We are six months into the COVID-19 pandemic (longer if you go back to it’s international origin) and the end is… not near? From what I have deduced, the end of humanity is not near and the end of the pandemic is also not near. It only occurred to me today how much this global event has changed my outlook on life. We just returned home from a two week trip through Montana and Idaho. It was cool, crisp and, frankly, really accelerated our blissful trajectory into autumn. And then we returned home to terrible smokey conditions secondary to the Creek Fire which is burning ~40 mi due west.
Now, to back it up a little, I have a very interesting relationship with the state of California. I’m truly uncertain of the origins of my bias against this enormous state. My dad is very conservative and often begrudgingly referred to “Californians.” I also lived in Steamboat and Big Sky, two ski towns that often complained of the effect of the “Californians” on local traffic patterns, skied-out pow, real estate prices, etc. Somehow, over time, I have absorbed these biases. To give an example: when I was newly pregnant Jimmy and I came out to Bishop to look for a home. We car camped one night on that trip and I was terrified (TERRIFIED!) of mountain lions. It was crazy. I have spent more nights than you can shake a fist at sleeping out under the stars in the Rocky Mountain west. But for some reason I got this idea in my head that California is really populous, and as such the mountain lions are more scrappy and “front-rangey,” and thus much more likely to hunt you down. What! I don’t have any idea where I came up with this. All I know is that I literally solo skate skied at midnight in Montana and on the ski out noticed cat tracks overlapping my ski tracks and thought it was super neat and a little creepy. And in California I slept in the back of a Tacoma(!) and worried about a large kittycat jumping in the back to eat my face. It made no sense.
So we returned to a valley socked in with smoke. And one would think that I would reflect on many fire seasons that I have experienced in the past to help assuage my concerns. But no. I was like, “We need to pack a getaway bag. We need to load the car with water. We need to develop a three part escape route. We need to invest in industrial strength air purifiers (pleural).” Have I ever responded to fire season this way before? No. My typical response has been… go running anyway. But this year I went a very different way with my response.
I cannot help but wonder if my reaction is similar to my concern for Big Cats– a nod to my understanding (or lack thereof) of how regular mountain things go down in California, or if it is influenced by the novel coronavirus! Pre-Corona I had a sense that the world (or perhaps more aptly, my world) was stable, predictable, secure. And then coronavirus happened and I read something that said we would still be dealing with it in April. And I thought, “In April!” Like, holy moly, how can we do this for an entire month. And then April came and went, as did May, as did June- September. And here we still are. Eyeballs deep in a pandemic that isn’t showing any signs of surrender. I guess my underlying belief that the world is predictable and orderly came to a screeching halt. Older adults and impoverished populations may find this laughable. Of course a pre-millennial white woman would feel that the world is unflappable. Somehow my privilege and my world experience has taught me optimism– that bad things pass and that things work out. I cannot help but wonder if my experience of these smokey conditions is a nod to the coronavirus. If I have come to expect that bad things are here to stay. My previous self my have thought, “I hope this smoke clears out by Saturday.” My current self thinks, “I hope this smoke is gone by 2021.”
What is the moral of this tale? There is no moral.