Shelter in place
By: Claire Drumond
Tags: Bay Area, Shelter In Place, Journaling, Quarantine, Isolation

I woke up at 5 am from a nightmare about forgetting my dog in the back of our hot car. I resisted waking my husband immediately to warn him. I wanted to make sure he really understood the dangers of putting her in the way back in her little carrier — she’s too quiet, I’d say. You could forget all about her and then leave her there to suffocate and die. It would be horrible, I’d warn him, and then I’d make him promise me to never, ever, ever, leave her in the way back of the car. But instead, I let him sleep, and slipped out of bed to make coffee. I’d warn him when he woke.

The morning was completely silent — no cars on what was usually a very busy intersection by our house. The air of the impossible whisked through the crisp morning fog. The birds were still chirping. For a brief moment, it felt like the entire world shut down just for me.

I could finally get the time and quiet I’ve been craving all these years. A writers’ insatiable yearning for time and quiet. Finally, an excuse to stay home and really focus on writing. To finish my book. All of the distractions of travel, commuting, and social obligations have been taken off of my plate. A police-enforced writing retreat. An involuntary escape from the speed and anxiety of regular life. I wonder if I’ll miss it?

What does one do with an abundance of time and quiet? Because, as all writer’s know, even though that’s all we ever want, we never want too much. So I bought a bunch of seeds and potting soil yesterday from the closing garden store. I think I’ll take up gardening. I’ll run and walk my dogs every day. Maybe I’ll do video yoga or the workout which made that Instagram girl famously fit. I think I’ll try to lose weight and get buff like I did for my wedding when we did T-25 everyday for three months. I’ll FaceTime a lot.

I imagine my husband and I sitting by the fire, drinking wine and talking about how fortunate we are. We’ll congratulate ourselves for our foresight, stocking up long before everyone started hoarding toilet paper. We’ll wonder how long this will last and say it’s just a matter of time before every city shuts down. We’ll talk about the stock market and our dwindling 401Ks. We’ll talk about how we can’t leave the county to see our parents.

We’ll talk about how it feels like the world will change for good this time. About how the president — who brushed this off weeks ago as a hoax constructed by the Democrats — is now eating his words, but feel no sense of vengeance. How the Republicans want to distribute handouts and the Democrats are implementing a police state in California. We live in an upside down world, we’ll say, things will never be the same. We’ll talk about how relieved we are that the government is at least taking action, even though it’s probably too late.

We’ll talk about our parents’ health and my one brother-in-law that still thinks this whole thing is fake. We’ll get angry. I’ll cry. But we’ll be safe in our little house, at least for now. At least until the city of Oakland loses control and people start looting and violence breaks out that if it does, I’m in the car so fast, there’s no way I’ll be a sitting duck here. We’ll spiral on the black swans.

photo from theportalist.com

I keep thinking about the book Station Eleven, a post-apocalyptic story where most of the world’s population is wiped out from a pandemic. The characters remember the last airplane they ever saw fly. I’ll savor watching the ones that are still flying — however scarce it feels now. In the book, many of the children don’t remember the time before the pandemic. The kids grow up after the cities stopped being cities and people started living in airports, perpetually waiting to leave, even though there was nowhere to go. Everywhere was wiped out by the disease — at least, that was the last they heard when the last news reports were broadcast. So they spent the remainder of their lives just waiting to be remembered. That book was about the staying power of art, even through the end of times. Like the art on walls of caves by people who went extinct from novel diseases brought from foreign lands.

I always imagined that in a situation like this I would pack my car and drive straight to our ranch in Colorado, seemingly the perfect place to hunker down, rural and protected. You could live there year round in theory, you could grow food in the summer and store the elk and deer you hunt in the huts built into the cold ground. In theory, you could live off the land there. You just needed a gun and some gardening skills. But in reality, it was probably the worst place to go. Because it was so rural, you were too far from medical help and the hospitals were too small to keep up with the demand of the sick people that already lived there. It could become a prison, instead of a sanctuary.

We were better off in our home in Oakland, where delivery services seemed to continue uninterrupted by the new edict — the latest attempt to “flatten the curve” as they keep saying over and over and over. Just don’t get sick, at least not for a long time, they say. The hospitals are completely overwhelmed and they can’t handle you. If you get sick, you’ll likely be sent home with a prayer — unless of course you’re over 60 — so just don’t get sick, ok?

It almost feels like the earth is fighting back against us and our unadulterated plundering of it for the last 100 years. Like it said, you know what, enough. And put us all to a halt. Showing us just how many of the things we do aren’t essential to survival. If forced to only think about the essentials, you realize just how underinvested we are in those, and over invested we are in bullshit.

So now we wait. As some invisible fog rolls in over us all. A fog that could already be in our homes, or our neighbors home, or our friends’ homes, but we won’t know for a week. You don’t know where it is, or how long it’s been there, you just know it’s here. So shelter in place. At least, that’s what they’re saying.