the bird, and boom, the poem just…came to me! Or, I was scuba-diving off the coast of Fiji and I couldn’t believe it — the song just wrote itself! I think of that quote from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird about how no one actually writes good first drafts, except this one writer she knows, “but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her.”
So forgive me when I say that for the very first time in my adult life, I was — jazz hands — struck by inspiration. I saw this map of the U.S. showing the regional coalitions states had formed to combat coronavirus, and I knew I needed to write some speculative fiction, set in a future world where these groups might have political significance.
Can I just tell you about something funny that happened/is happening?
I’ve been working at a university, and one of the most appealing perks—given I’m not anywhere in the world of tenure or sabbaticals—is the free tuition on any course in the whole place. I could get an MBA…for free! I could become some crazy mathematician, on the side, with a steady income!
My daughter has a well-loved copy of Richard Scarry’s book, What Do People Do All Day? The book, first published in 1968, shows all the workers in Busytown at their various jobs. Kids love it. Adults love it. Four and a quarter stars on Goodreads.
But 1968 was a long time ago, a different era. And that might help explain why there’s a chapter titled “Mother’s work is never done.” Mommy Pig gets up, cooks breakfast, gets groceries, washes dishes, mops the floor, cleans the house, makes lunch, does laundry, and fends off a too-aggressive brush salesman. And here’s how it ends: Mommy makes dinner. Daddy Pig eats too much and breaks the kids’ bunk bed. And the kids HAVE TO SLEEP WITH MOMMY. “What would we ever do if we didn’t have mommies to do things for us all day — and sometimes all night?” Scarry writes.
I can think of a few things, and most of them involve Daddy stepping the fuck up. It is, by a wide margin, my least favorite chapter. (And there is an entire chapter devoted to cotton. So that’s saying something.)
Early explorers at the South Pole. Wikimedia Commons.
Many years ago, when I was working as a river guide, a little boy accidentally knocked a girl’s front teeth out with his paddle. The girl was in pain, and understandably distraught about losing her permanent teeth, which had only just grown in. But there were still several miles of river left, and we needed her to calm down and get back in the raft, so we could paddle downstream and get her to a dentist as quickly as possible.
My friend, a river guide named Colleen Hardiman, crouched down in front of the bloody-mouthed girl and told her: You look beautiful. The girl stopped crying and agreed to go downriver.
To no one’s surprise, Colleen went on to all kinds of badassery and is now in charge of field equipment and logistics for a company called Polar Field Services, which provides gear and training for researchers in the National Science Foundation’s Arctic Research Program and other scientific programs in Antarctica. She organizes the warehouse, repairs equipment, and outfits scientific groups before they go out into the field, often teaching them how to use their gear. She helps to review the field plans that scientific groups submit, and when appropriate, say: “Ooh, that’s really dangerous. Let’s talk about how you’re going to do that.”
Colleen spends a lot of time in the field, including a 7 and 9-month stint at the McMurdo Research station in Antarctica. She was getting ready to go back to Greenland when the pandemic hit, and is working from home until she can go back to the field. As someone who spends extended periods in one of Earth’s most isolated and extreme environments, it struck me that Colleen might have some good ideas about how to cope with sheltering-in-place. I also really just wanted to talk to her – it had been too long since we last caught up.
Emily: Colleen, how are you? It’s so nice to hear your voice!
Colleen: I’m really good! I’ve just moved in with my boyfriend. I should be in Greenland, but I’m a full-time employee and working from home right now, so I am very lucky.
Emily: I have been thinking about you, because the other day I was staring into the middle distance, looking at nothing, and it reminded me of something I heard of a few years back, called the Antarctic stare. As I understand it, this is a kind of mild fugue state that people sometimes experience during long periods in an isolated and extreme environment like the research station where you work in Antarctica.
Colleen: I know exactly what you’re talking about. It has to do with a thyroid hormone, and the dark, but also isolation. People have all kinds of funny nicknames for it. You are kind of in a state like we are now, this perpetual Groundhog Day. You wake up, you go to work at the exact same time every day. I knew who I was going to pass in the hall. I knew the cadence of their footsteps. I knew their smell. Our jobs were challenging, but they were also repetitive. It made you feel numb, like you just didn’t care about much.
Emily: My concentration has been shot lately. When Pete is talking, I often can’t remember the beginning of his sentences by the time he finishes them. Does this sound familiar?
Colleen: Yep. At the station, sometimes you’ll catch a whole table full of people just staring outside at nothing. The two winters I did were dramatically different from each other, and in retrospect, it was all about coping strategies.
Emily: Please share.
Colleen: Unbeknownst to me, I had way better coping strategies the first winter. My mental health is intrinsically connected to exercise. That first winter I was really diligent. About six days a week, I did an hour of exercise a day with a small group, and it was intense cardio. We were sweaty and shaky by the time we were done.
Emily: Other than exercise, what helped?
Colleen: It was all about the things I could control – like, I made myself get up at the same exact time every day. It was also about surrounding myself with a support system. Friendships happen quickly and fast because of the place and the situation. Also making plans for the future, like a New Zealand trip when I was done; I took up a lot of mental space with that. That was a good thing, to remember that the Groundhog Day was going to be over at some point.
Emily: What kinds of lessons do you think carry over now?
Colleen: Exercise I have fully rediscovered. I mean, I’ve always enjoyed exercise, but I’ve just realized that if it’s not every single day my mental and emotional capacity will reflect that. The other thing is remembering that it’s going to be over — but that’s the hard part with this. I mean, there’s going to be vaccine, right, but when? Even afterwards, I feel like our society has changed so much that it will never look like it did before. So that’s a hard one.
Creating some reason to celebrate, even if it’s just with my boyfriend. We try to get takeout every Friday night. Once a week, we’ll patronize a restaurant and look forward to it and treat it like a date — something that makes it not Groundhog Day. That puts time in the perspective of one week at a time, instead of one day at a time. One day at a time may work for some people’s psyche and emotion, but, oh God, I feel like I need more perspective than that.
Emily: The other day Pete and I passed over a strange threshold. You know that feeling when you say the same word over and over and over again, and at first the word loses its meaning, and then it becomes hysterically funny? It’s absurdity — we’ve crossed into a realm of absurdity that you can’t actually easily access under normal conditions.
Colleen: I know what you mean. At the station, you’d see a table of people throwing inside jokes back and forth, and everyone is laughing in a way that is so true, that you think, wow, these people are connected. But if you were a passerby, and you heard what they were talking about, you would have no idea what they were laughing about.
Emily: What are some upsides to spending long stints in a dark, confined environment?
Colleen: I thought about this lately, and one of the silver linings of this odd career or life I’ve chosen is that I put myself in these places were there are fewer resources, fewer vices and fun things, things that, when you come back, you can really appreciate. Smells are intense, feelings are intense – not putting on layers of clothes – all of those things are so much sweeter. Also: food, food, food. When I leave Antarctica I like to go to a grocery store and get whatever I want – you want those strawberries? Get two boxes.
Emily: How long do you find the stare lasts?
Colleen: So, something kind of crazy and cool, and also I think very common, is that when you leave Antarctica, the feeling [of numbness] goes away, like, overnight. You land in New Zealand, where it’s springtime, and everything is blooming and green and alive. You exit one world into another world, and you leave the stare behind.
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.
