October 12, 2020

Past and future collide in strange ways if we let them. We find that what we think of as the present doesn’t really exist. Every experience, as soon as we reflect on it, suddenly is the past, transformed into memory. We treasure them all, or at least try to learn from them. Then we move on.

I looked back Saturday to losing my left kidney just a year ago, and the following five days in a hospital bed. Leaping forward to the days now rushing by, we’re looking at life in a two-bedroom apartment in another state.

Fall was setting in when I left the hospital, as it is right now, the weather mild, the leaves starting to color. The first week was excruciating, but slowly I got better. More weeks, then months flew by. Other things rushed in. The docs who cared for me were skilled and dedicated. Expensive, too, but that’s goes with the terrain. It was my crisis. Now the entire country is facing one. I learned about strains of cancer I had never heard of. Now we’re all learning about viruses, about epidemiology. We’ve heard the tragic stories of the last pandemic, and the ones before that. Only the most obtuse—you know who you are—now pretend it’s just like the flu and will simply disappear.

Republicans, Democrats, and independents who claim to have a pulse were electrified, in the wrong way, when Trump pulled off his mask at the top of the White House staircase last Monday. It happened, even as we wondered whether to believe our eyes. For me, it brought home the tragic, terrifying image of the autocrat in Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ luminous, eloquent novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch.

Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel for literature in 1982, wrote of the interminable rule and finally the death of an aging Latin-Caribbean dictator. His flamboyant, passionate, poignant paragraphs describe the social and political decline, poverty, and despair inflicted by a tinhorn authoritarian on his nation. Garcia Marquez borrowed from the lives of such Latin autocrats as Franco of Spain, Trujillo (Dominican Republic), Gustavo Rojas Pinella of his own country, Porfirio Diaz of Mexico, others.

The Latin association is familiar for Americans; most recently, Pinochet in Chile, Somoza and Ortega in Nicaragua, Garcia and Efrain Montt in Guatemala, now Maduro in Venezuela. Non-Latins would be the big three: Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un. Then, in his own mind, Trump.

Garcia Marquez drew his readers into dreams, fantasy, magic as he created the world of the old dictator and those he ruled. Right now America seems a bizarre place, a world of dreams and nightmares. We open the newspaper each morning braced for shock or some prurient, lowbrow comedy. Then we remind ourselves we really are in the autumn of someone holding high office who inspires us with wonder, the wonder of witnessing the unreal. It will end, either in three months or four years. What will be left?

Meanwhile, like everyone else, we’re battling, amidst the pandemic and the election frenzy, to stay anchored in the real world.  I’m still cleaning up the place for the new owners. Last weekend I dragged everything out of the toolshed, scrubbed the walls, and primed and painted the floor. I hauled my nearly-new lawn mower and a box of tools to Habitat for Humanity, and another box of our daughters’ more-than thirty-year-old little-girl clothes to the Red Cross (why did we still have them?) We uncovered still more boxes of our kids’ grade-school papers, report cards, swim team trophies. I repainted the edges of the kitchen cabinets with semi-gloss paint, covering the flat latex I had tried to get away with.

The new owners came by to take window measurements, we introduced ourselves and had a nice visit. A friend helped me haul away an old sofa and box spring. We bought insurance for the apartment we’ve rented for six months and transferred our health insurance. We hauled boxes from the basement to what used to be the dining room and hired a moving truck. Furniture and boxes now are staged near the front door, but we’re still consolidating the inventory. We’re pushing forward to wrap up our lives here.  

Yet, as if postponing the inevitable, I keep doing some of the things I’ve done for years. I worked my regular shift at the Holy Family food pantry—30 clients in under two hours, the typical lineup. The unfortunate, the unemployed, the sick empty the shelves, the way it is at food pantries every day, everywhere, underlining the real state of the country.

But the inevitable is coming. We stare at the stacked boxes and indulge in our own wonder: three weeks left here. The past week has been cool and clear, as that gentle fall crispness creeps into Virginia. It’s the weather that coaxes those brilliant blooms from the chrysanthemums and makes the begonias and impatiens, with a little rain, explode in red, pink, and white. The new owners told us the flowers helped clinch the deal for them. I’m happy about that, I’m sure I am.

The bigger story, we remind ourselves, will be in just over three weeks. Unless the mailed-in ballots make things complicated, the country’s course may be recharted. The timeless Garcia Marquez allegory will resonate again. For those of us who have seen it before, the future will rush past with a flash of wisdom or regret then, as always, recede into the past.

September 28, 2020

Alex and I stamped our feet and shivered in the falling darkness. We stood at a place called Blackrock Summit, a bend in the Appalachian Trail maybe 30 miles from the southern end of Shenandoah National Park. In the light of our headlamps we had set up a makeshift aid station, four boxes of snacks and bottles of water, two hundred yards up a rocky grade from Skyline Drive. Will, our runner, still was a couple of miles away, according to the GPS sensor he carried. We were his support crew.

We had met Will about eight miles south at Turk Gap, his first stop for aid 12 miles after he started running at Rockfish Gap, near I-64 and about midway between Charlottesville and Staunton, Va. He hoped to break the record for the “fastest known time” or FKT, for traversing the 107.8 miles of the Appalachian Trail that passes through the Park. He is very fast. The record, set just 36 hours earlier, is 23 hours, 14 minutes, 23 seconds. If anyone can break the record, it’s Will.

It was chilly, probably in the low 40s, when we arrived at Turk Gap about 6:00 PM. The clear mountain air has a sharp bite to it. I pulled on two thermal shirts and a hooded sweatshirt. We hauled the aid out of Alex’s truck. He had packed food and snacks, cold-weather gear, water, and Tailwind, a powdered energy drink mix. We set up a table and chairs. Promptly at 6:30 Will emerged from the forest. He nodded, grabbed some cookies, refilled his water bottles, and disappeared up the trail. That’s how you get to fastest known time.

Something wasn’t right when we got to Blackrock Summit. We drove a bit further, looking for a white AT tree marker, then backtracked and parked. Alex ran up a short spur and found the AT. He checked his watch. We waited. We pulled on our gloves as our fingers grew stiff. Alex’s phone rang, it was Will. We were off—the rendezvous was Blackrock Gap, a mile back. Will good naturedly ran the extra mile. He fueled up and was gone. As we drove towards Doyle’s River Overlook, we saw Will’s headlamp flash through the trees as he crossed Skyline.

At Doyle’s we had gained elevation and could pick out in the distance the twinkling lights of Charlottesville. The cold took our breath away. We parallel-parked our vehicles to deflect the wind. I wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. Alex lit his propane stove and cooked us a hot meal. We sat huddled, guzzling steaming ginger tea.

Above us a bright quarter-moon had risen, the stars glowed brilliantly in the wilderness sky. The wind abated, the crisp mountain air revived us. We got Will’s gear ready, then saw his headlamp moving toward us. He trotted in looking strong, but a little strained. He had taken a spill miles back, his knee was acting up. He now was a few minutes behind his projected arrival time. He grabbed his refilled drinks and a sandwich and headed into the darkness. Eight miles, or two hours, to the next rendezvous.

At Ivy Creek Overlook we backed Alex’s truck up to a chain across a fire road and set up the aid station. Since we had time, I slumped in the van and closed my eyes, my blanket pulled tight. For a while I heard the soft twanging of Alex’s country station as he heated up Will’s soup. I slept for an hour.

We went through the aid-station drill when Will arrived. He had pulled on his long-sleeved running shirt. We handed him a cup of the hot, savory chicken soup, just the thing for a trail runner at 35 miles. Will stuffed a peanut butter sandwich and some cookies in his pockets. He was ten minutes behind his projected time. We walked with him to the trailhead. “Razzle-dazzle,” Alex yelled, and Will was gone.

Smith Roach Gap was another quick stop, seven miles up. The wind had abated but the chill still penetrated. We stood peering into the darkness. Will showed up in good spirits, but still behind schedule. He lingered, gulping soup, then waved and reentered the trail.

To get to South River we drove five or six miles to our point of entry to the Park at Swift Run, then three more miles up the Drive. We found the trail access point, then had to hoof it, carrying the boxes of aid a hundred or so yards to the AT. At that point the trail descended from higher ground, Will could coast in. We waited. Alex checked his watch. We walked a short way up the trail and listened. Nothing. We turned back. Soon we heard footfalls and saw the glow of Will’s  headlamp. He was walking. For the first time since we met him, he sat. The knee injury from the fall had stiffened. He stood and stretched, then took a few tentative steps and felt pain. He rubbed the knee and pondered going on. A few minutes later he dropped from the run. He had covered 50 miles. We picked up our aid boxes. Will limped with us back to the vehicles. It was about 4:00 AM.

In this time of pandemic, the AT still beckons. Virginia has more than 500 miles of the Trail, the longest segment of any state. Shenandoah National Park’s 108 miles is the northern segment. Further north are the rocks of Pennsylvania and Maine’s 100-Mile Wilderness. You jump on the trail and go, watching for those unique white blazes.

A few years ago, on a bitterly cold January day after a fresh snowfall, two friends and I climbed the Pass Mountain Trail, which links with the AT west of Sperryville. We passed an AT shelter, folks were camping. They waved, I shivered.

The AT always is in season. It conveys something mysterious, something magical. Not escape, exactly, but the awareness that traversing rugged places trains us to persevere, to move forward, to overcome. The Trail is about climbing rocky ascents to see the pale sky of the western horizon, the green hills to the east, then descending through deep gorges along plunging streams. Will knows he’ll get his FKT. The Trail is long and tough. We’ll be back.

September 21, 2020

We’ve been glued to the tube in the evenings watching news footage of the holocaust in California and Oregon, the Gulf Coast floods, the still-spreading pandemic, the scary clown show in Washington. But we quit our all-day house fix-up grind for a few hours to have lunch with a friend, a woman who came to the U.S. from Guatemala years ago. We kept in touch after she lost her job as administrator of the food pantry where I volunteer. We last saw her in February, just before the pandemic shut Virginia down. She and her husband now are doing well, both working, daughter in college, son nearby.

A day or so later I heard from an old colleague. We lost touch years ago. Recently I read that she had just published a novel. It’s an intense, passionate drama of a woman living through the American Revolution and the savage Cherokee wars in East Tennessee, a time of violence and hardship we now can barely comprehend. The title contains these words: “The Story of Hope.” She’s now planning her next book.

A friend in Florida contracted covid-19. She was sick for weeks but recovered. Back to work. Our youngest daughter, studying for nursing school in Colorado, learned she made the “President’s List” for the summer semester.

I got out of the house Saturday to volunteer at Athletic Equation’s “social-distanced” 12-hour run at Prince William Forest Park. Runners cover either a 6.5 or 11-mile course for a maximum of 12 hours. Few stay in that long. The winner is the guy/gal who racks up the most miles. I ran one loop. Good clean fun, but after a couple of loops you need spunk to keep going.

We all could use some spunk. Like the baby turtles pushing out of their shells in those PBS nature flicks, life keeps pushing us. For fun we drove past the three other for-sale houses nearby.  We agreed that ours, next to all three, is a gem, a palace. Right?

Not exactly. Not by a mile. We patted ourselves on the back for getting the place painted, then looked closer and found more nicks and dings, chipped caulking, spilled paint, a broken wall outlet, cracks in the concrete walkway. All that is on us, we’ve blown the budget for contractors. We need new outlet facings, new stones on the stone walkway, mulch in the front yard, back yard, etc.

I didn’t know moving was a sentence to hard labor. But then, it’s housework, after all. We now know this is what everyone does. We’re not griping as much. This is no joke, but it’s become easier to laugh at ourselves.

You can’t go backward. My former co-worker from Guatemala, seeking work, persevered, said her Rosary, and eventually found a good job close to home. The Tennessee novelist spent countless hours in front of her computer screen bringing her thoughts to life. Our friend in Tampa fought the virus, took her medicine, and got better. Our daughter cracked the books day and night to earn those As. These stories repeat themselves everywhere, every day.

I know enough to appreciate and treasure those things; I got sick and had my dark, not-feeling-very-good moments in recent years. We remind ourselves that many Americans are living with stunning tragedy, unspeakable heartache.

We can’t comprehend the experience of the victims of the pandemic, the wildfires, the floods. Still, we all know others who have taken or are taking their turn in the mill, struggling with serious illness, struggling to find decent work. In an entirely different universe, others confront personal challenges to achieve something singular and unique, like writing good fiction.

Amid your own hardship, you may come to realize that you have no alternative but to go on. Struggle and pain in human experience can in some unknowable way teach fortitude, courage, strength, thereby offer a path to recovery. In this hellish year, as millions suffer, perseverance and faith can carry us. They emerge from love, the relentless, mysterious gift of God.

They carry us back to the richness we can find around us. We find it by welcoming new things, experiences, people into our lives. We find it also by facing down difficulties, unique or mundane: the job search in times of trouble; the serious illness; even the blank, unforgiving computer screen that tortures the writer with doubt.

The things we wrestle with aren’t always life-changing. I’m preoccupied with nuts and bolts, nails and hammers. I wonder if anyone else is trying to install an outdoor electrical outlet facing, spread concrete on a cracked driveway, build a stone path. Really, in our besieged country right now, this slog through amateur house touch-ups to make the place presentable for would-be future owners seems a petty, self-indulgent sideshow.

But it isn’t, not really. Someone has to do it. Seems that after all these years we’ve come up with something like a plan. We’re worried about what lies ahead, but we’ve unmoored ourselves from this place. Whether it’s Trump or Biden, we’ll be somewhere else, close to kids and grandkids, but still somewhere strange, somewhere alien to our up-to-now closely regulated lives. We’ll be planning our next adventure in a new place. This house, the toolshed, and this scruffy back yard will belong to someone else. All that work, all that living, behind us. It’s time.

September 14, 2020

Our friends are on the road. They’re heading to Sedona, Ariz., Albuquerque, N.M., Southport, N.C., Sarasota, Fla., or already have arrived. They chose the seashore, the deserts, the mountains. Others left town for jobs—Austin, small-town Alabama, Saudi Arabia. The plan is normal life in the time of Trump, amidst the cult of Trump, which will be with us when Trump is gone.

I talked over coffee with a friend who had just returned from Idaho, Wyoming, Montana. We compared memories of tall mountains and small towns. Places with dark forests and snow-capped peaks, places we passed through on our summers of adventure.  A few years ago we had fun thinking of moving out there. Family and weather reports induced some sanity.

Since then we’ve looked at the places our friends landed. Now, though, we factor in covid-19, which is Trump’s legacy, along with the popular trends in camouflage uniforms, Confederate flags, AR-15s and bandoleers in public.  Arizona and Florida became disease hotspots. After killing thousands in the Northeast, the pandemic raged amid the palm fronds and gentle breezes along the Gulf Coast, and across the rugged deserts and peaks of the Southwest.

Normal life ended in the spring of 2020. We persevere in our routines, those of us whose lives have not been wrecked by infection or loss of livelihood. We endure as best we can the bitter war between two societies: one that recognizes Trump and Republicans as purveyors of the nation’s multiple, still-unfolding nightmares, and that other universe, the “base”: the White-race culture warriors, the so-called evangelical Christians, the chasers of paranoid conspiracies, the pundits and propagandists of Trumpism.

The virus now has killed more than 190,000 Americans. On Thursday a man at the Trump rally in Michigan said, “I think he’s done a wonderful job.”

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” Robert Duvall famously said in “Apocalypse Now,”   a film that echoed the fear and horror of Joseph Conrad’s narrator in Heart of Darkness, thereby to clarify for Americans the viciousness and futility of Vietnam.

Today in America we have entered our own heart of darkness. We created it. We can’t escape it in warm, beautiful places. Americans, starting with the election, may overcome the tragedy we now endure. Overcome it, or perpetuate and deepen it.

The mask thing became a curiosity. Did wearing it make you a Democrat? We still see news footage of crowds without masks, at beaches, in bars, on college campuses, and two weeks ago at the White House. Who’s making critical decisions on covid policy, Fauci, or that renowned epidemiologist, Trump? On our June visit to South Carolina I drove past shops and restaurants. Didn’t see a mask. I recall, only a few months ago, promising Sandy that on our next road trip we’ll make it to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in Sturgis, S.D.  For sure!

Yet people are pushing on with life: They’re moving now, as they’ve always moved: to turn the page to a new serenity, a new peace. My sister and brother-in-law settled in the Seattle area, my brother moved to Delaware. The tax situation in Delaware is better, but the Cascades are more spectacular than Rehoboth Beach. We know lots of folks who transplanted to North Carolina. A retired Navy captain I know and his wife are looking at New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. Skiers, maybe. Adventure always presents: our son got a job offer in New Zealand. Fortunately, he didn’t take it. The covid-19 safeguards are more effective there. I know people who have moved from quiet places, the places they were born, to settle in congested, expensive northern Virginia suburbs because their children are here.

The alternative—stay put. I look around at Mass and see oldsters I’ve known for thirty-plus years, now white-haired and slow-moving, still here, going nowhere. They think: why leave just because others are leaving? Their homes are paid for, their kids, maybe nearby, maybe not. Maybe no kids. I see widows and widowers. Here for the long count.

I thought we were members of that crew. As readers here recall, we talked and talked about what to do. We could sit tight and avoid the move hassle, the real-estate search rat race, the change of cemetery plans. We argued for and against cities and small towns, villages, and hamlets. Western North Carolina, East Tennessee, North Georgia, southern Virginia. Occasionally for fun I’d throw out Mexico, Costa Rica, Ecuador (I have a cousin there).

As we debated, at least a hundred times I’ve reminded Sandy of our pre-covid night at Picacho Peak State Park in Picacho, Ariz., two years ago. It was mid-September, hot as blazes. We gasped and sweated in our airless van. Finally we fell asleep.

Around 2:00 AM I awoke and stepped out of the van. It was cool and clear, the moon bright above us, lighting the desert. I climbed a slight rise. I could see for miles across the sand and scrub the glowing headlights of long-haul trucks crawling along I-10. The place was silent and lovely, a setting of peace. I felt in those moments the presence of God. Sublime, in a way that could never be routine. That was then. Now, I look for my mask.